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July
12th, 13th and 14th 2008:
Symposium "The Other Europeans"
[Deutsche
Übersetzung]
A three-day symposium on Yiddish and Roma music and
cultures takes place on July 12-14, featuring talks by
renowned anthropologists, historians, musicologists, and
musicians. For anyone interested in Yiddish or Roma
cultures, or in issues of national and transnational
identities in Europe, the symposium will be a rich
experience.
Lecturers:
Kalman Balogh
(Hungary)
Diana Bunea
(Moldova)
Claude
Cahn
(Switzerland)
Bob
Cohen
(Hungary)
Zev
Feldman (USA/Israel)
Ruth Ellen Gruber
(Italy)
Ivan
Ivanov
(Belgium)
Slawomir Kapralski
(Poland)
Zola
Kondur
(Ukraine)
Harry
Stein
(Germany)
Yale Strom
(USA)
Janina
Wurbs
(Germany)
participation fee 60 € or 40 € (reduced),
[discounts possible, see: 'conditions']
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PDF-Downloads
application
form symposium
conditions symposium
Project
Partners
In
cooperation with Landeszentrale für politische Bildung
Thüringen and Gedenkstätte Buchenwald.
Schedule
Schedule with abstracts by the speakers here [PDF].
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Claude
Cahn
(Human Rights Activist, Switzerland) |
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is
Head of Advocacy Unit for the Centre on Housing Rights
and Evictions (COHRE), a global housing rights
initiative based in Geneva. Between 1996 and 2007, he
was Programmes Director of the European Roma Rights
Centre (ERRC), an international public interest law
organisation working to end the systemic human rights
abuse of Roma (“Gypsies”) in Europe. Mr. Cahn’s areas of
expertise include cause and mission management,
international institutions, human rights law and policy,
monitoring methodologies, policy and law analysis,
public outreach and matters relating to the Romani
communities. Major achievements with the ERRC include
authoring European Union policy on Roma issues, shaping
European human rights law in the field of housing rights,
securing just remedy for victims of coercive
sterilisation, and moving a number of the countries of
Central and Eastern Europe to implement school
desegregation policy. He has been active since 2004 in
the campaign for an Optional Protocol to the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights. Since joining COHRE, he has been active in Human
Rights Council work, including matters concerning the
first rounds of the Universal Periodic Review.
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Zev
Feldman (historian,
musician / USA/Israel) |
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is
a leading researcher in both Ottoman Turkish and Jewish
music, and a performer on the klezmer dulcimer, tsimbl.
During the mid-1970s he and Andy Statman studied with
Dave Tarras and were two of the creators of the klezmer
revival; at that time Feldman reintroduced the dulcimer
tsimbl into klezmer music with his classic LP “Jewish
Klezmer Music”. Today he performs with the group
Khevrisa and elsewhere. Having grown up with traditional
Ashkenazic, Greek and Armenian dance, during the 1970s
he researched and taught Turkish folkdance. Today
Feldman is a teacher and performer of Ashkenazic dance,
leading workshops in the U.S., Canada, England, Germany
and Israel. Zev is a part-time associate professor at
Bar-Ilan University (Tel-Aviv) and a fellow of the
Center for Jewish Music Research at the Hebrew
University, Jerusalem. He was a co-editor of the
Medimuses Project for Modal Musics of the Mediterranean
for the EnChordais School in Thessalonica, Greece. In
2004 he co-directed the successful application of the
Mevlevi Dervishes of Turkey for the UNESCO proclamation
of the masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage
of humanity. In 2003 he curated the concert series “The
Revival of Klezmer and Yiddish Music in New York” at the
CUNY Graduate Center. He was the artistic director for
Jewish music at the 92nd Street in New York, and was the
artistic director of the series “Music and Dance of the
Jewish Wedding” (2004-2007) and "Music of the Mystics"(2005).
Today he is teaching klezmer music at the Rubin Academy
of Music in Jerusalem.
[Photo © by David Kaufman]
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Ruth Ellen Gruber
(publicist, cultural scientist / Italy) |
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is
an American writer living in Europe. Her books include
“Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere)”, “National
Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern
Europe” and “Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish
Culture in Europe”. Her work has appeared in the “New
York Times”, the “International Herald Tribune”, JTA and
many other publications. She has won Rockower awards for
Jewish journalism and received a Guggenheim Fellowship
and NEH Summer Stipend to explore the role of the
American west in the European imagination.
[photo:
Amalie R. Rothschild]
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Ivan
Ivanov
(expert for human rights, attorney / Belgium) |
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is
the Executive Director of the European Roma Information
Office (ERIO). Previously as an Attorney for the
Budapest-based European Roma Rights Center, he was
involved for five years in the research and building the
legal strategy of ground-braking civil rights cases
filed with the European Court of Human Rights and the
domestic courts of several countries in Central and
Eastern Europe. From 1996 to 1998 he has served as a
legal adviser for the Human Rights Project a national
human rights and legal defence organization based in
Sofia, Bulgaria. In this period he has spearheaded the
development of a number of strategic litigation cases
and key advocacy initiatives.
Ivan Ivanov holds degrees in medicine and law. In
1999-2000 he was a visiting scholar at the Law School of
Columbia University in New York, where he has
specialized international human rights and
anti-discrimination law. He has a number of publications
focusing on issues related to discrimination and access
to education and health care.
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Slawomir Kapralski
(sociologist
and philosopher / Poland) |
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studied
sociology and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University
in Krakow, Poland, where he received his MA and Ph.D. He
taught at the Jagiellonian University and then joined
the Central European University where he has been
lecturing for thirteen years in all three campuses:
Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest. He has been a visiting
scholar at the University of Bielefeld, the University
of Chicago, IWM Vienna, WZB Berlin, and Max Planck
Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle. At present
he is a Lecturer at the Warsaw School of Social
Psychology and an Associate Professor of Sociology at
the Centre for Social Studies of the Polish Academy of
Sciences in Warsaw. Since the end of 1980s he has been
involved in various research activities and educational
initiatives in the field of Polish-Jewish relations and
Roma communities of East/Central Europe. His research
interests focus on nationalism, ethnicity and identity,
collective memory, anti-Semitism, and the Roma and
Sinti. He is a member of the Gypsy Lore Society.
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Zemfira “Zola” Kondur (lifelong
human rights
advocate and Roma activist) |
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was
born in 1976 in the Odessa region of Ukraine and was
raised in a traditional Roma family. But unlike most
Roma, Kondur’s father attended university and obtained
two advance degrees. Education was important to the
Kondur family, and Zola’s mother had to fight against
discrimination so that her three children could attend
an English school in Odessa. To this date, the Kondur
children are the only Roma students to have graduated
from the school. Zola went on to enroll in the State
Pedagogical University and earned a teaching degree in
Russian language, literature and world culture.
In 1993, Zola and her family helped form the Izmail Roma
Association, which works to protect the rights of Roma
people in southern Ukraine. In 1997, she became the head
of the association’s Sunday school. In response to a
serious lack of services for Roma girls, she helped
launch the Chiricli International Roma Women’s Fund in
2000 to advocate on behalf of Roma women across Eastern
Europe. As the vice president of Chiricli, her
priorities are ensuring that Roma girls have access to
adequate education and proper health care for themselves
and their families.
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Yale Strom
(Director, Composer, Musician,
Writer and Photographer /
USA) |
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was
a pioneer among klezmer bale-kulturniks (returners of
the culture) in conducting extensive field research in
Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans among the
Jewish and Rom communities since 1981. Initially, his
work focused primarily on the use and performance of
klezmer music between these two groups. Gradually, his
focus increased to examining all aspects of their
culture, from post-World War II to the present. In the
more than two decades since his initial ethnographic
trip, Yale has become the world’s leading
ethnographer-artist of klezmer. His work has resulted in
10 books (i.e. The Book of Klezmer, Uncertain Roads:
Searching for the Gypsies), 12 recordings (i.e. Cafe Jew
Zoo, Borsht with Bread Brothers, Absolutely Klezmer Vol.
2), 7 documentary films (i.e. The Last Klezmer, L'Chayim
Comrade Stalin!) and many photo exhibitions.
www.yalestrom.com
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Janina Wurbs (Jewish
studies / Germany) |
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has
been exploring the Yiddish scene for several years. She
began by attending workshops on Yiddish instrumental and
vocal music, and recently spent over a year with the
Yiddish poet and songwriter Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman
in New York City. Last summer her interests led her to
Chernovitz (now in the Ukraine), where she conducted
ethnological interviews in Yiddish. She has delved into
various facets of Yiddish culture – from listening to
nigunim in Boro Park's Hasidic shiln and shtiblekh to
studying Yiddish language and literature with Miriam
Hoffman at Columbia University and Dovid Roskies at the
Jewish Theological Seminary. Having majored in Jewish
Studies, Religious Studies and History at Potsdam
University, she is connecting what she has learned with
her interests in Yiddish and Jewish music in a variety
of ways, whether t's collaborating in a project on the
collections of Sofia Maggid and Moshe Beregovski at
Potsdam University, digitalizing the Stonehill
collection (field recordings of mostly Yiddish songs) at
YIVO, doing research and translation of Yiddish songs
for CD release, operating the supertitles at New York's
Yiddish theater Folksbiene, helping to write subtitles
for Boris Sandler's interview film with the Yiddish
writer Shira Gorshman (Yiddish to English), or
publishing her own photographs in the Yiddish
periodicals "Forverts", "Afn Shvel" and "Di Tsukunft".
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