Course

Discussions and assignments will focus on the close analysis of written texts, films, and video testimonies that, in different ways, bear witness to experiences of extreme violence, destruction, and dispossession (including but not limited to the Holocaust). Throughout the semester, students will also engage with theoretical and interdisciplinary debates that have emerged about testimony and its role in shaping historical understanding, collective memory, and cultural production, as well as with questions of media specificity, transmission, and translation. The course puts particular emphasis on Yiddish-language sources (available in English translation), though it situates these sources in a broadly comparative framework, with additional attention, for example, to Arabic-, English-, French-, German-, Hebrew-, Russian, Spanish-, Swedish-, and Ukrainian-language sources. In their final written assignment, students will be encouraged to work with sources in the original, building on their different language skills and areas of interest.