Skip to main navigationSkip to main content
The University of Southampton
The Parkes Institute

Bournemouth Mini Series 2012 Event

Date:
14 May 2012 - 25 June 2012
Venue:
tbc

For more information regarding this event, please email parkes@southampton.ac.uk .

Event details

'Interpreting Jewish Spaces'

Below is the programme for this years Bournemouth Mini Series.

14 May - Professor Joachim Schloer: ‘Street Life in the Modern Metropolis'

The street is the arena where modern urban history happens, from the first "flâneur" in the Paris of 1840 and Poe's "Man of the Crowd" via 19th century debates about street lighting, prostitution and crime to situationism in 1968 Paris and the "street art" of our times. There is a Jewish angle to all this - the "Jewish Street" has become synonymous with life in a Jewish quarter, London's East End or the Lower East Side of New York, so the paper will also discuss the contribution of Urban Studies to contemporary Jewish Studies.

21 May - Dr Helen Spurling: ‘The End of the World: Jewish Apocalyptic Visions'

This talk will examine a literary Jewish space, that of the apocalyptic text. During the Second Temple Period and into Late Antiquity, the threat of an impending apocalypse was often used as a theme within Jewish literature to express social and political change and any accompanying fears. Apocalypses are important because they represent an expression of social and cultural concerns, but also are of great significance for shedding light on attitudes to historical events and to surrounding cultures at crucial periods in the development of Jewish history.

18 June - Professor Tony Kushner: ‘Exodus 1947: Illegal Immigrants or Deserving Survivors?'

The talk will look at British and Zionist rhetoric concerning the journeys of Exodus 1947 and the attempt of its passengers to reach Palestine. Why was it that different readings of the slave trade and the Second World War became at the heart of the propaganda war between the two sides and is it possible, over sixty years later, for a consensus to be reached on the nature and purpose of these epic journeys and Britain's attempt to curtail them?

25 June - Dr Dan Levene: ‘They left us the Babylonian Talmud, but did you know of the magical incantations?'

Most of what we know of the Jews of Babylonia in late antiquity we know from the Babylonian Talmud, as really, there is precious little in the way of other evidence. Although it is becoming better known that we have now as big a literature in the form of Jewish Aramaic magical incantation from this period, what it reveals to us about the people who wrote them is not. This material certainly challenges preconceptions of that formidable club of Amoraic rabbis.

Privacy Settings