[ Modiya > Rituals > Wedding ]
Topic: Wedding
River View Hotel, Mock Wedding, courtesy of Phil Brown, The Catskills Institute
Objects of Affection
The Wedding in Jewish Life: A Colloquium
Sunday, 13 April 2008
10:00 am - 9:00 pm
The Working Group on Jews, Media, and Religion,
Center for Religion and Media, New York University
The Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street, New York City
This event is free; reservations are required.
Please call SmartTix at 212-868-4444 or visit www.smarttix.com
Weddings are the most elaborately celebrated of Jewish life-cycle events. This is reflected in a wide array of customs (rituals, songs, dances), objects (canopies, rings, clothing) professions (entertainers, caterers, photographers), and works of cultural creativity (representations of weddings in plays, films, visual art). Some of these phenomena are centuries old and widely familiar; others are rare, highly localized, or very recent innovations.
Consequently, weddings provide abundant opportunities for considering the intersection of media and religiosity in Jewish life. We have invited today's gathering of scholars, artists, and performers to select key examples of mediating the Jewish wedding-from its graphic representation in a medieval manuscript to avant-garde performance-and to discuss what their place in a rite that is central to Jewish communality and continuity reveal about Jewish life itself. How do all these media practices enhance this ritual-or serve as opportunities for critique? What other aspects of Jewish life-gender, family, religious authority, economic concerns, aesthetic desires-do these wedding practices engage? How do the various media involved help articulate notions of spirituality, sexuality, memory, and religious tradition or provide a means for transformation?
Schedule (subject to change)
10:00-10:30 AM Welcome and Introduction
Faye Ginsburg, The Center for Religion and Media, New York University
Judith Siegel, The Center for Jewish History
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler, colloquium co-conveners
10:30-12:00 Session 1: Images
Chair: Sally Charnow
Marc Michael Epstein
Marriage Procession, Italy, 1465: “The way we were”—Realia
or fantasia?
Nahma Sandrow
Weddings in S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk
Edward Portnoy
Four Weddings and a Funeral: Cartoons of weddings from the Yiddish press
Edna Nahshon
Nechama Golan: Between sacredness and feminism
Rachel Kranson
The "No Chuppa, No Shtuppa" T-Shirt: Mocking the Jewish wedding
12:00-1:00 PM: Lunch break
1:00-2:30 Session 2: Performances
Chair: Brigitte Sion
Olga Gershenson
Benya Krik (1927): How it was done in the USSR
Alisa Solomon
Fiddler on the Roof: Sunflowers, bottle dancers and the invention of tradition
Ilana Abramovitch
Wedding videos: Performing ritual for the camera
Irit Koren
My Wedding Video: An atypical modern Orthodox feminist wedding
Susan Chevlowe
Nikki S. Lee’s The Wedding: Performing a “Jewish bride” /
casting a Jewish bridegroom
2:30-3:00 Coffee break
3:00-4:30 Session 3: Practices
Chair: Chava Weissler
Hankus Netsky (and Jake Shulman-Ment, violinist)
Uncovering Jack Levinsky's Complete New York Russian Sher Medley
Jill Gellerman and Mark Kligman
“Yidden” on YouTube: The mediation of Mordechai Ben David’s
music and wedding dance moves
Juliana Ochs
Wedding Menus: Nagamaki on the smorgasbord
Vanessa L. Ochs
Jewish Wedding Booklets: Tweaking tradition for personal meaning
4:30-5:15 Artist presentation
Melissa Shiff and Louis Kaplan
Postmodern Jewish Wedding: Rejuvenating Jewish ritual
5:15-5:45 Reception
5:45-7:15 Dinner break
7:30-9:00 Screening of Goodbye, Columbus (1969)
Remarks by J. Hoberman