Talking About Jewish Women and Comics 26 February 2012
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TALKING ABOUT JEWISH WOMEN AND COMICS 26 FEBRUARY 2012 Introduction We are delighted to welcome you to “Talking about Jewish Women and Comics” on February 26th 2012, at Yeshiva University Museum. This one day symposium looks to bring together academics and comic artists to share ideas, research, and artwork. We hope it will be a space for dialogues about the interactions between text and image both on and off the page. What common themes emerge when Jewish women cartoonists represent themselves and others? What are some helpful theoretical modes for reading these works individually and collectively? What is it about sequential art that allows for unique investigations of identity categories like “Jewish,” “woman” or even “artist”? This symposium was inspired by Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women, the first ever museum exhibit to highlight the contributions of Jewish women to the genre of autobiographical comics. We are excited to host a roundtable with many Graphic Details artists at the end of the day. “Talking about Jewish Women and Comics” is sponsored by Yeshiva University Museum, The Jewish Daily Forward, McFarland & Co., Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, The Stirling Maxwell Centre at the University of Glasgow, and the PhD program in English at the CUNY Graduate Centre. We hope you enjoy the day. Sarah Lightman, Tahneer Oksman, and Dr. Amy Feinstein 1 Symposium Schedule 9:00 Registration; meet and greet 9:45 Introduction Sarah Lightman (University of Glasgow) and Rachel Lazin (Yeshiva University Museum) SESSION ONE, 10:00 - 11:30 Panel I: The Sequential and the Scriptural Chair: Karen Green (Columbia University Libraries) Rebecca Levi (University of Virginia), “Image as Midrash: Text, Gender, Representation and Interpretation in The Comic Torah” Sharon Rosenzweig (The Comic Torah) and Andrea Kantrowitz (Teacher’s College, Columbia University), “First We Do, Then We Understand: How God Became a Woman” Panel II: Picturing the Body Chair: Sasha Semach (Yeshiva University Museum) Tahneer Oksman (CUNY Graduate Center), “Self-Creation in the Comics of Vanessa Davis” Fabio Mourilhe (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), “The Graphic Memory of Aline Kominsky Crumb” Jennifer Glaser (University of Cincinnati), “Graphic Inheritances: Jewish Women Comic Artists and the Jewish Body” Joanne Leonard (University of Michigan), “Miscarriage made visual: Diane Noomin's Baby Talk and Joanne Leonard's Journal” 11:30 - 11.45 COFFEE BREAK (coffee/tea and light refreshments will be provided) SESSION TWO, 11:45 - 1:15 Panel III: Drawing in Yiddish: A Schmooze with the Artists Chair: Alisa Braun (Jewish Theological Seminary) Leela Corman (Unterzakhn) Liana Fink (Six Points Fellow) Panel IV: Between Diary and Memoir: Forming Comic Identities Chair: Michael Green (Hershey Medical Center, Penn State University) Natalie Pendergast (University of Toronto), “The ‘Outlaw’ Genre: Erasing the Line Between Form and Content in Ariel Schrag’s Comic Chronicles” Heike Bauer (Birbeck College, University of London), “Graphic Lesbian Contiuum: Ilana Zeffren” Judy Batalion (Writer and Performer, NYC and London), “The Comedy of Confession” Evelyn Tauben (Independent Curator and Writer, Toronto) “Mi Yimtza? Finding Jewish Identity Through Women’s Autobiographical Art” 1:15 - 2:00 LUNCH (not provided) 2 SESSION THREE, 2:00 - 3:30 Panel V: Scrutinizing Israel: Travelers, Tourists, and Citizens Chair: Amy Feinstein (Independent Scholar, New York City) Maya Balakirsky Katz (Touro College), “Drawing Israel: Friedel Stern on the Sabra” Maya Barzilai (University of Michigan), “Reframing the Holy Land: The ‘Adventures’ of Jewish Women Cartoonists in Israel” Panel VI: Trauma, Memory, and the Imaginary, Part I Chair: Bella Brodzki (Sarah Lawrence College) Ariela Freedman (Concordia University), “Charlotte Salomon: Graphic Artist” Maeve Thompson-Starkey (University of Cambridge), “Bernice Eisenstein's I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors: Autobiographical Hybridity – the Possibilities of the Multinarrative” Christopher Couch (University of Massachusetts at Amherst), “American Widow and Urban Identity: Grief, Memory, and the Fabric of Multicultural New York” Maya Hajdu (Concordia University), "Fragmented Memories in the Graphic Novel: Works by Miriam Katin, Bernice Eisenstein, and Miriam Libicki” 3:30 – 4:00 Viewing of Graphic Details Exhibition in Gallery 4:00 – 6:00 Artists in Conversation (two artist roundtables open to the public) Introduction by Dan Friedman (The Jewish Daily Forward) ROUNDTABLE I (4:00 – 5:00) Trauma, Memory, and the Imaginary, Part II: An Artist Roundtable Chair: Sarah Lightman (Graphic Details Curator, University of Glasgow) Sarah Leavitt (Tangles) Caryn Leschen (Aunt Violet Productions) Janice Shapiro (Bummer) ROUNDTABLE II (5:00 – 6:00) A Conversation with Artists from the Graphic Details Exhibit Chair: Michael Kaminer (Graphic Details Curator, The Jewish Daily Forward) Sarah Lightman (Dumped Before Valentine’s) Miss Lasko Gross (A Mess Of Everything, Escape From “Special”) Diane Noomin ( Twisted Sisters, Glitz-2-Go) Corinne Pearlman (Playing The Jewish Card) Ariel Schrag (Potential, Awkward, Definition, Likewise) Lauren Weinstein (Inside Vineyland, Girl Stories) Miriam Katin (We Are On Our Own) 3 Participant Biographies Maya Barzilai is an assistant professor of Modern Hebrew Literature and Jewish culture at the University of Michigan, where she teaches courses on the Jewish graphic novel, Jewish film, and Jewish immigrant literature. She received her Ph.D. in 2009 from the Department of Comparative Literature at The University of California, Berkeley. She researches Hebrew- German bilingualism and translation in the early twentieth century, and she has published extensively on the German author W. G. Sebald. She also studies photography and film theory, focusing on the use of hybrid, visual-verbal media in aesthetic responses to war and violence (“Reading Camera Lucida in Gaza: Ronit Matalon’s Photographic Travels” is forthcoming with Comparative Literature). Her current book project, The Golem and the Genesis of Modern Media: Film, Comics, and Poetics in Post-War Europe and the United States, examines the proliferation of this story of creation in twentieth century European, Israeli, and American culture. In this period, the book argues, the golem legend became a myth of origins for the nascent mediums of film and comics. Judy Batalion is a writer, comedian, and art historian. Her work has appeared in publications including Salon, The Washington Post, The Jerusalem Post, Contemporary Theatre Review, The Forward, Lilith, and Nerve, and she edited the anthology The Laughing Stalk: Live Comedy and Its Audiences. She currently holds a Yiddish translation fellowship from the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. Heike Bauer is a Senior Lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on sexology, nineteenth century literary culture, ‘race,’ and the histories of female and male same-sex sexuality. Her publications include a monograph, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion 1860-1930 (Palgrave, 2009) and a three-volume anthology of texts, Women and Cross-Dressing, 1800-1930 (Routledge, 2006). A collection of essays co-edited with Matt Cook, Queer 1950s: Reshaping Seuxality in the Postwar Years, is forthcoming with Palgrave in 2012. She is currently writing a book about Magnus Hirschfeld, global travel, and the development of transnational modern sexuality debates, and she is also leading a related collaborative project on sexology and translation, which is sponsored by the Wellcome Trust. Alisa Braun is the academic director of the Institute for Jewish Learning at The Jewish Theological Seminary. Dr. Braun served as the academic coordinator of the Jewish Studies program at the University of California, Davis, where she taught courses on modern Jewish literature, history, and film. She has a PhD from the Department of English at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on Jewish writers in America and the institution of patronage, with a special focus on Yiddish language literature in the US. She has both studied and taught in the Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture. Bella Brodzki is the Alice Stone Ilchman Chair in Comparative and International Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, where she teaches Comparative Literature. She is the coeditor of Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography and the author of Can These Bones Live?: Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Most recently, she published an essay on Art Spiegelman's earliest work in the collection Graphic Subjects and co-edited a special issue of the 4 journal Comparative Literature Studies entitled “Trials of Trauma.” Her current project is a study of translators’ prefaces in theoretical and literary texts. Leela Corman has illustrated books on subjects ranging from urban gardening to the history of the skirt, and her work has also appeared in the New York Times, on WNET/Thirteen, and in the Boston Phoenix, Lilith, Bust, and Tikkun. Leela is also a professional belly dancer. Her radio show, "Ecstacy to Frenzy" airs weekly on GROWRadio. N. C. Christopher Couch is an academic and curator. He is Visiting Associate Professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, an affiliated faculty member at University of Massachusetts, and Visiting Lecturer at School of Visual Arts in New York City. He has curated numerous exhibits, including “Will Eisner’s The Plot: The Secret History