*IN YIDDISH* Oren Cohen Roman, Gib mir a penny un varf mikh aroys: der purim-shpil fun mitl-alter biz haynt tsu tog
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Himel Family Yiddish Lecture Series
Co-sponsored by the Al and Malka Green Fund in Yiddish Studies
Oren Cohen Roman (Lund University)
This lecture will focus on the Purim-shpil, a traditional Yiddish performance held during the holiday of Purim. Purim-shpils have been performed since at least the 16th century and continue to be performed today. The presentation will explore the similarities of Purim-shpils across the centuries and in various countries, as well as the unique traits of certain performances. Through this tradition, we will also touch on key aspects of Yiddish culture, such as gender, theater, the Holocaust, and contemporary Yiddish.
Oren Cohen Roman is a cultural historian of Ashkenazi Jews and scholar of Yiddish literature from its medieval beginnings until the present day. His research interests include Jewish and Christian retellings of the Tanach/Bible; cultural transference between Yiddish and co-territorial cultures; the history of reading, in particular the relationship between text and melody; news transmission in Early Modern Europe; gender; and popular culture (folklore). His book Joshua and Judges in Yiddish Verse: Four Early Modern Epics was published in 2022 by De Gruyter. He is currently preparing a scientific edition of the Old Yiddish epic Shmuel-bukh, a project supported by the ISF. His publications include a study of Yiddish written in Latin letters (Journal of Jewish Languages), a song reporting the martyrdom of Jewish criminals in 17th-century Moravia (Jewish History, with Daniel Soukup), and the depiction of female musicians in the works of Sholem Aleichem (Massekhet: Women of the Jewish World).
Cohen Roman is associate professor of Yiddish at Lund University. He holds a doctorate from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2015), and before coming to Sweden he taught at the University of Haifa. He held post-doctoral and research fellowships at the University of Oxford; Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf; Ben Gurion University of the Negev; and the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania.
This event is conducted entirely in Yiddish.