THE SEGAL CENTRE
FOR PERFORMING ARTS
in partnership with the City of Montreal
IS PROUD TO PRESENT
THE MONTREAL INTERNATIONAL YIDDISH THEATRE FESTIVAL
SYMPOSIUM SPEAKERS JUNE 18-19 09
THIS ROSTER OF SPEAKERS ATTESTS TO THE QUALITY OF RESEARCH BEING CONDUCTED ON THE TOPIC OF YIDDISH THEATRE.
The one and a half day Symposium consists of a keynote address, three themed panel sessions, a roundtable discussion and closing remarks. One of the important goals of the Symposium is to encourage the cross-fertilization of ideas between the scholars themselves and between the scholars and the practitioners of Yiddish Theatre.
Joel Berkowitz is Associate Professor, Chair of the Judaic Studies Department, and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University at the State University of New York University at Albany. He received his Ph.D. in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1995, and spent the following year as a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. For four years he was the Corob Fellow in Yiddish at Oxford University, and has taught at SUNY since 2001. He is the author of Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage (2002), editor of Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches (2003), and co-editor and translator of Landmark Yiddish Plays: A Critical Anthology (2006).
Dov-Ber Kerler (literary pen-name: Boris Karloff) is a Yiddish poet and scholar. He was born in Moscow in 1958 and has lived, studied, and taught in Jerusalem, Oxford, and Bloomington, Indiana, where he currently holds the Dr. Alice Field Cohn Chair in Yiddish Studies. He has published four collections of Yiddish poetry, including one with his father, the poet Josef Kerler. His Yiddish poetry blog can be found at www.elabrek.blogspot.com.
Jean-Marc Larrue is co-director of the Research Centre on Intermediality (Centre de recherche sur l'intermédialité - CRI) at Université de Montréal (Canada). Professor of theatre history and theory, his research mainly focuses on theatre, modernism and media. He is the author or co-author of several works: Yiddish theatre in Montreal (Lansman-Jeu), Les Nuits de la " Main" (VLB - with André-G. Bourassa), Le Monument inattendu (HMH-Hurtubise), Le Théâtre à Montréal à la fin du XIXe siècle (Fides), Théâtre au Québec - repères et perspectives (VLB - with André-G. Bourassa and Gilbert David), Théâtre sans frontières -Theatre without Frontiers - Teatro sin fronteras (AITU Press - with Maria S. Horne and Claude Schumacher, editors), Lives and Deaths of Collective Creation with Jane Baldwin and Christiane Page (Vox Theatri). He is about to publish a book on theatre and new media with George Brown and Gerd Hauck.
Sarah Sonia Lipsyc, est l'auteure de plusieurs pièces de théâtre, metteure en scène et spécialiste du théâtre juif. Sa dernière pièce, « Eve des limbes revenue ou l'interview exclusive de la première femme ou presque de l'humanité » a été achetée récemment par France Culture pour une réalisation radiophonique. SSL a dirigé pendant des années en France une compagnie de théâtre Kédem. Elle a également joué comme actrice à la Comédie Française. Docteur en sociologie du théâtre, elle a enseigné l'histoire du théâtre juif dans divers séminaires universitaires en France et en Israël. Son enseignement peut se voir et s'entendre sur le campus numérique juif : www.akadem.org. Elle est l'auteure d'un ouvrage iconoclaste sur le théâtre juif : « Salomon Mikhoëls ou le testament d'un acteur juif », édition du Cerf, Paris, 2002.
Allan L. Nadler B.A., McGill, M.A. and Ph.D. Harvard, is Professor of Religious Studies and the Director of the Program in Jewish Studies, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. He has been a Professor of Jewish Studies on the Drew faculty since 1998. Prior to his appointment at Drew, Dr. Nadler was, for seven years, the Director of Research at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City and Dean of YIVO's Graduate Training Program, the Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies. Dr. Nadler has taught at Cornell University, at New York University, at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Studies in Chicago and at McGill University in Montreal. An ordained rabbi, Dr. Nadler served in Boston and Congregation Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal. Dr. Nadler's articles, reviews and essays have appeared in numerous scholarly and popular journals. He is the author of: Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), The Hasidim in America (American Jewish Committee Monograph, 1995), and the forthcoming: The Heretic as Hero: Spinoza in the Modern Jewish Imagination.
Edward Portnoy earned his PhD at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Modern Jewish Studies. He also holds an MA in Yiddish from Columbia University. He currently teaches Yiddish language and literature at Rutgers University. He lectures and writes on Yiddish popular culture.
Alyssa Quint, a native Montrealer, received her PhD from Harvard University where she wrote a dissertation on the origins of the modern Yiddish theatre. She has published encyclopedia entries, book reviews and essays in periodicals such as The Forward, Guilt and Pleasure, Prooftexts and AJS Review and books such as Culture Front (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) and Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon (Harvard UP, 2008) which she co-edited. She has taught at Brooklyn College, Rutgers and Princeton and now teaches at Columbia University. She is currently at work on a book about Avraham Goldfaden and the modern Yiddish theatre.
Nahma Sandrow is author of Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater and God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation, as well as many articles on related subjects. She wrote award-winning off-Broadway shows Kuni-Leml and Vagabond Stars, based on Yiddish theatre material; several of her translations/ editions of Yiddish plays are scheduled for upcoming productions. She has lectured at Harvard, Oxford, the Smithsonian, the National Yiddish Book Center and elsewhere.
Michael Steinlauf teaches Jewish history and culture at Gratz College in Philadelphia. He is theater editor of the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, just published by Yale University Press, and editor of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, v. 16 (2003), the first collection of studies focusing on Jewish popular culture in Poland and its contemporary afterlife. He is also the author of Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (1997), which examines how the experience of witnessing the Holocaust shaped Polish history and consciousness in the half century after the war. His work has been translated into Hebrew, Polish, German and Italian. He currently serves as senior historical consultant for the planned Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is scheduled to open in Warsaw in several years.
Jeffrey Veidlinger is Director of the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University, where he holds the Alvin H. Rosenfeld Chair in Jewish Studies and is associate professor of History. His first book, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage received a National Jewish Book Award and the Barnard Hewitt Award for Theater Scholarship. It was also a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award for Theater Studies. His second book, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire was recently published by Indiana University Press. He is currently working on a book entitled In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Jewish Memory in Eastern Europe. Professor Veidlinger has also published and lectured widely on Yiddish theatre in the Soviet Union and interwar Poland. In 2006, he was named a Top Young Historian by History News Network.
Seth L. Wolitz holds the L. D., Marie, and Edwin Gale Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also Professor of French, Slavic, and Comparative Literature. He is a specialist in twentieth century Jewish and European literature and his major work for the past twenty years has been the recovery and appreciation of modern Yiddish literature in its European context. He has written the lead articles for the two major exhibition catalogues of modern Jewish art in Jerusalem and New York. His current research is focused on Modernism and Minorities: The Yiddish Case. Professor Wolitz has written countless journal articles on Yiddish theatre. He is the editor of The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer (2002), the author of The Proustian Community (1971) and co-author of Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn (1962).
For more information on The Symposium, 514-739-2301
yiddishtheatrefestival@segalcentre.org