A Higher Education: The Hasidic Revival in Interwar and Nazi-Occupied Poland
Sunday, April 10,
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Speaker(s):Glenn Dynner (Sarah Lawrence College)
The North Carolina Jewish Studies Seminar welcomes Glenn Dynner, who will discuss his paper "A Higher Education: The Hasidic Revival in Interwar and Nazi-Occupied Poland."
The post-WWI period saw an extraordinary revival of Hasidic education in Poland, from heder reform, to extensive yeshiva construction, to formal female education. The institutionalization of ostensibly "higher" education aimed to subvert both Polish mandatory public schooling and new secularist Jewish educational projects. During the Holocaust it continued underground in Ghetto yeshiva bunkers, symbolically repudiating Nazi dehumanization. Hasidic devotional education was thus not only a spiritual-intellectual practice but a political one; producing what Stuart Hall would term a "culture of resistance." The resulting pedagogical revival calls into question prevailing framings of 20th-century Hasidism as beset by anti-intellectualism, crisis, and decline.
Glenn Dynner, PhD, is Professor and Chair of the Religion Department at Sarah Lawrence College; Editor of the journal Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies; and a Guggenheim Fellow. He is author of "Men of Silk": The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (Oxford University Press, 2006), and Yankel's Tavern: Jews, Liquor & Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is currently working on a monograph entitled Higher Education: The Hasidic Revival in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust.
