Allison Schacter
3:15 pm | Guilford House Parlor, 11112 Bellflower Road
Sometime in the early 1960s, Lorraine Hansberry drafted an essay on the Eichmann trial, one that she never completed. Writing in the early 1960s, at a moment of anti-communist fervor that silenced both Black and Jewish radical thinkers, Hansberry understood antisemitism and anti-Black racism as an intertwined agenda of white supremacy that defined twentieth-century politics. These concerns also animated her 1964 play, (revived on Broadway this past year), The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which linked Nazism to American racism and the exploitation of women. Through readings of her essays and her play, I examine how Hansberry tackles the vexed legacy Nazism for American intellectual life in the 1960s from a Black left feminist perspective.
Presented in partnership with the Program in Jewish Studies, the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and the Department of English.
About the Speaker:
Allison Schacter is the Winkelried Family Chair in Jewish Studies as well as the Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for the College of Arts and Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Her scholarship is on nineteenth and twentieth century modern Jewish culture in comparative perspectives. Her books include Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century (2012) and Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939 (2021).
Learn more about Dr.Schacter .