Venice, the Jews, and Italian Culture: Historical Eras and Cultural Representations

FAIN: EH-50147-07

Regents of the University of California, Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA 95064-1077)
Murray Baumgarten (Project Director: March 2007 to July 2009)

A five-week institute for twenty-four college and university teachers in Venice on Jewish experience in the Venetian Ghetto, and its cultural, intellectual, and historical contexts.

This interdisciplinary institute explores the cultural, intellectual, and historic experience of Venetian Jewry. Our focus is the Ghetto of Venice, which gave its name to all such subsequent ethnic enclosures. We will explore, discuss and analyze the history of the Ghetto of Venice as built environment, cultural text and symbolic site. Our inquiry encompasses the literary, artistic and dramatic representations of Italian and Venetian Jews. The Institute will begin with the Renaissance, while emphasizing the modern experience of Venetian Jewry, a paradigmatic Italian Jewish community. The beneficiaries are college and university teachers in European culture, literature, art, and history, Holocaust studies, Italian studies and Jewish studies.