Jewish Queer & Trans Writers at the End of the Last Century
6 sessions, Thursdays, 7:00-8:30pm, November 3 through December December 15; (no class Nov 24th)
CBE Board Room
In a reading and discussion class, we will bring to life the writing of Jewish lesbian, queer, and trans writers who helped build grassroots archives, liberation movements, and a range of literary cultures in the late 20th century. Authors include: Samuel Ace (b. 1954), Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz (1945-2018), Irena Klepfisz (b. 1941), Rachel Levitsky (b. 1963), Aurora Levins Morales (b. 1954), and Joan Nestle (b. 1940). Searching for radical embodiment, sexuality, and community, these writers often risked rejection from family and mainstream society in crafting their nonfiction and poetry. We will supplement readings with recordings of interviews and videos where we meet the cadence of the writers' voices and the pace of their minds when engaged in dialogue. What can the literature of Jewish, queer leftist thought bring to our current social and political climate? What struggles are reflected in their work that can offer us tools for thinking and being today?
*This course includes writing that engages directly with power and violence as told through lived and imagined narratives of sex, gender transgression, Jewish diasporas, personal and collective resistance to ableism, classism, and racism. We will work to build a space where we can meet these writers’ words and have difficult, daring, and loving conversations.
Students are asked to read, listen, watch, 2-3 hours of material outside of class, per session:
-Samuel Ace / Linda Smuckler, Meet Me There; Normal Sex & Home in Three Days. Don’t Wash. Belladonna*, 2019 will be provided with registration of course.
-PDFs, photocopies, links of video and audio recordings will be distributed as a supplemental course reader
Photo credit: Dan Paz
Ariel Goldberg is a writer, curator, and educator. Their book-length publications include The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books, 2016) and The Photographer (Roof Books, 2015). They received a 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipient for their book in progress on trans and queer image cultures of the late 20th century. Goldberg’s short-form writing has most recently appeared in Lucid Knowledge: On the Currency of the Photographic Image, Afterimage Journal, e-flux, Jewish Currents, Artforum, and Art in America. Their work has been supported by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, New York Public Library Research Rooms, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and SOMA in Mexico City. Goldberg has curated public programs for over ten years at venues including The Poetry Project and Tucson Jewish Museum & Holocaust Center. With Noam Parness they co-curated Uncanny Effects: Robert Giard’s Currents of Connection (2020) at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Their exhibition on photography’s relationship to spaces for learning, Images on which to build, 1970s-1990s is currently on view at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati as part of the FotoFocus Biennial through February 12, 2023 and will travel to the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in NYC from March 10-July 30, 2023. Goldberg has taught photography, writing, and contemporary art practices at Bard College, The New School, Pratt Institute, and Rutgers University.