Conference: The Representation of Jewish Languages on Screen July 16-17, 2012

Room 3001, Rabin Building, Mount Scopus,The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Conference organizer: Cyril Aslanov

Monday, July 16

9:00 Gathering
9:30 Opening and greetings
Reuven Amitai, Dean, Faculty of the Humanities

Cyril Aslanov, Academic Chairman, International Center for University Teaching of
Jewish Civilization

9:45–11:15 First session: Yiddish and cinema: An unended romance?

Zehavit Stern, University of Oxford
Selling yidishkayt to the Jews: Folk performance and the quest for the authentic Jewish wedding in Yiddish fi_lm

Yvonne Kozlovsky Golan, University of Haifa
The man who loved in Hebrew

11:30-13:00 Second session: Between Yiddish and Hebrew

Joshua Sobol, Playwright and stage director
Ghetto – Writing Yiddish in Hebrew

Ken Frieden, Syracuse University
Yiddish in Hebrew: The romance of Israeli films with mame-loshn

14:30-15:30 Third session: Yiddish on the Soviet screen

Olga Gershenson, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
The forbidden fruit of language: Yiddish and Hebrew in Soviet cinema

16:00-18:00 Fourth session: Between Yiddish and music

Raquel Ibanez-Sperber, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yiddish and Hebrew as a sign of intimacy: From Left Luggage to The
Merchant of Venice

Aviv Livnat, Tel Aviv University/Bezalel Art Academy
Yidl mitn fidl: The music of other Jewish languages and its expression in cinema

Tuesday, July 17

10:30-13:00 Fifth session: Judeo-Spanish on screen

Gila Hadar, University of Haifa
The Queen, the governess and the tobacco worker: Hebrew, Spanish and Judeo-Spanish on screen and in reality

Tamar Alexander, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
La verdadera storia (the true story) – Television adaptation into Ladino of the Fifth Dialogue in the novel Mr. Mani by A.B. Yehoshua

Michal Held, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
«Borekas Films» and the absence of Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) from the screen: The migration of an Israeli socio-cultural sign

14:30-16:30 Sixth session: Other Jews, other languages

Cyril Aslanov, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Language as a synecdoche in the representation of Maghrebi Jewish ethnicity on the French screen

Sarit Cofman-Simhon, Kibbutzim College,Tel Aviv; Emunah College, Jerusalem
«At last we can speak our own tongue»: Maghrebi and Amharic in the Israeli theater and cinema

17:00-18:30 Special session & round table discussion

A meeting with Allen Lewis Rickman and Yelena Shmulenson – two Yiddish speaking actors in film (A Serious Man)