See Next Archive (2015-2016)

Please see below for archived 2015-2016 events.

G. SCHOLEM, LUCY S. DAWIDOWICZ, AND NATHAN BIRNBAUM: A TRANSNATIONAL POSTWAR "CONVERSATION" CONTESTING JEWISH SECULARISM

Nancy Sinkoff, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History, Rutgers University

Secularization as both process and project constituted a central component in the Jewish encounter with modernity. Beginning in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the all-encompassing world of traditional Ashkenazic Jewish culture was confronted with the intellectual demands of the European Enlightenment to distinguish between natural law based on reason and ceremonial law based on religious tradition and with the political goals of the centralizing European state to treat Jews as national subjects (and, exceptionally, in France, as citizens) who were to practice Judaism as a religion. Among East European Jews, secularization accompanied industrialization and proletarianization and by the end of the nineteenth century ideologues emerged who articulated a distinctly Jewish secular worldview that migrated, transnationally, with East European Jews from the 1880s forward wherever they settled, i.e., North and South America, S. Africa, Ottoman Palestine, and western Europe.

My paper takes as a given that the Ashkenazi Jewish encounter with western modernity was both a typological (or phenomenological) encounter and a historically and regionally specific one. Western Ashkenazi Jews living in France, for example, experienced the “secular” demands of the modernizing French state long before eastern Ashkenazi Jews living in Habsburg Galicia or in the Russian “Pale of Settlement.” This paper explores a fertile exchange between one of the towering figures of twentieth-century Jewish life, Gershom G. Scholem (hailing from western Ashkenazi Jewish circles and living in Palestine/Israel), and a well-known popular historian of the Holocaust, Lucy S. Dawidowicz (hailing from eastern Ashkenazic Jewish circles and living in New York City) regarding the claims of secularism and mysticism on Nathan Birnbaum (hailing from fin-de-siècle Vienna and finishing his days in the Second Polish Republic), a significant figure of late nineteenth- and early twentieth European Jewish nationalism. This exchange raises the question of the possibility or lack thereof of a completely secular Jewish modernity, a project suited—if at all—only to Jewish civilization in the European context.

Nancy Sinkoff is a cultural-intellectual historian of early modern and modern East European Jewry who is particularly fascinated with the question of how diasporic Jews understood politics. Her work focuses on both the European heartland (Poland) and on transnational settlements—in particular the United States—and examines how East European Jews and their descendants understood themselves as they encountered the political, economic, social, geographic, and religious transformations of modernity. Her first book, Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (2004), explores the first encounter of East European Jews with modernity in the period of Poland’s partitions and the spread of the European Enlightenment to the East. She is currently at work on a biography of Lucy S. Dawidowicz, an American-born historian of East European Jewry who was raised in a Polish-Jewish immigrant family and as a youth traveled to Vilna, Poland immediately before the outbreak of World War II.

  • Date(s): Wednesday, 4/13 6:00 PM to Wednesday, 4/13 7:00 PM
  • Address: 701 S Morgan St
  • Location: Chicago
  • Contact: Linda Vavra
  • Email: humanist@uic.edu
  • Phone: (312) 996-6352

ECONOMIC ANALYSIS AS POLITICAL PREDICTION: RUSSIAN ECONOMY IN 2016 AND IN A 40-YEARS PERSPECTIVE

Konstantin Sonin, John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor Irving B. Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago
Economic Analysis as Political Prediction: Russian Economy in 2016 and in a 40-years Perspective

There is no question that the Russian economy is in crisis: in 2015, GDP was down 3.5 percent, inflation was 11 percent, and real income fallen for the first time on Putin’s watch – in 15 years. The immediate reason is a dramatic fall in the world prices of oil, Russia’s main export, yet the foreign sanctions, cabinet dysfunction, and president’s inattention contributed to the downturn. However, the main problem of the Russian economy is long-term: the economy stagnates since 2008 and there is little hope that it will return to sustainable growth without serious reforms. Essentially, this is the same issue that the Soviet Union faced 40 years ago: without a political change, the planned economy would not stop stagnating. Then the long-delayed attempts of political change and economic reforms have only sped up the economic catastrophe. This time the market protects the economy from a total collapse, but the archaic and corrupt political system prevents any sustainable economic growth – making everyone who wishes Russia well to wait for a political change that would allow badly needed reforms.

Konstantin Sonin is John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. His research interests include political economics, development, and economic theory. His papers have been published in leading academic journals in economics and political science. In addition to his academic work, Sonin has been writing a blog on Russian political and economic issues, a fortnightly column for the Russian-language newspaper Vedomosti, and contributed to all major Russian media. In 2012, he was an economic advisor to the presidential campaign of Mikhail Prokhorov. He earned an MSc and PhD in mathematics from Moscow State University and an MA in economics at Moscow’s New Economic School, was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and served on the faculty of the New Economic School (NES) and Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow. As an NES and then HSE vice-rector, Sonin was a founder of an HSE-NES joint undergraduate program, and overseen HSE international recruitment effort in 15 disciplines, the largest such effort in Russia in decades. Now he is affiliated with HSE and Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics as a visiting professor and adviser.

  • Date(s): Wednesday, 3/16 6:00 PM to Wednesday, 3/16 7:00 PM
  • Campus Address: Institute for the Humanities
  • Address: 701 S Morgan St
  • Location: Chicago
  • Contact: Linda Vavra
  • Email: huminst@uic.edu
  • Website: huminst.uic.edu
  • Phone: (312) 996-6352

THREADS OF RUSSIAN EMPIRE: IDENTITY AND AUTHORITY WHERE EUROPE MET ASIA, 1552-1917

Charles Steinwedel, Northeastern Illinois University

“Threads of Russian Empire: Identity and Authority Where Europe Met Asia, 1552­-1917”

After Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible) and his forces conquered the Khanate of Kazan in 1552, the Russian government first in Moscow, then in St. Petersburg, sought to identify parts of the primarily Turkic, Muslim population that could stabilize imperial rule in Russia’s east. Although this challenge remained constant, strategies of imperial rule changed substantially over time.  The tsar and his officials first assigned status in a manner similar to their predecessors on the steppe, then sorted the population according to legal status, religion, into a military estate, and eventually, according to nationality. They did so in order to identify and reward those considered loyal or to identify targets of sometimes harsh violence or dispossession. I argue that by the mid nineteenth century, strategy succeeded in producing a local elite that identified with imperial authority and stabilized imperial rule.  Only in the last two decades of the empire, in the conditions of mass politics after 1905, did tsarist officials start to consider members of non­Russian, non­Orthodox groups unable to participate fully in imperial political life. In the East, imperial officials started to push Turkic and Islamic members of the elite from imperial institutions.

The full importance of shifts in imperial governance over becomes clear over the longue durée. I examine the Russian Empire over the entire 365 ­year period from the empire’s  arrival in a region known as Bashkiria to its demise in 1917. Bashkiria is about the size of Colorado and is located 750 miles east of Moscow. It lies in and just west of the Ural Mountains, which Peter the Great’s geographers identified as the geographic feature separating European from Asian parts of the empire. In Bashkiria, Russian Orthodox met Muslim, settled agriculture met semi­nomadic pastoralism, Slavic met Turkic, and Europe met Asia. Bashkiria’s core became the basis for the first autonomous republic in the Soviet Russia in 1919.

Charles Steinwedel is Associate Professor of History at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.  His articles have appeared in The Russian Review, Ab Imperio, and in volumes published by Macmillan, Princeton University Press, Indiana University Press, and Moscow’s Vostochnaia Literatura. This talk highlights themes in his book, Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552­-1917, which will be published by Indiana University Press in April 2016. The book received a first book subvention award from ASEEES.

  • Date(s): Wednesday, 2/17 6:00 PM to Wednesday, 2/17 7:00 PM
  • Address: 701 S Morgan St
  • Location: Chicago
  • Contact: Linda Vavra
  • Email: huminst@uic.edu
  • Phone: (312) 996-6352

OFFICIAL AND UNDERGROUND CULTURE(S)IN THE SOVIET UNION: HOW DO THEY PERSIST IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA?

In recent years, Russia has been featured in the news abroad, particularly in the U.S., mostly in connection to its adventurist foreign policy. First the aggression against Ukraine with the annexation of Crimea, and recently the start of military operations in Syria have reframed the scandalous reputation of Russia formed in the early 2010s as the country severely censoring the freedom of artistic expression. Meanwhile, little has changed in this respect within the country: the criminal prosecution of the punk group “Pussy Riot Affair” in 2012 was followed by the assault on the theater Teatr.doc, the police harassment of challenging and explicitly political performances of Piotr Pavlensky, and encouragement of violent vandalism by Eastern Orthodox religious fundamentalists against contemporary art exhibitions – to list just the most resonant cases. In Russia, artistic resistance remains an important venue for public civic and aesthetic self-expression. Nonconformist art persists despite increasing ideological censorship by the authorities and rising popular nationalism and conservatism. Contemporary “Russian culture” – once, a key component of Russia’s image in the world – is understood differently by artists and a significant part of their audience. Is this cultural differentiation driven mostly by political considerations (depending on one’s pro-government or oppositional stance), or there is a deeper and more complex divide? In my presentation, I consider a number of nonconformist / unofficial / critically oriented artistic movements and authors, in a hope to answer this and several other questions, such as: Are these phenomena of modern nonconformist art connected to the tradition of unofficial art and literature of the Soviet period? (Think of the most recent act of vandalism, when religious fundamentalists destroyed sculptures by famous Soviet underground artists). What is the difference between “old” and “new” types of cultural resistance to authoritarianism in Russia?

Ilya Kukulin is an Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies of the National Research University – Higher School of Economics (HSE, Moscow), Senior Researcher at the School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Moscow), and currently — visiting professor at the Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia. His most recent book, Machines of the Noisy Time: How the Soviet Montage Became an Aesthetic Method of the Unofficial Culture (in Russian), came out in Moscow in 2015. He broadly publishes in the fields ranging from the history of schooling in the 20th Century Eastern Europe to cultural practices of Russia’s internal colonization; from contemporary Russian literature, especially poetry, to the history of nonconformist social thinking in 20th century Russia and political discourses in contemporary Russian social media. The geography of his publications includes Russia, Germany, Norway, China, Lithuania, Armenia, and the U.S. In his capacity of a literary critic and public intellectual, Ilya Kukulin is actively present in non-academic venues, including digital media.

  • Date(s): Monday, 10/12 6:00 PM to Monday, 10/12 7:00 PM
  • Address: 701 S Morgan St.
  • Location: Chicago
  • Email: huminst@uic.edu
  • Phone: (312) 996-6352