NOTE: All information from the folkhögskola will be sent in Swedish.
YIDDISH CINEMA: DISCUSSING MIGRATION, COMMUNITIES AND TRADITION
The course aims at offering the space to watch some of the best examples of pre-war Yiddish cinema and discuss Jewish culture, history, and politics. The Yiddish cinema gives unique interpretations of the world of Ashkenazi Jewish culture during a turbulent period of rapid social, political, and cultural changes. The primary goal of the course is to study together, through the discussions, how the films reflect and conceptualize the central beliefs and principles that formed Jewish life in the first half of the twentieth century: the movement from shtetl to the towns, the international emigration, crisis of the traditional family, crisis of faith and secularization, the notion of revolution, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.
In the course we will watch and discuss following movies: “Tevye” (1939), “The Light Ahead (Fishke der Krumer” (1939), “Uncle Moses” (1932), “American Matchmaker” (1940) and “East & West” (1923).
The course is given in English, in collaboration with Jiddischsällskapet i Stockholm.
Course structure
The course consists of five meetings, during which the teachers introduce the background of the film, supervise the projection of the film, and chair the discussion.
Course material
Course material is included in the cost for this course.
About the teachers
Urszula (Ula) Chowaniec, Ph.D. is a professor (dr hab.) at the Andrzej Frycz-Modrzewski Cracow Academy in Poland and the Research Fellow at University College London. An Amos Oz Fellow at Paideia (2019-2020). She is an author of a monograph Melancholic Migrating Bodies in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2015) and In Search for a Woman: Early Novels of Irena Krzywicka, Kraków 2007. She also edited and contributed to Women’s Voices and Feminism in Polish Cultural Memory (2012), Mapping Experience on Polish and Russian Women’s Writing (2010), Masquerade and Femininity. Essays on Polish and Russian Women Writers (2008). She teaches among other courses: Contemporary Polish Women’s Writing; Gender and Body Politics in Literature and Film (Eastern-European Perspectives); Eastern Europe Through the Literary Nobel Prize Winners. Currently, she lives in Stockholm. Academic side: https://cudzoziemki.weebly.com
Ivana Koutníková has studied in four different countries (the Czech Republic, Austria, Israel and Sweden) and holds degrees in Jewish studies, German studies, and history. Her research focus is on the 20th century, especially on the Holocaust and World War II in Central Europe. She has worked in educational organizations such as Centropa (a Vienna-based historical institute dedicated to preserving 20th century Jewish family stories and photos from Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans) and CET Academic Programs in Prague (as a resident director for Jewish and Central European studies). She also has been involved in the creation and organization of a film section for the festival The Days of Jewish Culture in Olomouc, Czech Republic. In 2019–2020 she was an executive board member of the charity Limmud Stockholm. She has been working with cultural management connected to Jewish culture for more than 8 years. Currently, she works at Paideia as responsible for courses within the Jewish profile, responsible for cultural programs and as a project manager.
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