HABERMAN INSTITUTE FOCUS ON CULTURE: LITERATURE
Presented by Dr. Golan Moskowitz
Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies, Tulane University
As a child in a family of Yiddish-speaking Polish immigrants, Maurice Sendak was regaled with real-life horror stories of life in Poland and the loss of family members in Nazi death camps. Fear of the "other” was a daily reality. Moskowitz engages us with the life of a man who appealed to the fantasies of children who needed to escape from the realities of a hostile world in which Jews were the “other”. He gave shape to the fantasies of children who could fly or grow sideways when society or family circumstances prevented them from growing upward or moving forward. They were haunted by a past they did not directly experience. Join us as Golan Moskowitz investigates the evolution of Maurice Sendak’s artistic vision and its appeal to American, Jewish, and queer audiences.
You will be fascinated by this presentation, which is so relevant today as antisemitism and hatred of the “other” are on the rise.
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Golan Moskowitz, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at Tulane University, is a literary scholar, cultural historian, and visual artist. He completed his graduate studies at Brandeis University, where he earned a PhD in Near Eastern & Judaic Studies and a joint MA in Jewish Studies and Women's & Gender Studies. Holding a BA in Art from Vassar College, Dr. Moskowitz also applies visual studies and creative modes of inquiry to his scholarship and teaching. Golan has worked as a research consultant and editor for the Anti-Defamation League, he served as Assistant to the Executive Director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, and he has published on gendered and queer approaches to the study of post-Holocaust family and memory. His book Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context (Stanford University Press, 2020) situates Sendak's life and work within discourses of queer and Jewish studies and their intersections. Golan’s work has been supported by a number of organizations, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and YIVO. Before joining the Jewish Studies faculty at Tulane, Golan was the Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto.
Thank you to Andrew R. Ammerman for sponsoring our Spring 2024 program lineup.
He dedicates the semester’s learning in loving memory of Josephine and H. Max Ammerman, Stephen C. Ammerman, and Avi West.