2/19 Translating Freud: Psychoanalysis in the Popular Jewish Press with Naomi Seidman
Wednesday, February 19, 2025, 4:30 pm PST - 6:00 pm PST
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.
Photo credit: Nancy Rosenblum/Frisco Graphics
About the speaker
Professor Seidman is the Jackman Humanities Professor at the University of Toronto, in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. 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. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Seidman is presently completing a study of the Hebrew and Yiddish translations of Freud’s writings during his lifetime. Her podcast on leaving the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world, Heretic in the House, was recently released by the Shalom Hartman Institute.
This event is co-sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities Translation Studies Hub