By Jillian Chambers

After 25 years at the Mandell JCC of Greater Hartford, a Holocaust memorial exhibit is moving to the University of Hartford thanks to efforts by Mandell JCC executive director David Jacobs, Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford executive director Estelle Kafer, and Professor of Modern Jewish History and Director of the Museum of Jewish Civilization Avinoam Patt.

The Museum for Jewish Civilization at the University of Hartford will become the new home for the Holocaust memorial exhibit. It contains descriptions of Jewish life in Europe pre-World War II, during the Holocaust and after the war. There is also a display of artifacts and documents provided by local survivors who settled in Hartford. According to the Connecticut Jewish Ledger article “Hartford Remembers the Holocaust,” school groups often visited the room, where they had the opportunity to meet with survivors. Some artifacts and documents were returned to the survivors and their descendants, but the rest was incorporated into a new exhibit titled “Hartford Remembers the Holocaust.”

The new exhibit opened at the Greenberg Center’s annual Holocaust Educators Workshop on Oct. 31, guided by the theme “Teach for the Future: Holocaust Education in the 21st Century.” The workshop featured a panel discussion of six Greater-Hartford survivors, who are also very involved in local Holocaust education. In the near feature, the exhibit will feature video testimonies from survivors who came to the community but are no longer with us. Most of these video testimonies are from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University.

Professor Patt told the Jewish Ledger that this exhibit will allow them to “provide the local connection for students and community members to understand that this is not just something that happened long ago in a faraway place, but still continues to have an impact on people who live in our community and on their descendants – who are committed to teaching about the Holocaust to make sure that it never happens again.”

A project titled “In Their Own Words” featuring interactive videos conducted by the Greenberg Center and Voices of Hope will also be incorporated into the exhibit. The opening of “Hartford Remembers the Holocaust” was on Wednesday, November 9 at the Museum of Jewish Civilization at the University of Hartford. The original article featured in this story can be found here.

By Jillian Chambers

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, to the surprise of many, was awarded to the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Center Director Jeffrey Shoulson was recently featured on Trash Flow Radio, a radio program in Cincinnati, to discuss the implications of, and fallout over, the Swedish Academy’s decision to award the prize to Dylan.

Professor Shoulson began by explaining that there have been two general reactions in the world of literature, both on the extreme side of the spectrum: those who are thrilled and those that are disappointed. Especially in the age of social media, response has been swift and decisive. Shoulson recalled how he found out: a friend messaged him saying “Dylan WTF?” and, not having heard the news himself, he thought that Bob Dylan had died until he checked Facebook.

There have been many objections to awarding Dylan the Prize, the most common being that popular music is not legitimate enough for a Nobel Prize in literature. Shoulson found fault with this objection, arguing that if other forms of writing can be recognized, so should music. He also commented on the influence of Bob Dylan and the debate over measuring the quality of literature. Should the measure of the quality of the literature be independent of its influence? Is influence even relevant? Shoulson said that, in his estimation, easily two thirds of the people who had been given the award have had significantly less influence than Dylan and are not nearly as well known. At the same time, there are also writers who, despite their extensive influence and literary importance, never received the Prize.

Another objection raised by the radio host during the interview was that songwriting is different than prose or poetry because the lyrics of a song cannot be separated from the music. In choosing Dylan, Shoulson argued, the Academy has signaled that it is going to be more expansive in what and whom it considers literary. Dylan’s prize is also an acknowledgement of poetry’s roots. Before it was ever written down, poetry was sung; the term “lyrics poetry” takes it name more a musical instrument, the lyre, which was the standard ancient accompaniment to poetry, not at all unlike the acoustic guitar Dylan strums when he sings.

In addition to the last two objections, people have taken issue with Dylan’s plagiarism. Shoulson offered the counterargument by saying that Dylan’s work does not diminish what he borrowed, rather he “refined and raised it to the level of brilliance that we associate with Dylan’s music.” Shoulson added that this is a common feature of the folk tradition, and the literature Prize to Dylan is a recognition of the American folk tradition.

Shoulson and the radio host also discussed Dylan’s religion Dylan was born Jewish but converted to Christianity in the late 1970s. Some people have protested Dylan receiving the award by arguing that if the Academy was going to choose a Jewish American writer, it should have chosen someone like Philip Roth. Shoulson countered both Dylan and Roth have notoriously fraught relations with their Jewish roots.