Review of Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters by Maya Barzilai

The golem crosses many borders. A popular culture icon and an enduring image of creative power, its hybridity contributes to its elusive nature. What it is and what it means shifts over time. Maya Barzilai\u27s Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters takes a unique approach. Deeply interdisciplinary, as one must be to explore such a complex and paradoxical figure, and drawing on religious, literary, cinematic, and historical contexts, Barzilai weaves a rich tapestry of golem narratives. All the while, Barzilai keeps a clear eye on the golem\u27s ongoing association with war, seeing its birth in the clay trenches of World War One and tracing its later evolution as emblematic of nuclear weapons, computer technology, and Israeli military policy

Temma Berg, Professor of English

In this first Next Page column of 2018, Temma Berg, Professor of English, shares which texts have had a lasting influence on her teaching career and scholarship, how a chance meeting created a connection between her and one of her favorite childhood literary characters – Anne of Green Gables, which book she likes to give as a gift to friends who are retiring, and why she might just prefer to open another book rather than host a literary dinner party

El feminismo comparativo

En esta entrevista, Àngels Carabí y Temma Kaplan hablan de los orígenes y la evolución del movimiento feminista en los Estados Unidos, que surgió de los movimientos de los derechos civiles y que tenía un objetivo común: conseguir los derechos civiles para todas las mujeres, independientemente de la raza o clase social a la que pertenecían. Uno de los temas principales era el derecho al control sobre su propio cuerpo, con las metas iniciales de permitir los contraconceptivos y el aborto, pero también el derecho a tener hijos -denegado a muchas mujeres marginadas. Más tarde el debate sobre la sexualidad ganó importancia. Otro objetivo era dar voz a mujeres de grupos minoritarios. Los estudios actuales sobre las masculinidades han tenido asimismo una influencia positiva en el desarrollo del feminismo, ya que ni las mujeres ni los hombres pueden ser estudiados como identidades problemáticas o separadas.In this interview, Àngels Carabí and Temma Kaplan talk about the origins and evolution of the feminist movement in the United States. This derived from civil rights movements and had a common goal with them: to obtain civil rights for all women, of all backgrounds and races. The right to control their own body was one of the main issues, with the initial goals to allow birth control and abortion, as well as the right to have children -denied to many marginalised women. Later on the debate on sexuality got more attention. Studies on masculinities have also had a positive influence on feminism, since neither women nor men can be studied as separated identities

Women and grassroots leadership

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 29 July 1996A new generation of women leaders is carrying out an invisible revolution. All over the globe certain women have been asserting collective rights to protect their children against pollution, disease, and homelessness. Not content merely to fight for improvements in the lives of their individual families, many of these women leaders struggle to assure community rights rooted in human need according to an interpretation of democracy that they themselves are developing through their actions. In various resistance movements from the seventies on, women activists have transformed desires to protect their children and their homes into political claims about what democracy should mean. For these leaders and the movements in which they participate, democracy entails human rights based on a standard they themselves define. The implicit theory of human rights they promote seeks to make community health a corollary of justice, deriving its power from common sense notions of human need rather than codified laws

Gendered citizenship among grass-roots women activists

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Democracy, Popular Precedents, Practice and Culture, 13-15 July, 1994

Truth without reconciliation in Chile: testimonies of the tortured and the case against Augusto Pinochet

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: The TRC; Commissioning the Past, 11-14 June, 199

Our Monuments, Our History

Beginning with Toni Morrison\u27s 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 to emphasize the horror of the Viennese pogrom and others like it. The article ends with a brief mention of a 1955 rememorial in a cathedral in Lincoln, England to address the wrongs perpetrated in 1255 when Jews were accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy named Hugh. New monuments talk back to old and bear witness to people’s changing awareness of the significance of past horrors

After the Golem: Teaching Golems, Kabbalah, Exile, Imagination, and Technological Takeover.

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 figure of the golem represents our human fears that we are not the autonomous individuals we believe ourselves to be. Haunted by specters of artificiality and automatism, we wonder whether we are unique individuals or inexorably programmed by social, cultural, psychological, and biological forces we are just beginning to fathom. As a Jewish story, the golem narrative illuminates the relentless history of anti-Semitism and resistance to blood libels of all sorts, hope for the future as well as despair, and most of all, the need for questioning any narrative we are given if we want to uncover its potential significances. [excerpt