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DESCRIPTION:Lecture 2: Portrait in Ivory\, originally scheduled for Wednesd
 ay\, March 21\, has now been rescheduled for Wednesday\, March 28. Lecture
  3: Commonplace Things\, originally scheduled for March 28\, will now take
  place on Thursday\, April 12. If you were registered to attend the lectur
 e on March 28\, you do not need to reregister. If you would like to attend
  the lecture on April 12\, please click the register button.Join us this s
 pring for the Leon Levy Foundation\nLectures in Jewish Material Culture. L
 aura Arnold Leibman will deliver a three-part lecture series entitled “The
  Art of the Jewish Family: Material Culture in\nEarly New York.” Lecture 3
 \, “Commonplace Things” will take place on Thursday\,\nApril 12\, at 6 pm.
  Barbara Mann\, Professor of Cultural Studies and Modern Hebrew Literature
 \, Jewish Theological Seminary\, will offer a response.\n\n Wednesday\, Ma
 rch 14\, Lecture\n1: Pieces of SilverWednesday\, March 28\, Lecture\n2: Po
 rtrait in IvoryThursday\, April 12\, Lecture 3: Commonplace Things\n\n Add
 itional support provided by The David\nBerg Foundation.Between 1750 and 18
 50\, New York went from being one of many\nsmall Jewish communities on the
  Atlantic seaboard to the largest Jewish\ncommunity in the Americas\, a co
 mmunity whose size rivaled or surpassed many of\nthe historic Western Euro
 pean Jewish centers. The population surge was only one\npart of the story:
  over the course of the century\, the community shifted from\nSephardic- t
 o Ashkenazi-centered\, and family structure metamorphosed as Jews\nadapted
  their marriage patterns to American life. The Art of the Jewish\nFamily l
 ooks at how Jews of early New York mediated the radical changes in\ntheir 
 lives through material culture\, particularly objects associated with\ndis
 playing and maintaining the family. In each lecture Leibman will focus on 
 one of three key items\ntypically found in Jewish homes: silver\, portrait
 s\, and commonplace books.\n\nOur story begins just\nbefore the Revolution
 ary War. While the rise of the Enlightenment had\ncaused Christian marriag
 es to shift from arranged marriages as a social ideal\nto partnerships in 
 which women were encouraged to marry for love\, early Jewish\nAmerican mar
 riage contracts remained deeply tied to economics and social\nrelations th
 roughout the eighteenth century. Jewish marriages tended to be more\nconse
 rvative because in the Atlantic World\, women mattered deeply to kinship\n
 and Jewish culture. The gifts women received upon marriage helped cement\n
 families and reminded women of their obligations to both their biological 
 and\nconjugal relations. By the early nineteenth-century\, however\, this 
 ideal had\nfallen into question. While women still found themselves weighe
 d down by\neconomic calculations\, marriage increasingly took on romantic 
 expectations.\nIntimate portraits began to be exchanged as love tokens pri
 or to engagement. By\nthe 1830s\, Jewish women embraced the romantic ideal
  of marriage more fully\,\noften choosing not to marry rather than be yoke
 d to a loveless\, but\neconomically advantageous\, partnership. Just as Ch
 ristian women had used the\nlanguage of romance to challenge the older not
 ion of arranged marriages\, so too\nsingle Jewish women now co-opted the l
 anguage of romance and affection to\nchallenge traditional notions of Jewi
 sh kinship. This reformulation of Jewish\nkinship had important\, long-ter
 m ramifications for Jewish communal life as\nwomen’s role expanded beyond 
 creating biological Jews (offspring) to cementing\nthe larger Jewish natio
 n via affective ties. Commonplace books and personal letters\nbecame a key
  place where Jewish women reformulated the ideal of the Jewish\nfamily.Thi
 s final lecture uses a nineteenth-century commonplace\nbook to highlight t
 he rise of the new Jewish woman and radical changes in the\nJewish family.
  The niece of Rebecca Gratz and educator in her own right\, Sara\nAnn Hays
  Mordecai (1805–1894) married for love\, a love that would haunt her as\nt
 he Civil War began and the New Yorker found herself bound to a new family 
 in\nthe South. Better educated than either Reyna Moses or Sarah Brandon Mo
 ses\, Sara\nstyled herself as a producer of goods\, and compiled a commonp
 lace book\nconsisting of 102 manuscript poems and 22 illustrations. Like t
 he beakers a few\ngenerations before\, the work served to bind Sara to oth
 ers—weaving their\nthoughts and desires with her own. Unlike the alignment
 s of an earlier era\, however\,\nthe family and friends’ contributions wer
 e directed by Sara herself and\ncentered on feminine companionship. In thi
 s talk\, Leibman will place Sara’s\nvisually exquisite commonplace book al
 ongside her biography of Gratz to reveal\nthe new roles she envisioned wom
 en playing in the Jewish family.  Laura Arnold Leibman is Professor of Eng
 lish\nand Humanities at Reed College in Portland\, Oregon. Her work focuse
 s on\nreligion and the daily lives of women and children in early America\
 , and uses\neveryday objects to help bring their stories back to life. She
  is the author\nof Indian Converts (UMass Press\, 2008)\, the co-editor of
  Jews in\nthe Americas\, 1776–1826 (Routledge\, 2017)\, and the author of 
 Messianism\,\nSecrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early America
 n Jewish Life\n(Vallentine Mitchell\, 2012)\, which won a National Jewish 
 Book Award\, a\nJordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewis
 h Studies\, and was\nselected as one of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titl
 es for 2013. Leibman\nhas previously been a visiting scholar at Oxford Uni
 versity\, Utrecht\nUniversity\, and the University of Panama. Known for he
 r scholarship in Digital\nHumanities\, she served as the Academic Director
  for the award-winning\nmultimedia public television series American Passa
 ges: A Literary\nSurvey (2003). Leibman\, who earned her PhD from UCLA\, i
 s\ncurrently at work on a book that uses material culture to trace the\nhi
 story of members of a multiracial family who began their lives as slaves\n
 in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York. She h
 as\nbeen appointed Leon Levy Foundation Professor of Jewish Material Cultu
 re at\nBard Graduate Center for the spring 2018 semester.Barbara Mann is p
 rofessor of Jewish Literature and Simon H. Fabian Chair in Hebrew Literatu
 re at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Her areas of expertise include Isra
 eli and Jewish literatures\, cultural studies\, modern poetry\, urban stud
 ies\, literary modernism and the fine arts. Mann is the author of Space an
 d Place in Jewish Studies (Rutgers University Press\, 2012) and A Place in
  History: Modernism\, Tel Aviv and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (Sta
 nford University Press\, 2005)\, in addition to numerous scholarly article
 s. From 1997 to 2004\, she was a member of the faculty at Princeton Univer
 sity\, where she also served as a faculty fellow in the Center for the Stu
 dy of Religion. From 2007 to 2008\, Dr. Mann was a scholar-in-residence at
  the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. In 2
 011–2012\, she was a Lady Davis Visiting Fellow in the Humanities at the H
 ebrew University\, Jerusalem. Mann received an NEH Fellowship in 2015–2016
  for her work-in-progress\, “The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material H
 istory\,” which is under contract with Yale University Press.\n\nThis even
 t will be livestreamed. Please check back the\nday of the event for a link
  to the video. To watch videos of past\nevents please visit our YouTube pa
 ge.
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20180412T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20180412T193000
SUMMARY:Bard Graduate Center: The Art of the Jewish Family\, Lecture 3
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