Ted Solotaroff
Writing the Writing Life
October 18 2004, 7:00 PM
Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago
In the 1940s, Ted Solotaroff would escape from Elizabeth, New Jersey, and his brutal, miserly father to the rooftop of his Aunt Fan's Manhattan apartment building, where he would listen in on the neighbors' passionate debates about baseball, music, and the prospect of war. As a critic and memoirist, he has never forgotten that the writing life
is a life—marked by friendships, betrayals, love affairs, and personal tragedies. He talks about his coming of age and the importance of memoir to Jewish American literature. Solotaroff is the author of two memoirs,
Truth Comes in Blows and
First Loves, and the editor of
Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings.
Nathaniel Deutsch
Mysticism, Misogyny, and the Maiden
November 7 2004, 4:00 PM
Evanston Public Library
In the early 1830s, as legend has it, a Hasidic holy man traveled from Chernobyl to Ludmir to demand that Hannah Rochel Verbermacher stop acting like a rebbe and find herself a husband. She refused and went on to become one of the most original figures of 19th-century Judaism, denounced by her enemies as a dybbuk, but revered by her followers. Nathaniel Deutsch, author of
The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World, discusses how women like the Maiden of Ludmir challenged traditional notions of holiness and sexuality.
Ilan Stavans
Isaac Bashevis Singer and His Women
December 13 2004, 7:00 PM
Skokie Public Library
In January 2003, Ilan Stavans began to wade through boxes of photographs, newspaper clippings, and other material in the I.B. Singer archive at the University of Texas. Among other things, he found many letters from women professing their love for the rakish Yiddish writer and offering to translate his work. Stavans discusses Singer's relationships with women, as well as his depictions of women in his stories and novels. Editor of the new Library of America three-volume set
Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, Stavans is also the author of numerous books, including
On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language.
Thane Rosenbaum
Ripped from the Torah
February 7 2005, 6:00 PM
Harold Washington Library Center
Every day, Americans watch as lawyers on
The Practice, Law & Order, and other courtroom dramas confront the divide between the law and their own sense of moral justice. Novelist, essayist, and law professor Thane Rosenbaum talks about why we love these characters (while often despising their real-life counterparts), and how these contemporary dramas reflect ancient Jewish concerns. Examining artists as diverse as Shakespeare, Ben Shahn, Sidney Lumet, and E.L. Doctorow, he shows how the tension between law and justice has been an animating force in Jewish culture. Rosenbaum is the author of
The Golems of Gotham and
The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What's Right.
Ruth Knafo Setton
Sephardic Writing: On the Outside Looking Out
April 10 2005, 3:00 PM
Skokie Public Library
Ruth Knafo Setton is as much at home with Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie as with Moses Maimonides. Her novel
The Road to Fez tells the story of a Sephardic American who returns to her birthplace in Morocco on a pilgrimage to the tomb of a Jewish martyr, and the cultural and erotic complications that ensue. Setton talks about contemporary Sephardic writing and why this literature is often overlooked by traditionalists and multiculturalists alike. Born in Morocco and raised in America, Setton is Writer-in-Residence at the Berman Center for Jewish Studies at Lehigh University.
Riv-Ellen Prell and Rhonda Lieberman
The JAP: Star Turn for a Stereotype?
April 12 2005, 7:00 PM
Evanston Public Library
She's narcissistic and avaricious (not to mention a culinary disaster), qualities once abhorred but now the hallmarks of chick-lit heroines and TV obsessions like
Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw. Has the Jewish American Princess finally arrived? Or are these qualities only endearing in non-Jews? Or in men? Historian Riv-Ellen Prell and artist and critic Rhonda Lieberman discuss the origins of the JAP stereotype and its continuing influence on conceptions of Jewish women. Prell is the author of
Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation. Lieberman has written for
ArtForum and
The Village Voice; her artwork appeared in the Jewish Museum's exhibition "Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities."