On the day of Commemoration of the Victims of Holocaust in Romania, RCINY organizes the launch and a roundtable around Andrei Oisteanu celebrated book "Inventing the Jew", recently published in English at the University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, 2009). The author will be in dialogue with Randolph Braham, Director of the Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, Vladimir Tismăneanu, policy scientist and professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Moshe Idel, professor Hebrew University oh Jerusalem.
Inventing the Jew follows the evolution of stereotypes of Jews from the level of traditional Romanian and other Central-East European cultures (legends, fairy tales, ballads, carols, anecdotes, superstitions, and iconographic representations) to that of "high" cultures (literature, essays, press writings, and socio-political literature), showing how motifs specific to "folkloric antisemitism" migrated to "intellectual antisemitism." This comparative perspective also highlights how the images of Jews have differed from that of other "strangers" such as Hungarians, Germans, Roma, Turks, Armenians, and Greeks. The gap between the conception of the "imaginary Jew" and the "real Jew" is a cultural distance that differs over time and place, here seen through the lens of cultural anthropology.
Stereotypes of the "generic Jew" were not exclusively negative, and are described in chapters on the physical and professional portrait, the moral and intellectual, the magic and mythological, and religious images.
Andrei Oisteanu is a researcher at the Institute for the History of Religions in Bucharest, and associate professor at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Bucharest. He is the author of several books, including The Image of the Jew in Romanian Culture, Order and Chaos: Myth and Magic in Romanian Traditional Culture, and Religion, Politics, and Myth: Texts about Mircea Eliade and Ioan Petru Culianu.
"This scrupulously researched study is a profound revelation of "the other" in western culture. The "imaginary Jew," in its specifically Romanian and central-east-European incarnation, reverberates through all of Europe's hellish myth-making, beginning in the first Christian century. The layering of stories and images has the effect of a masterful horror-film. Andrei Oisteanu's book is an unflinching look at Europe's darkest secret. It is therefore an indispensible text."-Andrei Codrescu, MacCurdy Distinguished Professor at Louisiana State University
"This book is erudite, richly documented and intelligently written. Though both a comprehensive and explicit analysis of so many themes concerning the images of the Jews, it is at the same time an implicit critique of an important component of Romanian culture. However, Andrei Oisteanu's book is above all a very courageous one."-Moshe Idel, Max Cooper Professor of Jewish Thought at Hebrew University in Jerusalem
"A profound and illuminating anthropological study, with many cultural, historical, social-political, and religious layers about an old-new topic. The image of the stranger says a lot about the stranger's own history and psychology but perhaps even more so about his neighbor-observer. Between the fictionalized Jew and the real one rests an entire history of thousands of years. The author of this fascinating book offers a thorough, subtle, and lucid description and analysis of a certain location, but its meaning goes well beyond it."-Norman Manea, Professor of European Literature and writer-in-residence at Bard College
FRI, October 9, 7:30 pm
RCINY - THE GALLERY
[Carturesti book exhibition]
573-577 3rd Avenue
(at 38th Street)
New York, NY 10016
FREE ADMISSION
