Teaching Jewish Studies in the Framework of Latin American Studies: Questions of Mediality

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

The proposed roundtable brings together a group of classroom instructors who currently teach Latin American Jewish cultural topics each at a different public or private university. As well as representing diverse generations, from a graduate student and an assistant professor to senior professors, the participants vary widely in the degree to which they are grounded primarily in Jewish Studies or predominantly in Spanish/ Latin American Studies, though we are all part of both areas of scholarship. In the course of this roundtable, we would like to discuss how our teaching of Latin American Jewish material may best engage with the ongoing debates within Latin American Studies. For this session, we would like to focus especially on the current discussion of mediality and the ways in which its increasing influence as been reconfiguring the cultural scene.

To give examples of the questions that we will be taking up at the session:

How are categories of difference and otherness constructed in Latin American cultures, and how do we create a classroom where our students will trace these processes at work in representations, in diverse media, of Latin American Jewish life?

As such longstanding practices as collective exercises in remembrance (for example, of unresolved incidents of injustice) increasingly make use of the social media, how can our teaching take into account these new ways of shaping and strengthening social memory?

How do we move students to go beyond the manifestations of Latin American media culture that are easily accessible because they have entered a transnational space (such as films with international distribution and most-watched videos) and to find examples that remain predominantly local in their reach (such as awareness campaigns created by Jewish community groups using social media)?

At the outset of the session, each participant will relate and analyze an instance in which he or she had to deal with one of these questions while teaching a Latin American Jewish studies topic. From there, we will proceed to a general discussion, including both roundtable participants and audience members, of the issues that have emerged from the telling of these episodes.

Sub Unit

• Pedagogy

Moderator

• Nora Glickman, Queens College

Discussants

• Naomi E. Lindstrom, University of Texas

• Alexandru V. Lefter, University of Pittsburgh

• Regina Igel, University of Maryland, College Park

• Edna Aizenberg, Marymount Manhattan College