GUEST lecture with Jay Geller, Professor of Modern Jewish Culture at Vanderbilt University

The lecture will focus on the ascription (and manufacture) of animality that enacted the subordination or marginalization of "the Jew" and the dominance of the Gentile and similarly functioned with regard to a racially-identified group, people of predominantly sub-Saharan African descent (blacks), and the corresponding race-identifying group, people of predominantly European descent (whites).

Jay Geller taught at Vanderbilt University from 1994 to 2021. He is the author of On Freud's Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (2007, Fordham), which covers much of his corpus; The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (2011, Fordham), which devotes chapters to Levin Varnhagen, Feuerbach, Marx, Nordau, Schreber, and Benjamin as well as to the German reception of Spinoza's Tractatus and the intersections of the representations of Jews and Chinese and of Jews and syphilis; and Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (2018, Fordham), which addresses works by, e.g., Heine, Kafka, Freud, Salten, Siodmak over and against the long history of the deployment of images of nonhuman animals, real and imagined, to dehumanize Jews (and others). His current project is "S(h)ibboleth: Circumcision and Jewish Survival during the Shoah," which draws upon hundreds of audiovisual testimonies, memoirs, survivor literature and films.

Lunch and Learn: RSVP email by Monday April 17, 2023: Jennifer.M.Thomas@dartmouth.edu

Vegetarian Lunch from the NEST Cafe