Stories of the limitlessly foolish Wise Men of Chelm are a staple of European and American Jewish literature. Dr. Ruth von Bernuth's new book How the Wise Men Got to Chelm provides a comprehensive survey of this Chelm literature and its Yiddish—and German—antecedents from the late Middle Ages through the Enlightenment and 19th-century nationalism. Please join us on Tuesday, January 17 at 7 PM as Dr. von Bernuth will discus how literary Chelm has enabled writers both to entertain and highlight a variety of societal problems, a function that it continues to fulfill to this day.

Pizza and Beer will be served.
The event is free but please register below if you plan to attend.
 

About Dr. Ruth von Bernuth
Since 2008, Dr. Ruth von Bernuth has taught Medieval and early modern German and Yiddish literature and culture in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is also the director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies. For a research project on Yiddish literature she was awarded a visiting fellowship in Jewish Studies from Yad Hanadiv and Beracha Foundation in Israel in 2011/12. In 2013 she was a Junior Fellow at Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald. Her second book, How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition, examines the multiple ways in which the Jewish story tradition of the “Wise Men of Chelm” came into being.