"'"Oy Vey!"':" Houellebecq and BHL in conversation, reviewed

Ian Buruma reviews the translation of M Houellebecq and B-H Lévy's dialogic musings in Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take On Each Other and the World (Random House, 2010).

Prof. Bruno Chaouat interviewed on Palin's comments

Read the article by Maury Glover and see the interview on Fox 9 News, Palin's 'Blood Libel' Video Fans Flames:

MINNEAPOLIS - Since the Tucson shooting, pundits and politicians have been pointing fingers at everything from lax guns laws to political rhetoric . But the national war of words escalated Wednesday when Sarah Palin entered the fray with the term "blood libel."
The term blood libel isn't common in the United States - it was used mostly in Eastern Europe as a way of blaming Jews for the death of Jesus Christ. And Sarah Palin calling herself the victim of blood libel has upset some Jewish leaders.
In a nearly 8-minute video on her Facebook page, Palin said she is being persecuted by political commentators and the media in the wake of the Tucson shooting.
"Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that severs only to incite the very violence it claims to condemn," Palin said.
Bruno Chouat, director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, says the term blood libel refers to the false belief that Jews use the blood of Christian children for religious rituals, and has been used as an excuse for anti-Semitism since the Middle Ages.
"I do not believe there is anything anti-Semitic in her statement or anything offensive," Chouat said. "But it can be offensive because she is using the term as if as she is in the position of being stigmatized like the Jews have been stigmatized for centuries."
While some Jewish leaders say the term brings back painful memories of Jewish persecution throughout the centuries, Chouat says Palin's poor choice of words may have fanned the flames of political debate instead of cooling them.
"It's an exploitive metaphor because no Jews are involved in this," he said. "This whole question doesn't revolve around anti-Semitism, so its a form of exploitation of the history of anti-Semitism."
An aide for Palin says she stands by her video.

Gonzo Theatre's "No Exit" at the Lowry Lab Feb 3-12

Dramaturged by our very own Sophie Kerman!


Limited engagement! Tickets on sale now!
More at http://www.gonzotheatre.org

Department Faculty receive annual Imagine Fund Awards

Congratulations to our faculty for these awards, which support for research in the arts, design, and the humanities:






Hakim Abderrezak, Literary and Cultural Representations of Western Mediterranean Migrations (Book)
Daniel Brewer, Partial Recall: Memory Spaces of the French Eighteenth Century (Book)
Bruno Chaouat, Response to Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust film Shoah (Presentation
Juliette Cherbuliez, The Medean Presence in Early Modern Literature (Book)
Mary Franklin-Brown, Discourses of Encyclopedism in the Scholastic Age / Aesthetics, Ideology, and the Invention of Romance (Book)
Betsy Kerr,A Corpus-based Study of Semantic Anglicisms in Contemporary Metropolitan French (Article)
Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinematic Affect in Literature and Philosophy (Book)