Spiritual Homelands/Wahlheimat/Elective Exiles
An interdisciplinary international workshop organized by Da’at Hamakom: Center for the Study of Cultures of Place in Modern Jewish Society and the University of Virginia
January 1-2, 2017, Yad Hashmona
January 1
9:30am-10am Welcoming remarks
10am-12:30pm Exile and Erasures: Home and Unhousing
Chair: Professor Jeffrey Grossman
Dr. Nina Fischer (University of Edinburgh), “Remembering/Imagining Palestine from Afar: The Homeland in Contemporary Palestinian Diaspora Literature”
Dr. Sarit Cofman-Simhom (Kibbutzim College and Emunah College), “My Homeland is a Suitcase: The Suitcase in the Israeli Theatre as a Neurotic Container”
Professor Richard Cohen (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) presenting Professor Pierre Birnbaum’s (Université Paris I) paper, “The End of Exile? The Metz Contest of 1787 Revisited”
12:30pm-2pm Lunch
2pm-3:40pm Writing the Homeland
Chair: Dr. Sarit Cofman-Simhom
Professor Regina C. Range (University of Alabama), “Realms of Exile: Gina Kaus’ Migration of Worlds, Words and Womanhood”
Dr. Diego Rotman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), “Performing Homeland in Post-Vernacular Times: Dzigan and Shumacher’s Yiddish Theater After the Holocaust”
3:40-4:20pm Coffee break
4:20-6:00pm Language in Exile
Chair: Dr. Nina Fischer
Dr. Stefani Hoffman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ret.), “The World as Exile and the Word as Homeland in the Writing of Boris Khazanov”
Judith K. Lang Hilgartner (University of Virginia/Elon College), “The Poetic ‘Word’ as home during Exile: The Ladino Poetry of Juan Gelman”
7:00pm Dinner
January 2
7:00am-9:00am Breakfast and check-out
9am-10:40am Multiple Exiles, Contingent Homelands
Chair: Professor Asher Biemann
Dr. Steven Schouten (German Historical Institute in Warsaw/European University Institute, Florence), “Exile and Utopia: Ernst Toller’s Road to Revolution”
Professor Anna M. Parkinson (Northwestern University), “’In der Fremde zuhause’: Trauma, Contingent Cosmopolitanism, and Elective Exile in the Writing of Hans Keilson”
10:40am-11am Coffee break
11:00-1:00pm Of Other Spaces
Chair: Dr. Sarah Wobick-Segev
Judith Müller (Ben Gurion University of the Negev), “Neither Heimat nor Exile: The Perception of Paris as a Historical Blind Spot in Israeli Literature”
Professor Agnes C. Mueller (University of South Carolina), “Israel as a Place of Trauma and Longing in Contemporary German Jewish Literature”
1:00-2:30pm Lunch
2:30pm-4:10pm Longing, Attachment and Wahlheimat
Chair: Professor Anna M. Parkinson
Dr. Esra Almas (Halic University), “The Multiple Affinities of The Girl from the Golden Horn: the Ottoman Fantasy of a Jewish/Muslim Writer in Interbellum Germany”
Professor Jeffrey Grossman (University of Virginia), “France as Wahlheimat for two German Jews: Heinrich Heine and Walter Benjamin“
4:10-4:40pm Coffee break
4:40-5:30pm Concluding Discussion
Professor Asher Biemann, Professor Richard Cohen, and Dr. Sarah Wobick-Segev
