Hampshire College

The academic study of Jewish history, literature, and culture goes back to the early years of the college. In 1973, a group of students helped to organize the nation’s first college course on the Holocaust, “Thinking the Unthinkable.” Alumni of that course went on to further study of the Jewish experience, upon which they have based their careers: co-organizer Aaron Lansky founded the National Yiddish Book Center; Margo Bloom, now director of the Sol Goldman YM-YWHA of the Educational Alliance (also known as the 14th Street Y) in New York and former director of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, founded the organization Facing History and Ourselves; and Hampshire’s Dean of Faculty Aaron Berman did his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University on the history of American Zionism.

In recent years, the pursuit of Jewish Studies at Hampshire has been made possible through the generosity of the Jeremiah Kaplan Family Foundation, which has funded undergraduate grants, a postdoctoral fellowship in modern Jewish studies, and a visiting assistant professorship in American Jewish literature. In conjunction with the National Yiddish Book Center, the Kaplan Foundation also provided support for on-campus conferences on Rethinking the Holocaust, in 1998, and Contemporary Jewish Creativity, in 2000. Recent visiting lecturers on campus have included Eric Sundquist and E.L. Doctorow. In 2006, Jewish Studies joined several other programs at Hampshire and in the Five Colleges in creating an interdisciplinary series of lectures and discussions entitled "Art, Exile, Memory."

Beginning in the 2007-2008 academic year, Hampshire College has been awarded a grant from the Posen Foundation's Center for Cultural Judaism for the development of courses and programs in the study of secular Jewish history and cultures. For more details about the grant and related Hampshire courses, visit www.culturaljudaism.org/ccj/grants.

Courses in Jewish Studies at Hampshire vary from semester to semester, but are generally offered through the Schools of Social Science (SS) and Humanities, Arts & Cultural Studies (HACU). Courses are listed online via The Hub, Hampshire’s online registration system.

Jewish life at the Five Colleges is diverse. Hillel Foundation operates on three campuses in the valley (Smith College, Amherst College, and the University of Massachusetts). At Hampshire (as well as at Mount Holyoke), students have organized an independent Jewish Students Union. There is a Kosher mod on campus that is organized and maintained by observant students, and Kosher facilities are also available on other campuses.

Campus Resources For Jewish Studies:

National Yiddish Book Center
www.yiddishbookcenter.org/

Jewish Studies Resources at the Harold F. Johnson Library
library.hampshire.edu/subjects/jewish-studies.html

Jewish Studies at the Five Colleges

Program in Jewish Studies, Smith College
www.smith.edu/jewishstudies

Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, University of Massachusetts
www.umass.edu/judaic

Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College
www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/jewish

Resources for Jewish Students at the Five Colleges

Jewish Student Union at Hampshire College
Contact: Rabbi Steven Nathan
Spiritual Life Office
Phone: 413.559.5282
Email: snathan@hampshire.edu

Office of Jewish Affairs, University of Massachusetts
www. umass.edu/jewish

Smith College Hillel
www.smith.edu/chapel/resources/jewish.htm

Jewish Students Union at Mount Holyoke College
www.mtholyoke.edu/org/jsu

Amherst College Hillel
www.amherst.edu/~hillel

Posen Foundation for the Study of Secular Jewish History and Culture Programs 2008-2009

Visiting Writers Series

Thursday, September 18th

Imagining Redemption in a Secular Age

A reading with acclaimed author Jon Papernick

5:30 pm, ASH Auditorium

About Jon Papernick

Jon Papernick was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. His first collection of short stories, The Ascent of Eli Israel, was published by Arcade Publishing in 2002. The New York Times wrote: "There is a muscular certainty to the best of Papernick's stories that is altogether harrowing. Papernick's penetrating clear-sighted stories ring true."

He is the author of Who by Fire, Who by Blood and is in the process of adapting Who by Fire, Who by Blood, into a graphic novel with artist Sandy Jimenez. He recently completed his second collection of short stories entitled There is No Other.

Papernick's short fiction has appeared in publications such as Exile; The Sarah Lawrence Review; The Reading Room; Nerve.com; Night Train Magazine; Confrontation; Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge [Harper]; and Scribblers on the Roof [Persea]. His journalism and reviews have been published in The Jerusalem Post, Time Magazine, JBooks.Com, The Jewish Week, Jewcy, and The Forward.

Papernick has taught writing at the Center for Creative Youth at Wesleyan University; Pratt Institute; Boston University; and Grub Street Writers, Boston's Independent Creative Writing Center. He has been the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University, and the Visiting Writer-in Residence at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. He currently teaches fiction writing at Emerson College, and lives outside Boston with his wife and two sons. Check out his blog The Conversational Anarchist.

Thursday, October 23rd

Freedom and Responsibility in Poetry: On Translating the World

A reading with poet, translator, Hampshire alum, and 2007 MacArthur fellow Peter Cole

7:00 pm, FPH West Lecture Hall

About Peter Cole

The recipient of a 2007 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Peter Cole has published three books of poetry, Rift (Station Hill); Hymns & Qualms (Sheep Meadow Press); and, most recently, Things on Which I've Stumbled (New Directions). A fourth volume, What Is Doubled: Poems 1981-1989, was also recently published by Shearsman Books in the UK. Cole has worked intensively on Hebrew literature, with special emphasis on medieval Hebrew poetry. In 1988 he started the ambitious project of translating into English texts by Shmuel HaNagid, whose lyrical work had always been considered untranslatable. Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid, published by Princeton University Press (1996), received the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Translation. Cole was granted a TLS translation award for Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol, also by Princeton University Press (2001), an equally challenging translation of the philosopher, poet, and mystic, who was a younger contemporary of Shmuel HaNagid.

Cole’s prize-winning translations of the Hebrew Golden Age poets have helped to recreate for contemporary American readers the multifaceted world of medieval Spain, in which Jewish artistic and intellectual communities flourished under Islamic rule. His new anthology, The Dream of the Poem, traces the arc of the entire period and reveals this remarkable poetic world in all of its richness, humor, grace, gravity, and wisdom. By far the most potent and comprehensive gathering of medieval Hebrew poems ever assembled in English, Cole’s anthology builds on what poet and translator Richard Howard has already described as “the finest labor of poetic translation that I have seen in many years” and “an entire revelation: a body of lyric and didactic verse so intense, so intelligent, and so vivid that it appears to identify a whole dimension of historical consciousness previously unavailable to us.” Among Cole’s translations from contemporary Hebrew and Arabic poetry and fiction are also Love & Selected Poems of Aharon Shabtai (Sheep Meadow); J’Accuse, by Aharon Shabtai (New Directions); So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005 by Taha Muhammad Ali (Copper Canyon Press); The Collected Poems of Avraham Ben Yitzhak (Ibis); and The Shunra and the Schemetterling, by Yoel Hoffmann (New Directions).

Cole has received numerous awards for his work, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the 1998 Modern Language Association Translation Award. J’Accuse received the 2004 PEN-America Award for Poetry in Translation. He was a visiting fellow at Yale University’s Whitney Center for the Humanities in the fall of 2006. Cole is also the founder and co-editor of Ibis Editions, a small press devoted to the publication of Levant-related literature. Cole was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1957. He began studying Hebrew in Jerusalem in 1981, and has since divided his time between Israel and the United States.

Thursday, November 6th

A Workshop with Poet Jacqueline Osherow

2:00 pm, FPH 104

About Jacqueline Osherow

Jacqueline Osherow is the author of five books of poetry. Osherow has been awarded the Witter Bynner Prize by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation; and a number of prizes from the Poetry Society of America. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Twentieth Century American Poetry, The Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Jewish-American Poetry, Best American Poetry (1995 and 1998), The New Breadloaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, The New Yorker, Paris Review, and many others. She is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Utah.