The Holocaust: An Engorged Symbol of Evil?

Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate by Jeffrey C. Alexander, with Martin Jay, Bernhard Giesen, Michael Rothberg, Robert Manne, Nathan Glazer, Elihu Katz, and Ruth Katz. Foreword by Geoffrey Hartman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. 224. $27.95 cloth.

Nociceptors: a phylogenetic view

The ability to react to environmental change is crucial for the survival of an organism and an essential prerequisite is the capacity to detect and respond to aversive stimuli. The importance of having an inbuilt “detect and protect” system is illustrated by the fact that most animals have dedicated sensory afferents which respond to noxious stimuli called nociceptors. Should injury occur there is often sensitization, whereby increased nociceptor sensitivity and/or plasticity of nociceptor-related neural circuits acts as a protection mechanism for the afflicted body part. Studying nociception and nociceptors in different model organisms has demonstrated that there are similarities from invertebrates right through to humans. The development of technology to genetically manipulate organisms, especially mice, has led to an understanding of some of the key molecular players in nociceptor function. This review will focus on what is known about nociceptors throughout the Animalia kingdom and what similarities exist across phyla; especially at the molecular level of ion channels

Converged Aesthetics: Blewishness in the Work of Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell

This essay examines the converged aesthetic of Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, focusing on the Kosmopolitan video projects. These videos, and Russell’s work overall, resist the singular terms “Black” and “Jew,” constructing a Blewish converged aesthetic by overlaying images of Josephine Baker or a lonely, lost child walking backward with Russell’s rich and full voice singing Yiddish songs. These remarkable videos, and the projects created by Tsvey Brider (Russell and Dimitri Gaskin), disrupt assumptions about race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnoreligious affiliation in profound and important ways. I argue that this work performs convergence, thus bucking against the very insistence on antagonism that forms the conditions of possibility for racism

The aesthetics of the worst: Remembering and forgetting in French, Yiddish, and architectural Holocaust representations

This dissertation is a comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of different modes of Holocaust representation, including French and Yiddish testimony and literature and an international array of monuments, memorials, and museums. Although setting out to write about pain I have inadvertently also written about pleasure; by examining painful memories and painful recreations, I uncover the thorny problems that pleasure poses in relation to the aesthetics of remembering the Shoah. Because aesthetics is the branch of philosophy dedicated to investigating what pleases the senses, aesthetic questions always involve pleasure. Because history is the branch of the humanities that investigates social change, it often involves pain. Hence my project addresses the paradox inherent in the aesthetics of history. In the first part of the dissertation I discuss the aesthetics of memory and their relationship to pleasure in literature by Charlotte Delbo, Georges Perec, Edmond Jabes, Robert Antelme, and Marcel Proust. I argue that some of these writers challenge prevalent conceptions of Holocaust representation and Jewish identity, hence problematizing the very subjects they memorialize. In the second part I reflect on the interconnections between language, memory, and Jewish identity within Yiddish literary and testimonial culture by analyzing Yiddish texts by Jacob Glatstein and Abraham Sutzkever. I argue that a paradoxical relationship between nostalgia and irony characterizes many of these works, and that this paradox derives from the confrontation between the pleasure of memory and the painful realization that the past is irretrievably lost. In the final part of my dissertation I discuss various arguments about Holocaust monuments and memorials in Europe and America and reveal parallels and differences between literary, sculptural, and architectural aesthetics.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2002.School code: 0028