Shachar Pinsker Speaks on Urban Cafes and Modern Jewish Culture

Shachar Pinsker (U. Michigan) presented a talk on the role of urban cafes in the development of modern Jewish culture on Thurs. April 19 at 6 pm in rm. 2-01A of the Law School.

Shachar also offered a workshop on Thursday, 2:30-4 pm in Lowenstein 906, on the collaborative work he is doing with his Michigan colleagues on diasporic Jewish cultures. Here's a paragraph describing it:

Histories of modern Jewish cultures face the challenge of how to fathom complex issues of place and space. Because Jews never conformed to the national concept of the unity of people, language and territory, modern Jewish culture developed within constantly shifting borders of empires and nation-states. Jews are a transnational people with multiple diasporas, and this project proposes to map the migration of multilingual literary and visual networks of cultures across the long 20th century. Using innovative digital tools and databases, we plan to visualize the tension between  transnational and diasporic, but also grounded in a particular place; belonging to both global and local cultures. We hope to take macro and micro views of this network of people, analyzing both the diasporic and individual levels, as well as a multimedia view, such as visual and textual analogs. Digital humanities tools will allow us to map a non-linear, multimodal narrative.

Pinsker's visit was co-sponsored by the programs in Jewish Studies and Comparative Literature.