CORONADO, California (Press Release)–The Agency for Jewish Education continues its Coronado lecture series this month with Eliza Slavet, Ph.D. of UCSD. Slavet’s lecture will take place in the Winn Room of the Coronado Library (640 Orange Avenue, Coronado) on Dec. 16 at 10:30 am. Her lecture is titled, “Freud and the Jewish Question.”
What makes a person Jewish? Why do some people feel that have physically inherited the memories of their ancestors? Is there any way to think about race without reducing it to racism or to physical differences? These questions are at the heart of Eliza Slavet’s new book, Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question (Fordham U Press, Sept 2009) .
In his final book, Moses and Monotheism, Freud hinted at the complexities of Jewishness and insisted that Moses was really an Egyptian. Slavet moves far beyond debates about how Freud felt about Judaism; instead, she explores what he wrote about
Jewishness: what it is, how it is transmitted, and how it has survived. Freud’s theory of Jewishness emerges as the culmination of his work on transference, telepathy and inter-generational transmission, and on the relationships between memory and its rivals: history, heredity and fantasy.
Writing on the eve of the Holocaust, Freud proposed that Jewishness is constituted by the inheritance of ancestral memories; thus, regardless of any attempts to repress, suppress, or repudiate Jewishness, Jews will remain Jewish and Judaism will survive.
Future lectures will feature brilliant professors speaking on their own areas of research. In January Professor Steven Cassedy, UCSD will discuss “A Bintel Brief: Abe Cahan as the Lower East Side’s Ann Landers.” Other speakers include professors Chanan Naveh, Risa Levitt Kohn and Ghada Osman.
The Mandelbaum Family Lecture Series is a program of the Agency for Jewish Education and is free and open to the public.
For more information on this or future talks in the series, contact the Agency for Jewish Education, (858) 268-9200 ext.102 or www.ajesd.org.
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Preceding provided by the Agency for Jewish Education