From Ashes to Ashes: Death in the Jewish Imagination

Tuition: $325 | YIVO members: $250**

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Maya Balakirsky Katz

Death is the definitive end. Though, in practical terms, death also defines life. But however real, death is also mythical, creating an imaginary experience for the living. Representations of immortality shape mortality. Death has thus inspired entire cultures around it. While death is constant, it is reimagined anew in every generation. And, while death is universal, Jewish culture has generated unique customs and images surrounding the passage of life. Jewish attitudes towards death provide an understudied lens for studying the construction of identity, selfhood, and collective memory across various periods of Jewish history. Artistic themes and visual practices surrounding the spectacle of death, necro-politics, celebrity funerals, and different modes of death (e.g., execution, suicide, martyrdom) reflect and indelibly mark Jewish history. 

This course is thematic. Each class explores the meanings of a broad range of artistic and functional objects, rituals and customs related to dying and death, such as the transition from family crypts to community cemeteries, the customs of preparation of the body and the grave, the advent of funerals, the rituals of mourning and commemoration, and artistic representations of the afterlife and the anticipation of the messianic rising of the dead.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Maya Balakirsky Katz is a psychoanalyst and an Associate Professor of Jewish Art at Bar-Ilan University. She is the author of the books The Visual Culture of Chabad (Cambridge, 2010), Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation (Rutgers, 2016), and Intersections between Jews and Media (Brill, 2020). She is co-editor, along with Steven Fine and Margaret Olin, of the journal Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture. Her forthcoming book Freud, Jung, and Jonah (Cambridge University Press, 2022) explores the exposition of religion during the founding years of the first psychoanalytic periodicals.

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