Talk: "On Sponges and Lost Love: Three Poems and a Few Comments on Arab-Jewish History in Iraq," by Orit Bashkin, University of Chicago

The Department of Middle Eastern Studies presents:

"On Sponges and Lost Love: Three Poems and a Few Comments on Arab-Jewish History in Iraq"

A lecture by Orit Bashkin, University of Chicago
Thursday, March 22, 2012
4:00 PM
SAC 1.106

In the years 1921–1951, the Iraqi Jewish community thrived. Numbering around 150,000, this primarily urban community figured prominently in Iraq’s culture, literature and economy. Bashkin raises a few questions relating to the meanings of the Jewish sense of belonging to the Iraqi community through a reading of three poems written by Iraqi Jews. In doing so, she explores the ways in which Iraqi Jews wrote about modernity and secularism, and the manners in which their texts shed light on sociocultural processes occurring in Iraq at the time.

Professor Bashkin's faculty homepage:
http://nelc.uchicago.edu/faculty/bashkin