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Graduate Student Spotlights
Noam Sienna’s A Rainbow Thread Wins Two Awards
Noam Sienna (PhD, History) published his groundbreaking work, A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969 (Print-O-Craft Press, 2019), just over a year ago. In that frst year, the initial printing sold out. And now his book has won two major awards: The 2020 Judaica Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries, and the 2020 LGBT Anthology Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation. Commenting on the sold-out print run, Sienna notes, “I think it demonstrates what a need there was for this book.” “Before the pandemic,” he reports, “I was able to spend the year traveling to share it with a wide variety of audiences, and I was always amazed by how excited people were about it.” Indeed, the two awards recognize Noam Sienna both the quality and breadth of Sienna’s scholarship as well as speak to the need the anthology fulflls for both an academic and general audience. As Sienna says, “I’m honored to have received these two awards, which represent how warmly the book has been received both in the world of Jewish Studies and in the world of LGBTQ community.” Sienna chose to publish his anthology with a trade press rather than with an academic press because he wanted to have a wider audience than just academics. He is happy with that choice, not only because of the sold-out initial printing, but because he feels Print-O-Craft Press is “doing great work producing creative and beautiful Jewish books, and they gave me a lot of freedom with this book, which I’m grateful for.” He also notes that the press has been able to continue fulflling orders through print-on-demand services, and a second print run is scheduled for summer 2020. Sienna defended his dissertation (supervised by CJS Director Daniel Schroeter) via Zoom on May 15, 2020. He is currently focused on his academic work on medieval and early modern Sephardi history, including preparing a proposal to publish his dissertation research as a book. He is also devoting attention to a few studies of some of the cases mentioned in his dissertation that he did not have room to fully explore. And fnally, focusing on the positives in a pandemic, he says, “I’m also using this time to fnd new opportunities to teach online, which has meant developing a different pedagogy and learning some new skills, and it’s been very rewarding.”
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Jazmine Contreras (PhD, History), despite the interruptions and disruptions of the pandemic, completed her dissertation, “We Were All in the Resistance”: Historical Memory of the Holocaust and Second World War in the Netherlands, and conducted her dissertation defense via Zoom on July 17. Working under the direction of Anna Clark (History) and Mary Jo Maynes (History), and with committee members Kirsten Fischer (History), Thomas Wolfe (History), and Alejandro Baer (Sociology, Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies), Contreras’s research examines contested cultural memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust through an analysis of
Jazmine Contreras the monuments, museums, educational programs, and commemoration ceremonies that shape memorial culture in the Netherlands. Contreras conducted interviews in over twenty cities across the Netherlands in support of her research, speaking with members of the Jewish community, with children of resistance members, children of former National Socialist (NSB) members who collaborated with the occupying German forces, museum staff, and educational program directors. She identifed interview subjects by enlisting the help of all the major museums, educational organizations, and victim-based organizations related to the Holocaust and Second World War in the Netherlands. In conducting the interviews, she focused on her subjects’ background, whether they ever encountered antisemitism (in the case of Jewish individuals) or discrimination (in the case of children of collaborators), their thoughts about how the Netherlands commemorates the war, and whether or not they think the country has yet to confront its complicity in the Holocaust. Her goal was to identify “how public spaces have enabled the transmission of specifc wartime histories and how these groups shape, push back against, or embrace a national narrative of the occupation.” Contreras’s research in the Netherlands was supported by two fellowships at the German Historical Institute in Amsterdam, one in 2017 and one in spring 2020. Contreras concludes that while her dissertation analyzes the tensions inherent to Dutch memorial culture,
the project is ultimately a commentary on the complex nature of European Holocaust memory. Despite the large numbers of Jews deported from the Netherlands during the Holocaust, the Dutch are rarely recognized as having collaborated with the Third Reich. This dissertation not only complicates the resistance narrative central to all Western European nations but forces a closer look at the ways in which Western European countries used a narrative of collective victimization in order to rationalize the development of European Union. By highlighting how Holocaust commemoration has become integral to EU values, my dissertation illustrates the strategic selectivity of Holocaust memory within European societies.
Contreras was in Amsterdam this spring, in the midst of her writing fellowship, when the pandemic shut everything down and she had to return to Minnesota. This prevented her from conducting fnal interviews, and she lost access to key secondary sources. Indeed, Contreras reports that monographs published in the Netherlands are nearly impossible to access in the United States, and she ended up emailing some of the authors directly to ask for copies of their work. Because University of Minnesota library services were only available remotely, she was also dependent on the ability of library staff to make books available online. Adequate support coupled with her considerable persistence enabled Contreras to complete her dissertation. The Center for Jewish Studies is proud to count itself among her supporters; Contreras received fnancial assistance from the Center for Jewish Studies in the form of the Riv-Ellen Prell Award for Research in the Study of Jewish Cultures (2018), and she writes that “the Center has been an incredible source of support these past few years.” This fall Contreras begins a three-year Visiting Assistant Professor position in European History at Goucher College in Baltimore, where she will also begin turning her dissertation into a monograph.
Jeff Cross Invited to Cambridge-Yale Biblical Semantics Workshop
Jeff Cross (PhD candidate, Religions in Antiquity), who in 2018 won the Canadian Society for Biblical Studies Joachim Jeremias Prize, was among a select group of twenty graduate students who were invited from an international pool of what the conveners called an “overwhelming number of good applications” to participate in this year’s Cambridge-Yale Biblical Semantics Workshop at Cambridge University. Jeff was invited on the strength of his CV, a letter of application describing his educational background as well as research goals, and a letter of recommendation from CJS faculty member and advisor Bernard Levinson, who praised Jeff’s “linguistic range, comparative perspective, and the strong training he has acquired in both biblical and Second Temple literature.” The workshop, scheduled for fve days, represented an opportunity for Jeff to atJeff Cross tend sessions by the conveners on aspects of biblical semantics (including lexicography, cognitive semantics, and the application of semantics in biblical interpretation), as well as a visit to the Cambridge holdings of the Cairo Genizah. The Biblical Semantics Workshop also featured paired study, through which attendees could work on a semantic task over the course of the week with someone from a different institution, presenting their fndings at the end to the entire group. In preparation for the workshop, Jeff was asked to read a dozen chapters and articles on biblical semantics and Hebrew lexicography. Unfortunately, shortly after Jeff completed all the assigned preliminary readings, the workshop was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He reports,
I had hoped that the workshop would provide me with a working understanding of semantic theories and their application to biblical and Second Temple studies. Since my research concerns processes and practices of interpretation by scribes and learned elites in both biblical and extra-biblical writings--primarily during the Second Temple period--I am interested in the interplay of semantics and hermeneutics.
Indeed, motivated by his dissertation research, Jeff has a series of questions he had hoped to engage during the cancelled workshop: “How did scribes and authors creatively (and/or tendentiously) exploit, mold, and reshape the semantic resources of the Hebrew language to support their interpretations of authoritative writings? Is interpretation a driver of semantic change, and, if so, can this be shown persuasively in a methodologically sound way?” In thinking about these questions, Jeff notes, “Lexica of biblical Hebrew often present semantic information in a way that can make the language look like an autonomous entity that develops of its own accord. Or, at the very least, they make it diffcult to see clearly the interpretive ingenuity that extends, adapts, and modifes the semantic potential of the texts and traditions scribes and authors were interpreting.” For Jeff, the next question is then “How can biblical Hebrew lexicography take these dynamics into account, assuming that it should?” Despite cancellation of the workshop, Jeff insists that the invitation to participate beneftted his dissertation research. He resolutely observes, “Completing the assigned readings has given me some ideas of how I might move forward in these directions and what resources are out there in the study of semantics.” Nevertheless, as with so many other cancellations due to the pandemic, there unquestionably has been a loss. As he says, “I was also hoping that attending the workshop would offer me the chance to network with other colleagues and scholars in my feld with related interests.” Looking ahead, Jeff is throwing himself into the writing of his dissertation, which will be supervised by Bernard Levinson with additional advice from CJS faculty members Patricia-Ahearne-Kroll , Stephen Ahearne-Kroll, and Mohsen Goudarzi, as well as U of M alumna Molly Zahn (University of Kansas). In addition to biblical Hebrew, Jeff has Aramaic, Coptic, Latin, and classical Greek under his belt, and by his own report he has done “a fair bit of work” with the Septuagint and New Testament in Greek, which he also views through the prism of interpretation and exegesis, and so his interest in semantics goes beyond just biblical Hebrew. With his broad linguistic skills and an undergraduate degree in classics as well, Jeff is poised to embark on a highly interdisciplinary academic career, and we look forward to his continued accomplishments.
Jana Gierden Rethinks Entangled Narratives with Israeli Artist Yael Bartana
Israeli video and performance artist Yael Bartana, in a 2012 Guggenheim Museum panel discussion following a screening of her critically acclaimed video trilogy, And Europe Will be Stunned (2007-2011), characterized her work as a critique of nationalisms, and of politicians who have lost their imagination. Bartana said of herself, “My role as an artist is to actually open the imagination and to rethink history.” Jana Gierden (PhD candidate, Germanic Studies) brings a similar critical imagination to her academic research, which she locates at the intersection of German studies, media studies, and Jewish studies, and in which she explores the concept of “entangled narratives” both as history and as aesthetic choice. As Gierden explains, the concept of verstrickte Geschichten, or entangled narratives, was developed by the German philosopher Wilhelm Schapp, a student of Edmund Husserl who has not yet made it into the modern philosophical canon, although Gierden aims to change that with a planned translation. For now, however, Gierden describes Schapp in the words of media theorist Bernd Bösel: “an insider’s tip amongst philosophers.” In Schapp’s view, Gierden says, “every human being is inextricably entangled in stories and every single story is in turn entangled in the so-called ‘Weltgeschichte’ (world-story), where all stories have their place. This means that the entangled person and their story never occur alone, but rather appear in the larger context of also being co-entangled in the stories of others and in the encompassing ‘world-story.’” Gierden applies Schapp’s theory to Bartana’s And Europe Will be Stunned, which she characterizes as a project on the history of Polish-Jewish relations and its infuence on contemporary Polish identity, as well as an exploration of contemporary antisemitism and xenophobia in Poland. Gierden says of the trilogy:
Bartana addresses the complicated Polish-Jewish relationship and the traumatic past of Poland as well as Israel….These three videos depict a fctional political organization called the Jewish Renaissance Movement, whose goal is to propagate the relocation of 3.3 million Jewish emigrants back to Poland, their former homeland. The visual iconography of the trilogy evokes controversial links between fascism, nationalism and Zionism. Living as a Jewish Israeli in Berlin, Bartana foregrounds the importance of thinking about the entanglement of past events and the present and brings them together with observations on personal and cultural identity while crossing reality with fction.
Gierden extends her analysis, moreover, by weaving in the work of Holocaust and memory studies scholar Michael Rothberg and his recent book, The Implicated Subject – Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. In an argument that has implications for Minnesota and the United States generally, as we grapple with the legacy of racism in America, she notes that Rothberg “foregrounds the importance of investigating one’s own implication in diffcult, traumatic histories. Rothberg’s notion of the ‘implicated subject’ –a subject that fnds itself in a hybrid position of both participating in and suffering from oppression and injustice– provides interesting similarities to the philosophical concept of Wilhelm Schapp’s entangled narratives.” Gierden argues that Bartana’s art together with Schapp’s and Rothberg’s theories “offer a new approach to the interpretation of entangled narratives in performance and video art while simultaneously enabling a close investigation of the most intertwined issues of our times, including racism, xenophobia and displacement.” Gierden will be presenting parts of her argument in a paper addressing the performative elements of Bartana’s video trilogy at a seminar about performance art and politics at the German Studies Association Conference in Washington, D.C. in October 2020. Gierden has completed a Bachelor of Arts in flm studies and philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany, and an international Master of Arts in Audiovisual and Cinema Studies at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main (Germany), the Université de Liège (Belgium) and the Université de Montréal (Canada). Conducting her research under the supervision of CJS faculty member Leslie Morris, Gierden is herself no stranger to performance art. In a personal engagement with entangled narratives, in this case the University of Minnesota’s response to its past history of antisemitism and racism as laid out in the Fall 2017 Andersen Library exhibit, A Campus Divided: Progressives, AntiCommunists, Racism, and Antisemitism at the University of Minnesota 1930-1942 (curated by CJS Professor Emerita Riv-Ellen Prell), Gierden and other engaged students at the Twin Cities campus organized a silent march from Middlebrook Hall to Coffman Union, only speaking to recite
poetry and read documents in front of four buildings named after individuals implicated in the exhibit. Confronting this local but entangled narrative from her own entangled position as an international student from Germany whose arrival in the U.S. coincided with the beginning of the Trump presidency, Gierden followed up the march with a directed study with Professor Morris, in which she immersed herself in key theoretical works about political performance art as a way to grapple with the issues raised in A Campus Divided. This in turn resulted in a Graduate Research Partnership Program Fellowship in 2018, all of which has fed into her current dissertation research. And thus have Jana Gierden’s personal engagement and academic research become intimately entangled.
Outside wall of Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art, 2012. Photo: Yair Talmor. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
