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It's Time for the 2015 AJS Conference!
Laura Arnold Leibman
December isn't just for Chanukah, it is also time for the Association of Jewish Studies (AJS) Conference! This year's 47th Annual Conference met December 13-15, 2015 at the Sheraton Boston in Boston, Massachusetts.
American Studies has increased its presence this year. In addition to Adam Mendelsohn who was a Jordan Schnitzer book award finalist in the field of “Modern Jewish History—Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania” for his book The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire, over eighty panels this year cover American subject matters, up from sixty eight last year. As another sign of the strength of the Americanist presence in the society, both the out-going President (Jonathan Sarna) and the in-coming President (Pam Nadell) are major figures in the field of American Jewish history.
Here is a quick list of the conference highlights in American studies, broken down by subject area, with a huge kudos to the planning committee for making the schedule more shareable and social-media friendly. (Note if you click on the panel titles below and then on the individual presenters, you will get to detailed abstracts of the papers on each panel.)
Literature & Film
- Jewish American Literature and Its Histories: Alternative Theories
- Eco-Criticism and Eco-Judaism
- Genealogies in Jewish Latin American Literature, Visual Arts, and Film
- “Fievel Goes West”: Jewish Literature in the American West
- Jewish Playwrights and the American Stage
- The Many Genres of Kadia Molodowsky
- “Before the Storm: Filming the Character and Fate of Europe’s Jews in 1940-1941”
- Parochial No More: Jews and Literary Modernism
- Jews as Subject in Film
- Acculturation through Yiddish Newspapers and Media
- Transmission or Invention?: Modern Jewish Writers On Religion
- Jerusalem nor New York: ‘alternative’ Jewish locations after the Shoah
- Teaching “Goodbye, Columbus”
- Teaching with TV
- Fartaytsht un farbesert? Translating Yiddish in the 21st Century
Material Culture
- Middle Eastern Jewish Foodways in Global Context
- Representing the American Experience in Art and Music
- Seeing Israeli Culture Through the Archive (Dance paper by Hannah Kosstrin)
- Acculturation through Yiddish Newspapers and Media
- Religion, Zionism, and Pedagogy in Israel and North America
- The Sounds of Silence? New Perspectives on Holocaust Commemoration in Postwar European Culture (Music paper by Jeremy Eichler)
- Seminar: The Practice and Materiality of Jewish Death, Part 1 (Gravestones in Colonial Barbados paper by Derek R. Miller)
Transnational(ism)
- The View across the Ocean: Contemporary research of American Jewry in Israel and of Israel by American Jews
- Martin Buber and the Postwar Quest for a Renewal of Judaism
- Migration, Relief, and Aid in the Postwar World: Defining a New Transnational JDC Mission
- On the Margins: The Other in Israel’s Politics and Society
- Philosemitism and Antisemitism in Contemporary Jewish Life
- Anti-Semitism and the United States in Global Perspective
- Transnational Jewish Giving to Zion: Community Building, Identity, and Authority
- Jewish Youth between Zionism and the New Left, 1967-1973: A Comparative Look
- The Rise of Holocaust Consciousness
- Jews in the Crosshairs of Empire: Between Colonial Privilege and Anticolonial Revolt (Paper by Nathan Kurz)
- Transfer and Transformation: Migration of experiences, knowledge, and bias in German-Jewish immigration to the US and Mandate Palestine from the 1930s to the 1950s
- The Yishuv in Empire: New Work on Jews and the British Empire in Mandate Palestine (Paper by Norman Goda)
- Failure in Modern Jewish Politics: A Global Reconsideration
- Jerusalem nor New York: ‘alternative’ Jewish locations after the Shoah
- Pedagogy and Politics of Teaching Israel and Palestine on American College Campuses
- Iranian Refuge: Jewish Relief and Rescue during World War II
- Rescue, Survival, Memory
Comparative Religion
- Jewish Boundaries and Border-Crossings in Protestant America
- Intermarriage and Jewish American Culture
- Crossing Religious and Geographic Borders
- Philosemitism and Antisemitism in Contemporary Jewish Life (Paper on Evangelical Christian Zionists and American Jews)
- Teaching Jewish Studies without Jewish Students
Modern Jewish History in the Americas
- Modern Jewish Philanthropy & the Political Economy of Jewish Life
- American Jews and the Long 1960s
- Beyond Freedom Summer: Complicating Narratives of American Jewish Involvement in the Civil Rights Movement at Mid-Century
- Jewish Communal Surveys in Postwar America
- Graduate student lightning session
- Jews on the Move
- We Remember with Ambivalence: Holocaust Memory and Memorialization Among Allied Soldiers and their Families
- Inventions of Modern Jewish Identity in the Americas
- Graduate student lightning session in Modern Jewish History
- Hebrew at American Jewish Summer Camps: The Role of Israel and Israelis
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Antisemitism: Historical Perspectives
- “Arab” Jews in North America
- The Other America: Jews and the Canadian Experience
Gender
- Women, Identity, and Gender Power Dynamics in DER TOG
- Jewish Feminists Facing Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism: Perspectives from the U.S., France, Israel, and South Africa
- Jewish Playwrights and the American Stage
- Orthodoxy, Gender, and the Body
- Medicine and the Body
- Rescue, Survival, Memory
- Social Justice Pedagogies – an Interdisciplinary Discussion
Modern Jewish Thought and Theology
- Midcentury American Jewish Thought
- Schechter's Legacy for American Judaism: Reflections on the 100th Anniversary of his Death
- Religion, Zionism, and Pedagogy in Israel and North America
- Transmission or Invention?: Modern Jewish Writers On Religion
- Medicine and the Body
- German Jewish Political Philosophy
- New Approaches to Modern Orthodox Jewish Thought
- Peoples, Persons and States: Modern Jewish Sovereignty in History, Law and Theology
- Rescue, Survival, Memory
Social Sciences
- Some of My Best Friends are Nones: Understanding Secular and Cultural Dimensions of Jewish Identity
- New Social Science Questions About Jewish Life
- Beyond parenting and into retirement: Multi-faceted engagement in Jewish life during the next chapter of life
- The Numbers Controversy and American Jewry: Discerning the Trends and Their Meaning
- Hebrew at American Jewish Summer Camps: The Role of Israel and Israelis
- Interrogating Identity: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Adults
- The Pitch of Jewish Voices in America
- Religion, Zionism, and Pedagogy in Israel and North America
- Does Family Matter? The Role of Parents and Grandparents in Jewish Education
- Urban Jewish Geography and Jewish Identity
The Profession
- The New Normal? Contingent Employment in Jewish Studies
- Journeys of Possibility: The Role of Jewish Studies in Developing Artistic Works
- Jewish Studies and the Digital Humanities Workshop
- Social Justice Pedagogies – an Interdisciplinary Discussion
- Teaching Jewish Studies without Jewish Students
- The Jewish Studies Classroom: Pedagogy, Ideology, and Identity
Further Resources:
A Group Blog on American Religious History and Culture
Source: http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2015/12/its-time-for-2015-ajs-conference.html
