About the Lecture
Researching the presence and meaning of Polish writers with Jewish roots in the landscape of the Central and Eastern European culture is complicated. In his lecture, Professor Sławomir Jacek Żurek will lead us on a voyage through the Polish-Jewish literary world, and the complexities of its Polish-Jewish and Christian-Jewish relationships in the 19th and 20th centuries. Żurek will discuss the four generations of 19th-century Jewish writers creating in Polish, the richness of Polish-Jewish cultural life of inter-war period (1918-1939), and the rebirth of Polish-Jewish literature after the Holocaust in Israel (after 1948).
The lecture is free and open to the public, followed by a reception.
About the Speaker
Sławomir Jacek Żurek is a full professor and head of the Centre for Polish-Jewish Literature Studies and director of International Centre for Research of the History and Cultural Heritage of the Central and Eastern European Jews at The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. He has published widely on Jewish motifs in Polish literature including Synowie Księżyca. Zapisy poetyckie Aleksandra Wata i Henryka Grynberga w świetle tradycji i teologii żydowskiej (Sons of the Moon: Writings on Poetry by Aleksander Wat and Henryk Grynberg in the Light of Jewish Tradition and Theology, 2004) and Z pogranicza: Szkice o literaturze polsko-żydowskiej (From the Borderland: Essays on Polish-Jewish Literature, 2008), He is a member of the Polish Society for Jewish Studies, the Council of the Polish Episcopate’s Committee for Dialogue with Judaism, and the Polish Council of Christians and Jews. A former Fulbright scholar at the University of Notre Dame (2002-03), he currently serves as a visiting scholar in the Department of Polish, Russian and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Originally published at nanovic.nd.edu.