Jewish Studies as Translation – A panel discussion

Jewish Studies, in many ways, is constituted through translation, indeed, it would not exist without the constant activity of translation. While English may currently be the most dominant of scholarly vernaculars across all areas of Jewish Studies, the sources we work with, the cultural, religious or historical contexts we study, are populated with and constituted in other languages and in places where English was perhaps only one vernacular among many or not spoken or read at all.

Speakers

• Dr Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah, is the digital curator for the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam and the Jewish Heritage Network. Her research interests include transnational Jewish solidarity movements and the modern history of Jews in the Arab World. Her book, Baghdadi Jewish Networks in the Age of Nationalism, is forthcoming in June 2021 in Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies.
• Dr Naomi Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts at the University of Toronto. Her publications include Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (2006), and Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (2019) which was awarded a National Jewish Book Award. She's presently working on a book about Freud and Jewish languages. 
• Dr Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, where her teaching focuses on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. Udel’s research interests include 20th-century Yiddish literature and culture, Jewish children’s literature, and American-Jewish literature. She is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press, 2017), winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience, and Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (2020).
• Dr Peter Davies is Professor of Modern German Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely on the relationship between Translation Studies and Holocaust Studies, including essays on authors such as Tadeusz Borowski, Elie Wiesel and Krystyna Żywulska. His work includes Holocaust Testimony and Translation (Translation and Literature special issue, 2014), and Witness Between Languages: The Translation of Holocaust Testimonies in Context (2018). His current research examines the work of interpreters in Holocaust trials, in particular the Frankfurt trials in the 1960s.

Chair

• Dr Hannah Holtschneider, Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies, University of Edinburgh.

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