Guest lecturer Naomi Seidman will take us inside  “the Freud craze” to explore the impact Freud’s work had on Eastern European Jews.

About the event

The Austrian journalist Karl Kraus reportedly quipped, “Psychoanalysis is the disease of assimilated Jews; Eastern European Jews make do with diabetes.” And yet, Eastern European Jews were fascinated by Freud and psychoanalysis, flocking to lectures on the subject and following Freud’s life and career with curiosity and enthusiasm. This lecture will trace “the Freud craze” in the burgeoning Hebrew and Yiddish press of the interwar period, when readers eagerly sought information about “the most famous Jew in the world,” and journalists and others were compelled to actively translate psychoanalytic terminology from German into Jewish languages.

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Photo credit: Nancy Rosenblum/Frisco Graphics

About the speaker

Naomi Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016, and a National Jewish Book Award in 2019. Her writings include the 2006 Faithful Renderings: Jewish—Christian Difference and the Politics of Difference, The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature (2016) and the 2019 Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition. Her podcast, “Heretic in the House,” was released in 2022. Translating the Jewish Freud (2024) is her fifth book.

This event is co-sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities Translation Studies Hub