Guest Lecture Klara Stephanie Szlezák (University of Passau)

Visualizing Jews in the Early 20th-Century United States

Besides the fact that both are early twentieth-century, non-fiction publications, little seems to
connect Hutchins Hapgood’s book The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902), a detailed portrait of New York’s
Yiddish Lower East Side, and Maurice Fishberg’s book The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment
(1911), a comparative scientific study of the global Jewish diaspora. They vastly differ in their
context of origin, their style, their purpose and intent, their target audience, and their circulation.
And yet, what the two publications strikingly have in common is the integration of visual materials
into the verbal text.
Rather than aiming at a full-fledged comparative approach, this paper seeks to juxtapose the
two books in order explore the usage of visual materials in their respective inquiry into and
depiction of Jewry and Jewish life. Both books, upon their first publication, interspersed their verbal
texts with numerous illustrations. This paper addresses the issues raised by the verbal-visual
interaction in these works, contextualizing and assessing the significance of the usage of visual
materials, and attempts to trace the possible reasons for and effects of the aesthetic and intellectual
choices.

Biographical Note:

After earning her M.A. and doctoral degree in American Studies at Regensburg University, Klara
Stephanie Szlezák is currently a post-doctoral lecturer and researcher at Passau University,
Germany. Her first monograph, “Canonized in History”: Literary Tourism and 19th-Century Writers’ Houses
in New England, and her first co-edited essay collection, Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen,
appeared in 2015. She has since taken up work on her next project, which revolves around the
intersections between photography and Jewish life in the early 20th-century United States.

This lecture is organized by the Department of American Studies in cooperation with Centre for Intermediality Studies (CIMIG) and Centre for Jewish Studies (CJS).

Katharina Fackler

Postdoctoral University Assistant
Department of American Studies
University of Graz
Attemsgasse 25/II
8010 Graz, Austria

Fon: +43 (0)316 380 - 8146
Fax: +43 (0)316 380 - 9768

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