Remembering the 93: Sexual Violence, Ultra-Orthodox Memory, Performance

Join us for this year’s Annual Jackman Lecture in the Humanities. This event is free and open to the public. The Annual Jackman Lecture in the Humanities was inaugurated in 2022-23 on the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the Jackman Humanities Institute as a way to express our lasting gratitude for the support of the Honourable Henry N.R. Jackman for research in the humanities. This annual lecture features a leading humanist at the University of Toronto.

Remembering the 93: Sexual Violence, Ultra-Orthodox Memory, Performance will explore the story—fictional, as it turns out—of ninety-three Jewish girls that committed suicide rather than be taken as prostitutes by the Nazis, which is a staple of Bais Yaakov holocaust memory and performance culture. It follows on Professor Naomi Seidman’s research into the girls’ school Bais Yaakov in Israel, which developed a lively and enduring culture of performance during the second half of the twentieth century. Seidman was a JHI 6-Month Faculty Research Fellow in 2022-23.

Naomi Seidman is a Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts at the University of Toronto, in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. Her fourth book, Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition, won a National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies in 2019. Her fifth, In the Freud Closet: Psychoanalysis and Jewish Languages, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Her podcast on leaving the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world, Heretic in the House, was released by the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America in 2022.