Polite Like a Cactus: Israeli Literature, Politics and Manners

Nancy E. Berg,

Professor, Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Washington University

"Portrait of the Artist as an Israeli Woman: Word and Image"

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

12:00 p.m.

CJS Conference Room

Humanities 4233

(455 N. Park St.)

Iris Nesher's international exhibit In the Darkrooms is a set of portraits of Israeli women artists. This talk reads the photographs through her subjects, and reads their works through her portraits, analyzing Nesher's black and white interpretations toward a larger discussion of the gaze, Israeli arts, and the interplay between the verbal and the visual.

  "Polite Like a Cactus: Israeli Literature, Politics, and Manners"

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

4:00 p.m.

L150 Elvehejm

(800 University Ave.)

Starting from examples as entertaining as they are egregious of Israeli incivility, this talk examines the blood sport of Israeli literature and literary scholarship, placing both at the center of explicating the enigma that is Israel.

Professor Nancy E. Berg is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Washington University where she teaches courses in Israeli culture, Hebrew, Jewish and Middle Eastern literatures. Her research includes a trilogy on the modern heirs of Babylonian Jewry: Exile from Exile: Israeli Jewish writers from Iraq; More and More Equal: The Literary Works of Sami Michael; and We Remember Babylon: Iraqi Jewish Memories of Home. She has also written on the Israeli mystery, women writers, food in literature, place, memory, and the question of language choice. Berg is the immediate past president of the (inter-) National Association of Professors of Hebrew.