Weekend of Italian Jewish Culture & Day of Radical Jewish Music Saturday, March 28 – March 30, 2015 The culture of Italian Jewry is unlike any other Jewish culture in the world. Although Italy is a part of Europe, Italian Jews tend to be less attached to the state of Israel than their French or German counterparts. Their history goes back more than 2000 years to before the first exile from Jerusalem after the destruction of the Second Temple. As part of the American Association of Italian Studies conference, Jewish Studies, French and Italian, and the CU Art Museum are proud to be hosting a Weekend of 20th-Century Italian Jewish Culture. Focusing on World War II, the weekend will move back and forth, from fascism’s concentration camps to the anti-fascist music fighting against Mussolini. On Saturday, at noon, CU is proud to welcome Carlo Spartaco Capogreco, the world’s leading expert on Ferramonti, a camp Mussolini established in 1940 to intern political prisoners and ethnically suspect people, including Jews. Artist and bookplate maker Michel Fingesten, the feature of CU’s own Davide Stimilli’s fascinating presentation, perished at Ferramonti. After his introduction to the life and work of Fingesten, Stimilli will take visitors on a tour of the small exhibition that he, along with Jewish Studies and Italian graduating senior Ari Browne, curated. Saturday afternoon features two special panels dedicated to Italian Jewish culture, and the day concludes with The Ginzburg Geography, a raucous evening of music presented by Jewlia Eisenberg and Charming Hostess. The concert is based on the life and work of Natalia and Leone Ginzburg, Italian Jews famous for anti-fascist resistance and intellectual brilliance. It is a sonic map focusing on where they lived together: Turin, Pizzoli, and Rome. The Ginzburg Geography refers to specifically physical locations, but also resonates with the actions and relationships associated with those places, allowing a sense-memory of places in time. Most of all, it is a concert of brilliant music little known outside Italy but that inspired generations with its yearning for freedom. Brought to you by the Department of French and Italian, the Program in Jewish Studies, and the CU Art Museum. Co-sponsored by the Centro Primo Levi of New York, Instituto Italiano di Cultura di Chicago, and the Ida Fund. Phillip Bohlman’s visit co-sponsored by the College of Music and the Program in Jewish Studies
Short Schedule of Events: Weekend of Italian Jewish Culture, Saturday, March 28 I campi di concentramento in Italia durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale (Italian concentration camps during World War II) Keynote Lecture with Carlo Spartaco Capogreco Saturday, March 28 @ 12:00PM - 1:00PM UMC Gallery Free and open to the public “Better to Die on One’s Feet than Live on One’s Knees: Life and Times of Michel Fingesten” Tour of Michel Fingesten Exhibition with Davide Stimilli Saturday, March 28 @ 1:00PM – 1:30PM UMC Gallery Free and open to the public Jewish Studies Caucus: Nazione ebrea e nuova Italia, Panel 1 Saturday, March 28 @ 2:00-3:15PM UMC, Aspen Room Organizer: L. Scott Lerner (Franklin & Marshall College) Chair: L. Scott Lerner (Franklin & Marshall College) •
Sergio di Benedetto (Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano): “Considerazioni attorno a un glossario beniveniano ebraico-latino”
•
Alessandro Grazi (Independent Scholar): “Jewish Secularization Modes and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Italy as Reflected in the Life and Oeuvre of David Levi.”
•
Tatiana Zavodny (University of California, San Diego): “(Dis)Unity in the Risorgimento: Kidnapping Italo-Judaic Identity.”
Jewish Studies Caucus: Nazione ebrea e nuova Italia, Panel 2 Saturday, March 28 @ 3:30-4:45PM UMC 382 Organizer: L. Scott Lerner (Franklin & Marshall College) Chair and Respondent: David Shneer (University of Colorado) •
L. Scott Lerner (Franklin & Marshall College): “Massimo D’Azeglio on Jewish and Italian Regeneration: A Reconsideration.”
•
Gabriella Romani (Seton Hall University): “Speaking to a National Body of
Readers: Italian Jewish Writers in Post-Unification Italy.” The Ginzburg Geography: A Sonic Exploration of Italian Antifascism Concert with Jewlia Eisenberg and Charming Hostess Saturday, March 28 @ 8:30PM - 10:00PM Glenn Miller Ballroom (Middle Section) Free and open to the public Day of Radical Jewish Music, Monday, March 30 Cabaret’s Moment in Jewish Music Lunch and Learn with Philip Bohlman Monday, March 30 @ 12:00PM – 1:30PM Lunch provided by Program in Jewish Studies RSVP to
[email protected] for location and pre-circulated reading The Ginzburg Geography: A Sonic Exploration of Italian Antifascism Concert with Jewlia Eisenberg and Charming Hostess Monday, March 30 @ 7:00PM – 9:30PM Old Main Theater Free and open to the public
Full Schedule with Descriptions Weekend of Italian Jewish Culture, Saturday, March 28 I campi di concentramento in Italia durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale (Italian concentration camps during World War II) Lecture with Carlo Spartaco Capogreco Saturday, March 28 @ 12:00PM - 1:00PM UMC Gallery Free and open to the public Professor Capogreco will speak about a still poorly known aspect of Jewish history in Italy, the presence of concentration camps in Southern Italy. While studies have focused on the presence of concentration camp in a number of northern Italian regions, little is known about the daily life and imprisonment of Jewish citizens and soldiers in Italy’s South. Carlo Spartaco Capogreco’s Bio: Carlo Spartaco Capogreco is an Italian historian, professor in the department of Political Sciences at the Università della Calabria. He is also president of the Fondazione Ferramonti, which archives and preserves records about the Ferramonti and other concentration camps in Southern Italy. He has presented his work and collaborated with a number of international universities and centers, including Boston University, Bar-Ilan University of Tel Aviv, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, and the Jevreiski istroijski Muzei of Belgrad. He is considered among the foremost scholars in the study and exploration of civilian internment camps under Italian Fascism. “Better to Die on One’s Feet than Live on One’s Knees: Life and Times of Michel Fingesten” Tour of Michel Fingesten Exhibition with Davide Stimilli Saturday, March 28 @ 1:00PM – 1:30PM UMC Gallery Free and open to the public Michel Fingesten is best known as one of the most prolific and highly sought-after bookplates designers of the 20th century. Son of a CzechJewish father and an Italian-Jewish mother, he fled Nazi Germany in 1936 and settled in Milan, where he built a circle of patrons who commissioned
and avidly collected his works. In 1940 Fingesten was confined to a Fascist internment camp in the Abruzzi, and then transferred a year later to Ferramonti-Tarsia near Cosenza, Calabria. He died shortly after the liberation of the camp by the Allies in 1943, apparently as the result of a wound infection after surgery. Fingensten was especially popular as a creator of bookplates or ex-libris (the Latin term meaning “from the books of”), a genre that appealed to the taste of elites in the late 19th and early 20th century. While he excelled in that genre, this exhibition provides a glimpse of the wide sweep of his graphic work. Exhibit curator Davide Stimilli, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, along with graduating Jewish Studies major and Italian minor Shikari Brown, will lead a fascinating tour of this exhibition, in which he will explore the breadth of Fingesten’s work while examining Fingesten’s shifting inspiration throughout his career between the erotic and the political. Fingesten’s stoicism is best summed up in the motto for a 1939 bookplate: “Better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees (Meglio morire in piedi che vivere in ginocchio).” Learn more about the Fingesten collection at Colorado.edu/JewishStudies. Davide Stimilli’s Bio: Davide Stimilli is Associate Professor of German, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies, and an affiliate of the Center for the American West. Davide graduated in Philosophy from the University of Pisa, Italy, and holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University. He is the author of Fisionomia di Kafka and The Face of Immortality: Physiognomy and Criticism, the editor of a monographic issue of the journal aut aut, devoted to Aby Warburg: "Aby Warburg. La dialettica dell'immagine," and of his clinical history: Die unendliche Heilung. Aby Warburgs Krankengeschichte (translated in Italian, French, and Spanish), as well as of a selection of Warburg’s unpublished writings: “Per Monstra ad Sphaeram”: Sternglaube und Bilddeutung. Vortrag in Gedenken an Franz Boll und andere Schriften 1923 bis 1925. Stimilli’s interests include literary criticism and theory, intellectual history, art theory, and film studies. Conference Panels on Jewish Studies: Join us for two conference panels on Italian Jewry, featuring a variety of national and international scholars. Professor David Shneer will serve as the chair and respondent on the second panel.
Jewish Studies Caucus: Nazione ebrea e nuova Italia, Panel 1 Saturday, March 28 @ 2:00-3:15PM UMC, Aspen Room Organizer: L. Scott Lerner (Franklin & Marshall College) Chair: L. Scott Lerner (Franklin & Marshall College) •
Sergio di Benedetto (Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano): “Considerazioni attorno a un glossario beniveniano ebraico-latino”
•
Alessandro Grazi (Independent Scholar): “Jewish Secularization Modes and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Italy as Reflected in the Life and Oeuvre of David Levi.”
•
Tatiana Zavodny (University of California, San Diego): “(Dis)Unity in the Risorgimento: Kidnapping Italo-Judaic Identity.”
Jewish Studies Caucus: Nazione ebrea e nuova Italia, Panel 2 Saturday, March 28 @ 3:30-4:45PM UMC 382 Organizer: L. Scott Lerner (Franklin & Marshall College) Chair and Respondent: David Shneer (University of Colorado) •
L. Scott Lerner (Franklin & Marshall College): “Massimo D’Azeglio on Jewish and Italian Regeneration: A Reconsideration.”
•
Gabriella Romani (Seton Hall University): “Speaking to a National Body of Readers: Italian Jewish Writers in Post-Unification Italy.”
The Ginzburg Geography: A Sonic Exploration of Italian Antifascism Concert with Jewlia Eisenberg and Charming Hostess Saturday, March 28 @ 8:30PM - 10:00PM Glenn Miller Ballroom (Middle Section) Free and open to the public Join us for the first of two concerts with Jewlia Eisenberg and Charming Hostess, exploring Italian anti-fascism. Throughout the concert, Jewlia Eisenberg will be in conversation with professors Valerio Ferme and David Shneer. The show will also include spoken word in Italian and English by students in the Department of Italian and Program in Jewish Studies, as well as feature a bilingual Italian-English zine about Ginzburg by Jewish Studies major and Italian minor Shikari Browne. The Ginzburg Geography is drawn from the life and work of Natalia and
Leone Ginzburg, Italian Jews famous for anti-fascist resistance and intellectual brilliance. It is a sonic map focusing on where they lived together: Turin, Pizzoli, and Rome. Charming Hostess’ map refers to specific physical locations, but also resonates with the actions and relationships associated with those places, allowing a sense-memory of places in time. Much of the information in our map comes from the Ginzburgs’ writing on place. The map of The Ginzburg Geography is new and traditional music drawing from the Italian regions of Piemonte, Abruzzo and Rome; from Italian Jewish liturgy, the oldest and most remote in Europe; and from Italian anti-fascist songs–work chants and resistance anthems. This iteration of The Ginzburg Geography is in concert form. It will soon be presented as an immersive performance that maps not only the journeys of the Ginzburgs, but also those of visitor participants, creating a sonic forest of maps to walk among, listen to, and add to. Jewlia Eisenberg Bio: Jewlia Eisenberg is a composer, extended-technique vocalist, lay cantor, and the founder of Charming Hostess. She is interested in the particular emotional, erotic and spiritual terrains that the voice can traverse. Her work explores the intersection of text and the sounding body, pushing for translation strategies between verbal and non-verbal languages. Collaborators include anarcholits Fantom Slobode, choreographer Jo Kreiter and filmmaker Lynn Sachs. Commissioned work includes Harmonices Mundi, an opera about Kepler’s mother, and Red Rosa, a song cycle based on the letters of Rosa Luxemburg. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at MIT and University of Denver; she has studied with sozanda Muna Nissimova, Fred Frith and Daniel Boyarin. Hobbies include class war, knitting, and smashing SUV windshields. Brooklyn born and bred, she now calls San Francisco home.
Day of Radical Jewish Music, Monday, March 30 Cabaret’s Moment in Jewish Music Lunch and Learn with Philip Bohlman Monday, March 30 @ 12:00PM – 1:30PM Lunch provided by Program in Jewish Studies RSVP to
[email protected] for location and pre-circulated reading Cabaret realizes a performative moment in which cultural, religious, and aesthetic differences converge upon a stage, both metaphorical and physical, mediated by music to reframe the narratives of the everyday
and of history. Music mobilizes cabaret’s moment, what Professor Philip Bohlman call the cabaretesque, by opening the possibilities of transformation: identities change as sameness is enacted through the performance of otherness; a new dramatis personae accrues to narrative and drama; the backdrop of staged worlds becomes the mirror of lived-in worlds; social relations are turned upside-down and inside-out; the borders between the serious and the comic are blurred and blinded by the footlights. For several years, Bohlman has been developing the concept of the cabaretesque by drawing upon and expanding Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnavalesque, which also draws upon metaphor from a performative moment of social inversion and cultural transformation, albeit one departing from Christian ritual in European history. The cabaretesque provides for exchange and encounter between the sacred and the secular in Jewish music. It serves to connect and mediate the performative in the triangulated cluster of stages variously called bima, Bühne, and bine, and it relocates sacred narrative from Jewish religious practice to secular history inseparable from the Jewish public sphere. Bohlman draws from his own research and performance as Artistic Director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, an Ensemble-inResidence at the University of Chicago, especially its most recent doubleCD, As Dreams Fall Apart: The Golden Age of Jewish Stage and Film Music, 1925–1955 (Cedille Records, 2015), to illustrate the ways cabaret forges its moment in Jewish music. By moving from performance more closely toward theory, Bohlman proposes more specific ways in which the cabaretesque brings new perspectives to the understanding of Jewish music in history and Jewish history in music. Philip Bohlman Bio: Philip Bohlman is Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. His teaching and research draw upon diverse methods and perspectives in music scholarship to forge an ethnomusicology built upon foundations in ethnography, history, and performance. He is particularly interested in exploring the interstices between music and religion, music, race, and colonial encounter, and music and nationalism. The study of Jewish music in modernity has provided a primary focus for his research for 35 years, and since 1998 has provided the context for his activities as a performer, both as the Artistic Director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society (a Jewish cabaret and ensemble-in-residence at the Humanities Division), and in stage performances with Christine Wilkie Bohlman (the College) of works for piano and dramatic speaker created during the Holocaust. With the New Budapest Orpheum Society, Bohlman has released four CDs, most recently As Dreams Fall Apart: The Golden Age
of Jewish Stage and Film Music, 1925–1955 (Cedille Records 2014). His work in historical performance has been recognized with the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society and the Donald Tovey Prize from Oxford University. Since 2008, Bohlman has been conducting research India, especially in Kolkata, Varanasi, and rural West Bengal. His research on the Eurovision Song Contest is ongoing. Bohlman's current research includes an introduction to the study of ethnomusicology for Cambridge University Press and a book on music and global nationalisms, for which he received a 2013 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. The Ginzburg Geography: A Sonic Exploration of Italian Antifascism Concert with Jewlia Eisenberg and Charming Hostess Monday, March 30 @ 7:00PM – 9:30PM Old Main Theater Free and open to the public Join us for the second of two concerts with Jewlia Eisenberg and Charming Hostess, exploring Italian antifascism. Throughout the concert, Jewlia Eisenberg will be in conversation with professors Valerio Ferme and David Shneer. The show will also include spoken word in Italian and English by students in the Department of Italian and Program in Jewish Studies, as well as feature a bilingual Italian-English zine about Ginzburg by Jewish Studies major and Italian minor Shikari Browne. The Ginzburg Geography is drawn from the life and work of Natalia and Leone Ginzburg, Italian Jews famous for anti-fascist resistance and intellectual brilliance. It is a sonic map focusing on where they lived together: Turin, Pizzoli, and Rome. Charming Hostess’ map refers to specific physical locations, but also resonates with the actions and relationships associated with those places, allowing a sense-memory of places in time. Much of the information in our map comes from the Ginzburgs’ writing on place. The map of The Ginzburg Geography is new and traditional music drawings from the Italian regions of Piemonte, Abruzzo and Rome; from Italian Jewish liturgy, the oldest and most remote in Europe; and from Italian anti-fascist songs–work chants and resistance anthems. This iteration of The Ginzburg Geography is in concert form. It will soon be presented as an immersive performance that maps not only the journeys of the Ginzburgs, but also those of visitor participants, creating a sonic forest of maps to walk among, listen to, and add to. JEWLIA EISENBERG BIO: Jewlia Eisenberg is a composer, extended-technique vocalist, lay cantor,
and the founder of Charming Hostess. She is interested in the particular emotional, erotic and spiritual terrains that the voice can traverse. Her work explores the intersection of text and the sounding body, pushing for translation strategies between verbal and non-verbal languages. Collaborators include anarcholits Fantom Slobode, choreographer Jo Kreiter and filmmaker Lynn Sachs. Commissioned work includes Harmonices Mundi, an opera about Kepler’s mother, and Red Rosa, a song cycle based on the letters of Rosa Luxemburg. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at MIT and University of Denver; she has studied with sozanda Muna Nissimova, Fred Frith and Daniel Boyarin. Hobbies include class war, knitting, and smashing SUV windshields. Brooklyn born and bred, she now calls San Francisco home.
