The Duke Center for Jewish Studies is pleased to present the annual Perilman Graduate Research Symposium, showcasing graduate work being done in the field of Jewish Studies. The Perilman fellowships in Jewish Studies honor the memory of Rabbi Nathan Perilman, who, after serving at Temple Emmanu-El in New York City, joined the Triangle-area Jewish community in his retirement.
2024 PERILMAN GRADUATE SYMPOSIUM
TENTATIVE SCHEDULE
9:00AM SESSION 1: CONFERENCES, LANGUAGE STUDY, AND THE FUTURE OF JEWISH STUDIES
SYED HABEEB TEHSEEN: "A Summer in Yiddishland-My experiences at the YIVO Uriel Weinreich Yiddish Summer Program"
The Perilman Summer Stipend made it possible for me to attend the In-Person YIVO Yiddish Summer Program in 2024. I was part of the Intermediate II track. In my short presentation I shall give a brief overview of the courses and seminars that I attended along with the extracurricular programs. I shall further talk about how my Yiddish developed over the course of the 6 weeks in the immersion program. I shall end with talking about how I am planning to be academically productive in the language, having recently found a novel in Yiddish that, previously only translated into Romanian, I would be interested in translating into English.
ACHIM SCHMID (online): "Memory and Fiction: Revisiting Matti Geschonneck's Die Wannseekonferenz"
Matti Geschonneck's documentary drama Die Wannseekonferenz (2022) commemorates the 80th anniversary of the historic event. Though the film has received wide acclaim and international recognition, Achim Schmid examines how it balances documentary accuracy with fictional elements, raising questions about its influence on collective memory.
MUHAMMAD USAMA: "The concept of Neshama in Shah Wali Allah’s thought and its antecedents in the Judea-Islamic Context"
This paper will examine the theory of subtle spiritual centers developed by the eighteenth-century Indian theologian and mystic Shah Wall Allah of Delhi (d. 1762). In particular, Wali Allah’s usage of the concept of Neshama will be analyzed in the comparative context of Judea-Islamic intellectual history. While the main focus is on describing the concept of the subtle body within the Judea-Islamic tradition, it will analyze how Shah Wall Allah’s reinterpretation of certain elements of this model reflects his views on various theological issues and his understanding of spiritual transformation. Scholars have previously noted the parallelism between Shah Wall Allah’s conciliatory project and Maimonides synthesis of Judaism with reason and philosophy. This paper will analyze parallelism with respect to the concept of Neshama.
Ms. Schkolnik completed her master’s degree in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, after which she immersed herself in black feminist theory, queer theory, gender studies, performance studies, and black studies. Her current research seeks to bring those disciplines together, along with training in Jewish studies and her recent engagement in the Israel-Palestine relation. Specifically, she is interested in the dynamics of suffering, and the role of national memory in its denial and recognition.
10:15AM: BREAK
10:45AM SESSION 2: JEWISH IDENTITY IN ART, LITERATURE AND MUSIC
IRIS GILAD (online): "Mapping Memories in the Art of Elham Rokni"
The paper examines how Israeli-Iranian artist Elham Rokni consistently explores themes of migration in her artistic career, often revisiting the landscapes of her past and obsessively retracing her memories out of fear that they will fade with time. It analyzes four of Rokni's video artworks through the lens of Marianne Hirsch’s concept of "postmemory," spotlighting her efforts to map both personal and familial diasporic memories.
AMELIAH LEONHARDT: “Developing the writerly Self in briv: Miriam Karpilove’s Epistolary Novella Yudis”
Miriam Karpilove’s Yiddish epistolary novel Yudis (1911) follows the eponymous heroine Judith as she navigates revolutionary politics, Zionism, anti-semitic violence, and emigration at the beginning of the twentieth century while writing letters to her revolutionary lover, Joseph. Karpilove utilizes melodramatic tropes and ostensibly sentimental language in the persona of her protagonist to explore how Judith is forced by her lover into a role as the stereotypical bourgeois heroine and as a refiguration of the apocryphal Jewish heroine Judith. However, through Judith’s navigation of roiling political and cultural changes, these expectations of her role, and the shifting tones of her relationship, she develops her own sense of self through the act of writing letters. In doing so, both the novella’s Judith as a character who writes and Karpilove herself as a writer demonstrate a quiet subversion of the role of Eastern European Jewish women at the beginning of the twentieth century.
GUILLERMO LUPPI: “Juan del Encina and converso Identity in Early Music Historiography”
As suggested, I will discuss how Juan del Encina’s (1468-1529) converso identity is reflected in his literary and musical works, particularly in his Cancionero (Salamanca 1496), and explore the challenges figures like him still pose to musicology.
DARIA KOZHANOVA: “Rethinking the National Canon with Jewish Italian Authors: Marina Jarre and Helena Janeczek”
This overview presentation will focus on some contemporary Jewish Italian writers — Marina Jarre (1925-2016) and Helena Janeczek — and suggest that their work can productively challenge the national-based approaches to Italian literature and the very notion of the Italian nation as such. The talk will foreground how their texts reflect their diverse backgrounds — Jarre was born in Riga to an Italian (Waldensian) mother and a Latvian-Russian-Jewish father, while Janeczek, a native of Munich, comes from a Polish-Jewish family — multilingual writing (combined with a choice to write in Italian), and transnational literary affiliations. All these features, testifying to the multiplicity of their identities (including but not to limited to their Jewishness), make it inadequate to inscribe Jarre and Janeczek into the exclusively Italian literary tradition and to claim their Italian national belonging — given the importance of literary canon for the crafting of the idea of Italian nation. The final remarks about recent reception of their novels in translation in the Anglo-American context will reveal further contradictions of the idea of “literary Italianness” that circulates outside Italy.
Abigail Emerson is Hebrew Bible/Old Testament PhD student in Duke’s Graduate Program in Religion. She earned a BA with distinction from Yale University in 2014 and an MA in Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity (tannaitic midrash halakhah) from the University of Virginia in 2020. She studies both Bibles as material objects and also biblical rhetorics of text provenance: speeches quoted, tablets smashed, scrolls inscribed. In the summer of 2021, she represented Duke’s Manuscript Migration Lab at the Authoritative Texts and their Reception Research Group at the University of Oslo under the Lab’s director Jennifer Knust. She and Knust also co-authored an exhibit in Perkins Library on MS 013, a holding in the Rubenstein’s Hebrew manuscript collection. Her dissertation will focus on divine quotation in the book of Leviticus and its function as a rhetoric of text provenance.