Description:

Nostalgia: On the Longing for an Imagined Past  

(Second in a two-part discussion series on "Working Memory: The Present Day Uses of the Jewish Past")

Panelists: 

Joshua Friedman, North Carolina State University
Rachel Gross, San Francisco State University
Charles A. McDonald, Northwestern University

This discussion series is presented as the 2021 Manfred H. Vogel Lecture in Judaic Studies 

In the Jewish tradition (as in any tradition), collective memory is not merely a sterile recall of past events --it is a conveyer of meaning, a way of selecting, shaping, and transmitting the values and commitments of the past in order to shape the present and future. Recent scholarship in the fields of Jewish and Israel Studies has taken this insight in innovative and provocative new directions. 

Over the course of two panel discussions, some of today's leading scholars will discuss the ways in which Jewish memory has been crafted, augmented, instrumentalized, and contested: from debates over how to memorialize antisemitism in pre-modern Europe, to Jewish perspectives on Confederate memory in the southern US, and to the rise of nostalgia as a modern Jewish mitzvah.