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Jewish Studies/Critical Theory Conference, co-organized by Comparative Literature graduate students.
Keynote speaker, Prof. Sarah Hammerschlag (U Chicago). "Judaism and Minority Politics: Homeopathy or Apotropaeon?"
Sponsored by UCI Humanities Center, UCI Center For Jewish Studies, UCI Comparative Literature, and UCI Critical Theory.
Revisiting the Jewish Question
April 20, 2026 at UC Irvine
All events in Humanities Instructional Building (HIB) 135
9:30am - Arrival, coffee
10:00 - Seminar on a work in progress by Prof. J. Kameron Carter (UC Irvine) Materials circulated in advance
10:45am - Break
11:00am - Panel One: Literary
Moderator: Prof. Julia Reinhard Lupton
- Na’amit Sturm Nagel (UC Irvine) - “‘Just Look Jewish’: Esther Kahn and the Escape from Jewish Particularity”
- Ezra Lebovitz (Pennsylvania) - “Under Review: Criticism of Anglophone Literature in In zikh”
- Michael Berlin (Washington and Lee) - “Last Jews: Paul Celan, Muriel Rukeyser, and the limits of Exemplarity”
- Ben Seigle (University of Illinois Chicago) - "Middlemarch's Jewish Question and Empire in the Long Twentieth Century."
12:30pm - Lunch (provided to participants)
1:30pm - Panel Two: Political
Moderator: Prof. Liron Mor
- Jonah Henkle (UC Irvine) - “What Would Lenin Say? Revisiting the Second International on the National Question”
- Colin Drumm (Mimbres) - "Hegel's Myth, Marx's Jew"
- Daniela Tolchinsky (Hebrew University) - “On 1967 and the Zionism of American Judaism”
- Rachel Florman (Harvard Divinity School) - “To ‘Be’ A Jew: Butler on Relationality and Diaspora Identity”
2:50pm - Break
3:00pm - Panel Three: Philosophical-Theological
Moderator: Prof. Margaux Fitoussi
- Avital Schkolnick (Duke) - “Precarious Empathy in Black and Jewish Thought at Times of Gaza’s Destruction”
- Lucas Scott Wright (Texas A&M) - “Against History: Infrapolitics contra Metapolitics with Rosenzweig”
- Olivia Gilbert (Yale) - “On the Use and Abuse of Names: Identity and Historical Difference in 19th-century Onomastics between Altgermanistik and Wissenschaft des Judentums”
- Jeff Aqua (UCLA) - “After the Cut: Circumcision, Violence, and Prosthetic Origin" 4:30pm - Break
5:00pm - Keynote Presentation
Prof. Sarah Hammerschlag (University of Chicago):
“Judaism and Minority Politics: Homeopathy or Apotropaeon?”
6:30 - Dinner
Contact co-organizers with questions: Iris Morrell (morrelli@uci.edu) and Jacob Reimer (reimerj1@uci.edu)