Abrams’ ongoing study of early 20th century Jewish minstrelsy engendered the performance Routine (2007), in which she redelivers old Borscht Belt standbys while bathing in a 25-gallon tub of borscht. The beet-red coloring of her face recalls the survival stories of Jewish blackface entertainers, and further interrogates the examination of Jews “corking up” for the stage.
Center News
The Frankel Center Welcomes New Affiliates
Each year, The Jean & Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies invites UM faculty who are interested in Jewish Studies to affiliate with the Center and participate in its intellectual life. We asked the new associate faculty to tell us something about themselves, their scholarship and their creative work.
Danielle Abrams
Assistant Professor of Art & Design
School of Art & Design
“I write performances and develop characters that are based upon members of my multiracial and cross-cultural family. Dew Drop Lady is a figuration of my 2nd generation Jewish grandmother from Brooklyn. Janie Bell is a portrait of my black grandmother from Virginia. In my recent performances as Uncle Bob, a character based upon my Jewish grandfather who was a tummler at a Catskills resort, I tote pocketfuls of coins and candy, tell jokes, lead Conga Lines through public spaces, and host variety shows that feature “eclectic groups of extraordinary everybodys.” In March 2008, I staged The Uncle Bob Variety Show at The Jewish Museum in New York City, an interpretation of David Susskind’s episode: How to Be a Jewish Son.
“I have performed and exhibited videos at a range of art spaces including The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Queens Museum, Arizona State University Art Museum, Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario, The Kitchen, and WOW Café Theater. In 2009, I presented my research and performances at the Conney Project’s Annual Conference on Jewish Arts, University of Wisconsin at Madison, at the Schmooze Festival in NYC, and was the keynote performer at “The Invisible Thread: A Woman’s Day of Learning” at the Ann Arbor Jewish Community Center. I am a recipient of fellowships from the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, New York Foundation of the Arts, and the NY Urban Arts Initiative.” (Visit www.danielleabrams.com.)
Jindřich Toman
Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures
“I am a native of Prague and received my doctoral degree in German linguistics from the University of Cologne, Germany, in 1981, joining the UM Slavic Department in 1987. Over the subsequent years, my teaching and research portfolio has broadened: Besides linguistics courses, I have taught cultural courses, including the large undergraduate arts and Cultures of Central Europe, surveys of old and modern Czech literature, and, most recently, a first -year seminar on Prague. In one way or another, all of these courses include segments relevant to Jewish studies, often in the context of the Holocaust. Among my research topics, Czech Jewish culture has been prominent. I am currently compiling my published essays on the topic into a book, adding new chapters. While the most current piece moves the gaze well to the beginnings of the 19th century (it analyzes early Gentile reactions to Prague’s legendary place, the Old Jewish Cemetery), the final chapter focuses on the 20th-century Czech Jewish author Jiří Weil.
“For me, Jewish studies are uniquely disposed to cross boundaries and connect disciplines. Studying the Jews in the Czech lands is no exception to this—it throws light on the Jewish minority, the Czech society as a whole, but also on the overall Czech-Jewish-German configuration that for centuries characterized Central Europe’s multinational structure. Nonetheless, and despite notable efforts in the past, Czech Jews remain an understudied topic in the US. In this sense, an affiliation with the Center opens challenges and provides opportunities. Among the challenges I am looking forward to is the task of convincing a distinguished and highly critical community of scholars that this is not a minor topic. At the same time, I hope to benefit from the Frankel Center’s enormous energy and expertise. The latter will be much needed for the completion of my book project, which while inherently complex (Czech, German, Jewish), requires a deeper knowledge of Jewish studies proper. I also hope to be able to transfer the results of my affiliation to a broader group of researchers in Czech Jewish studies, including junior scholars in the Czech Republic.”
Benjamin Paloff
Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures,
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
“I am a postdoctoral fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows with a tenure-track appointment beginning in 2010 in Slavic languages and literatures and the arts. I am also a literature fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts. My poems are centered on Jewish themes, and my research interests focus on comparative approaches to 20th-century Polish, Russian, and Czech literatures, critical theory, and poetics. My work treats philosophical problems (primarily metaphysics and ethics) in their literary representation and draws heavily on Jewish authors and ideas and, in this way, situates these authors more productively within their non-Jewish national literatures.
“This has certainly been the case in my book project, an examination of how new models of space-time (Bergson, Husserl, Einstein) at the beginning of the 20th century changed the way key authors in Central and Eastern Europe represented subjectivity and individual freedom. The authors I discuss include Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Richard Weiner, and Osip Mandel’shtam, writers who, though each working in a different language, subscribed to remarkably similar ideas about the structure of the universe and the function of the poetic word, ideas that are in large part modern revisions of much older Jewish ideas.
“I would like very much to teach a course on how Jewish philosophy entered the mainstream of the Polish literary imagination, primarily through the work of such “secular” Jewish writers as Schulz, Boleslaw Lesmian, and Julian Tuwim. This course, as well as others drawing on my current research, would speak not only to my own interests, but also to the growing interest among our undergraduate and graduate students in Jewish contributions to—and lasting presence in—Central European cultures.”
Paul Schoenfield
Professor of Composition
School of Music, Theater, and Dance
Schoenfield’s work is inspired by the whole range of musical experience, popular styles both American and foreign, vernacular and folk traditions, and the “normal” historical traditions of cultivated music making, often treated with sly twists. Like certain other 20th- and 21st-century composers, he looks for his inspiration in the national spirit, which in his case he describes specifically as that of the Jewish American. A native of Detroit, Paul Schoenfield began musical training at the age of six, eventually studying piano with Julius Chajes, Ozan Marsh, and Rudolf Serkin. He holds a degree from Carnegie-Mellon University, as well as a doctor of music arts degree from the University of Arizona. A man of broad interests, he is also an avid student of mathematics and the Talmud. He held his first teaching post in Toledo, Ohio, lived on a kibbutz in Israel, was a freelance composer and pianist in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, moved to Cleveland and then to Israel. He and his family currently have homes in Israel and the United States.
Mr. Schoenfield has received commissions and grants from the NEA, Chamber Music America, the Rockefeller Fund, the Minnesota Commissioning Club, American Composers Forum, Soli Deo Gloria of Chicago, the Juilliard School, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Seattle Symphony, and many other organizations. Although he now rarely performs publicly, he was formerly an active pianist, touring the United States, Europe, and South America. Among his recordings are the complete violin and piano works of Bartok with Sergiu Luca. His compositions can be heard on the Angel, Decca, Innova, Vanguard, EMI, Koch, BMG, and the New World labels.
David Caron
Professor of French and
Women’s Studies
“My primary field is in French literature and culture. For a long time, my main interest in Judaic studies focused mostly on testimonial texts of the Holocaust. Beyond my autobiographical connection with the events (my Hungarian family was almost entirely exterminated), as an intellectual I was especially drawn to the issues raised by the representation—and sharing—of experiences so extreme that they seem to fall outside of language. My first book was about the AIDS epidemic in France, and having worked on the Holocaust allowed me to reflect on how marginalized communities react to and are shaped by historical disasters.
“My latest book is, among other things, about the Marais neighborhood of Paris, once a vibrant outpost of Jewish, mostly Ashkenazi, culture. This time, my focus was on how minorities occupy urban spaces and make them their own while claiming their place in the dominant culture. Because my work is interdisciplinary in nature, my affiliation with the Frankel Center is a unique chance to share ideas and expertise with people from a variety of disciplines and a multiplicity of interests.”
Introduction
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