ACLA panel on Jewish Diasporas

[Amelia Glaser]

Dear Colleagues,

I want to draw your attention to a panel at the 2011, which I am
co-organizing with Maggie Levantovskaya. The topic is "Modern Diasporas in
Jewish Literatures," and the Conference will be in Vancouver from March
31-April 3.

To apply, please visit: http://www.acla.org/submit/index.php?override=xyzzy

I am pasting the full description below.

Sincerely,
Amelia Glaser

The internally and externally imposed migration of Jews in the twentieth
century has produced new conceptions and, in turn, representations of Jewish
identity and diaspora. For example, Russia and the Soviet Union have been
responsible for the most significant waves of twentieth century Jewish
migration and scattering. To the individuals involved in that history of
displacement, the state of Israel does not always embody the center or the
homeland lost. In fact, oftentimes it acts as a host nation that is, in
fact, alien to the versions of Jewishness developed in the diaspora since
the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem. Twentieth century
experiences of emigration suggest that the reversal or negation of Jewish
diaspora produces, in turn, new centers, including parts of Eastern Europe,
which has yielded its own modern diasporic culture in Israel and North
America.  The compounded and hybrid Jewish  identities produced in twentieth
 and twenty-first century instances of border crossing complicate the more
traditional understanding of Jewishness as a transnational category that has
a locus in the land of Israel. Simultaneously, there are also rapidly
evolving attitudes toward Jewish diaspora that revise past narratives and
mythologies and frame the condition today less in terms of a problem that
requires negation than an ideal to be aspired to and celebrated, in other
words, an identity without a center – what Daniel Boyarin refers to as a
“disaggregated” Jewish identity. This seminar will focus on the literary
renderings of the multiplicity of modern Jewish diasporas and the literature
that reflects their resulting identity groups. Papers for the panel should
present innovations in Jewish imaginings and discourses of diaspora, as
allegorized in twentieth and twenty-first century literature in any language
and from any national context. They may concern the topics of migration,
assimilation, acculturation, identification and disidentification as they
pertain to the intersections of Jewish identity and the concept of diaspora.

(You can also find the description here: http://www.acla.org/acla2011/?p=747
)

Amelia Glaser
Assistant Professor
Russian Literature
University of California, San Diego
Literature Building 3345
(858) 534-3809

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