The Mosse-Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies presents the 11th Annual Greenfield Summer Institute July 11-15, 2010.
This year's theme is "The Wandering Jew" focusing on the meaning and significance of Jewish wanderings from ancient times to the present.
Participants are coming from near and far for a week of summer learning and fun, including a concert by local klezmer band Yid Vicious and classes given by Jewish Studies faculty and guest lecturers.
Since Abraham's journey to Canaan, travel, movement, and migration have been important and recurring features of the Jewish experience.
From the Exodus to the expulsion from Spain; from Minsk to Ellis Island, Buenos Aires, and Tel Aviv; from home to homelessness, the Jews seem constantly to be on the move. Their fate as wanderers has been viewed many ways—as a curse (the Christian legend of the Wandering Jew), as a threat (Josef Stalin’s condemnation of the "rootless cosmopolitans"), or as a positive source of cultural vitality and creativity.
Jewish journeys have always been as much figurative as literal: as much cultural, culinary, and linguistic as geographical; and as much spiritual as material. Even conversion to or from Judaism may be under- stood as a journey: "Wherever you go, I will go," proclaims Ruth, the prototype of the righteous convert.
The Greenfield Summer Institute is sponsored by the George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies through the generosity of Larry and Roslyn Greenfield.
For more information, contact the Center at (608) 265–8150 or see http://jewishstudies.wisc.edu/eleventh-greenfield-summer-institute/