The Frankel Center Event Theme for 2024-25 is “IL/Legalities: Law and Legal Thinking in Jewish Histories and Cultures." Through this series of talks that included Paula Fredriksen, Marc Dollinger, and Tamar Menashe, we explored the intersections of Jewish Studies and other scholarly fields, including comparative legal studies, legal history, legal anthropology, post-colonial theory, and critical race theory. We questioned how these phenomena impacted the study of Jewish legal traditions, and what novel challenges—and perhaps opportunities—do they present for scholars within Jewish Studies?
On Wednesday, November 6, the Frankel Center brought to The Ark in Ann Arbor a lecture/concert entitled “Wild Burning Rage and Song: Replies to Scottsboro.”
The Scottsboro Trials stand as one of the most renowned miscarriages of justice in the history of America. Beginning in 1931 with a false accusation of rape against nine Black teenagers, the case went on to invigorate a nascent Civil Rights movement, earned the support of the Communist Party, and establish itself as a watchword among various strands of the American Left. These events inspired reaction from the contemporary world of arts and letters, most famously by the African American poets Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, as well as by the novelist Harper Lee. The Yiddish American intelligentsia of the 1930s also produced a body of creative response, including many poems that passionately took up the themes of the trial, juxtaposing its American injustices with a diversity of images, tropes and language imbued with their own distinct histories of oppression..
The concert/lecture is a collaboration between Professor Amelia Glaser (UC San Diego), the author of the award-winning book Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard University Press, 2020) and three accomplished musicians with extensive knowledge of Jewish and African American Music. In her research, Glaser discovered Yiddish poems about the Scottsboro Trails, which she also translated into English. She them collaborated with composer, pianist, and scholar Uri Schreter, and composers/vocalists Heather Klein and Anthony Russel to bring both Yiddish and African American poems about Scottsboro into new life on the stage.
While Glaser explained the historical and literary context of the poem, the musicians preformed them in a combination of Yiddish and English, with transliterations and translations displayed on a screen. Some of the poems featured were “The Negro Dies” by Berish Vaynshteyn and “God’s Black Lamb” by Malka Lee, along with “I Have Seen Black Hands” by African American writer Richard Wright.It was a fascinating and deeply moving event that delved into the mixed Christian and Jewish images prominent in many of the poems, as well as the Jewish and African American musical styles of the period. The event highlighted the role of poetry and music in exploring complex historical events in powerful and moving ways that also resonated strongly with many questions we are facing today
