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Published April 5, 2004; Category: ARTS AND SCIENCES
Conference brings experts from around the world, public invited
A public conference titled "Contested Memories of the Holocaust" will take
place Friday, April 9, and Saturday, April 10, at Dartmouth.
New York University artist Lorie Novak will show images, including Night and
Fog, at the conference on Holocaust memories. IMAGE (c) LORIE NOVAK 1991
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Because most of the survivors of the Holocaust could not return to their
native countries after World War II, many moved to Israel, the United
States, Australia, Argentina, or other countries. Many were unable to
talk about their experiences at first. Only years later did they find
willing listeners and publishers interested in making their accounts
available. Many survivors had to learn new languages and assimilate to new
cultures, which affected the way they remembered and narrated their
experiences.
"How the story got passed down was in many ways a factor of the places they
went to. Memory is always in the present," said Marianne Hirsch, The Ted
and Helen Geisel Professor in the Humanities. "What we're doing is
to compare the cultural memories in Israel and the U.S. These are the two
main destinations of Holocaust survivors.... We're interested in the
question of the mediated, contextual and shifting nature of memory,
and how over the last 60 years, memory has gotten simplified. It can get
monolithic and appropriative. It can lose some of its nuances and
complexity, but it also gains new dimensions as it is adopted by the second and
now the third generation. The conference will explore the ethics of
remembering, the problems of identification across ethnic lines, of
comparison in a genocidal age, and other topics relating to holocaust memory in
the 21st century."
The conference will take place over two days with six panel discussions and
one keynote speaker each day. (Along with the conference, Dartmouth professors
Marianne Hirsch and Annelise Orleck will teach an
undergraduate seminar this term with two professors from Tel Aviv
University.)
The keynote speakers are Amira Hass, a prize-winning journalist at Haaretz, a daily newspaper in Tel
Aviv, Israel, and Grace Paley, a writer, poet and activist who lives in
Thetford, Vt.
Amira Hass
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Amira Hass will speak about "The Israeli Occupation: Why
the Equations with the Holocaust?" She is the author of Drinking the
Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege (2000), about living in
the Gaza Strip as a Jewish Israeli, before and after the establishment of
the Palestinian National Authority (PNA).
Born in Jerusalem in 1956, Hass is the child of Holocaust survivors. She
studied history at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv
University. She held teaching positions and odd jobs before turning
to editing at Haaretz in 1989, and later that year, covering the
Romanian revolution. She now lives in Ramallah, where she moved in 1997.
She reports on Palestinian efforts at self-government, the relationship between
the Palestinian people and their government (the PNA), and the activities
of Hamas and other dissident groups.
"In the end," she wrote in Drinking the Sea at Gaza, "my desire to
live in Gaza stemmed neither from adventurism nor from insanity, but from
that dread of being a bystander, from my need to understand, down to the last
detail, a world that is, to the best of my political and historical
comprehension, a profoundly Israeli creation. To me, Gaza embodies the entire
saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it represents the
central contradiction of the state of Israel - democracy for some,
dispossession for others; it is our exposed nerve."
 Grace Paley
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Grace Paley will read from her own work, including a short
story titled "Three Days and a Question." She was born in the Bronx, New
York, in 1922 to Russian-Jewish parents, who had been anti-czarist
revolutionaries before being exiled to Siberia in 1904, then immigrating
to the United States in 1905. She studied at Hunter College and New York
University. She now lives in Thetford, Vt., and New York City.
She is the author of three collections of short stories, The Little
Disturbances of Man (1959), Enormous Changes at the Last
Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985), as well as
collections of poetry and short fiction. She taught creative writing and
literature at Sarah Lawrence College for 18 years, and at several other
colleges, most in New York City. She has also been a visiting professor
at Dartmouth on several occasions.
Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961, a grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts in 1966 and an award from the National Institute of
Arts and Letters in 1970. She was elected to the National Academy of Arts
and Letters in 1980, and in 1988, she was designated by the New York
legislature the first New York State Author. She is now the Vermont Poet
Laureate.
She has devoted herself to anti-war, feminist and anti-nuclear causes. She
is often described as a writer whose public identity is New Yorker,
Jewish and activist. The Village Voice once wrote about her, "Grace
Paley is to New York what William Faulkner is to Mississippi."
Both Hass and Paley have said that the experiences of their parents had
important influences on their own work. Hass's parents are Holocaust
survivors, and Paley's parents were political refugees.
The "Contested Memories of the Holocaust" conference includes panel
discussions with experts from the United States and abroad, including
Geoffrey Hartman (Yale), Susan Rubin Suleiman (Harvard), Bryan Cheyette
(Brownstone Visiting Professor in Jewish Studies, Dartmouth), Sidra
DeKoven Ezrahi (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and James Young
(University of Massachusetts, Amherst).
The conference was organized by Hirsch and Annelise Orleck, Associate
Professor of History, who will both participate in the discussions.
Orleck was on the first commission to create a Holocaust memorial in New
York City, which eventually resulted in the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A
Living Memorial to the Holocaust, which opened in 1997; and Hirsch has
published widely on what she has called Holocaust "postmemory" - the memory
of the second generation. Both professors have interviewed Holocaust
survivors in their research, although neither is an authority on Israeli
culture. (Orleck specializes in women's and American history; Hirsch studies
European literature and culture.)
The conference is sponsored by the Geisel Professorship (which Hirsch
holds), the Jewish Studies Program, the Women's and Gender Studies
Program, the Comparative Literature Program, the Fannie and Alan Leslie Center
for the Humanities at Dartmouth, the Dickey Center for International
Understanding and Dartmouth Hillel.
Registration is free and open to the public, and there is no deadline. One
meal will be provided during a reception on the evening of Friday, April 9, and
Kosher-for-Passover food will be provided for those who request it while
registering. Register
online and see a schedule and list of panel participants and their
biographies. For more information or to register by phone, call Gail Vernazza
at 646-2545.
By AMANDA WEATHERMAN
CONFERENCE
- Friday, April 9, 11:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m. at Rockefeller Center's Hinman Forum
(day) and 3 Rockefeller (evening)
- Saturday, April 10, 8:30 a.m.-6:30 p.m. at 2 Rockefeller
- Free, public, registration required
- 646-2545
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