Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Our Monuments, Our History, Temma F. Berg
Our Monuments, Our History, Temma F. Berg
English Faculty Publications
Beginning with Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory" and the recent completion of the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers on the University of Virginia campus, this essay explores the current monuments controversy by focusing on four Viennese monuments which have much to tell us about how new memorials might contextualize and reframe history. The first Viennese monument, a celebration of a series of fifteenth-century pogroms, was built into the wall of a house opposite the Judenplatz, a square in the center of what was once a thriving Jewish community. Four hundred years later, from 1998 to 2008, three additional memorials were built …
After The Golem: Teaching Golems, Kabbalah, Exile, Imagination, And Technological Takeover., Temma F. Berg
After The Golem: Teaching Golems, Kabbalah, Exile, Imagination, And Technological Takeover., Temma F. Berg
English Faculty Publications
The golem is an elusive creature. From a religious perspective it enacts spirit entering matter, a creation story of potential salvation crossed with reprehensible arrogance. As a historical narrative, the golem story becomes a tale of Jewish powerlessness and oppression, of pogroms and ghettoization, of assimilation and exile, and sometimes, of renewal. As the subject of a course in women, gender and sexuality studies, the golem narrative can be seen as a relentless questioning of otherness and identity and as a revelation of the complex intersectionalities of gender, class, sexuality, race, disability, and ethnicity. As a philosophical motif, the ambiguous …