“We wish there was something like this where we were.”
So artists and scholars of Jewish art have been saying to Douglas Rosenberg, founding director of the Conney Project on Jewish Arts at the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As he told The Chronicle in a Feb. 18 telephone interview, these artists and scholars were talking about the Conney Conference on Jewish Arts, which has been held every two years at UW-Madison.
The project, founded in 2005 via a gift from Babe and Marv Conney, will celebrate its tenth year at the coming conference, scheduled for March 24-26. But this conference is going to be different from past ones in many ways.
For one, it won’t be at UW-Madison, but at the University of Southern California, located in Los Angeles.
This is the outcome of a suggested collaboration with Rosenberg by Ruth Weisberg, founder of the USC Roski School of Art and Design and of the USC Initiatives for Israeli Arts and Humanities, which is co-sponsoring the conference.
“So we have access to people who might not otherwise come to the Midwest, especially in winter or when it’s cold,” Rosenberg said.
For example, one of the scheduled keynote speakers — there will be two — is Janice Ross, a dance historian from Stanford University, which is “right up the street from USC,” Rosenberg said.
But there’s another unusual thing about this conference, especially given recent news events. The theme is “Jewish/American/Israeli: Intertwined Identities in the Contemporary Arts and Humanities.”
That means this conference is going to a great extent to be about Israel and Israeli Jewish art and artists — and this at a time when much anti-Israel agitation is happening on many U.S. college/university campuses, particularly in California.
Nevertheless, this seemed like a good time to hold such a conference, said Rosenberg.
“We’ve never really done a focus on Israel, and to tell you the truth, people have often asked, ‘What about Israel?’” Rosenberg said.
And then, collaborator Weisberg’s Initiatives for Israeli Arts and Humanities has been “looking at the relationship between American Jewish artists and Jewish artists in Israel,” he said.
So, “it seemed like a good time to go in that direction and try that out,” Rosenberg said. “And I can tell you that the response to the idea has been pretty big, and we have a lot of people giving presentations on that topic, and we have a number of scholars coming from Israel to participate. It’s resonating very well.”
One of the participating Israelis will be the second keynote speaker, artist Andi Arnowitz “who makes work about Jewish identity [that] addresses difficult themes related to Jewish theology and such,” Rosenberg said.
In fact, Rosenberg continued, “We really have probably the broadest spread of people across the arts this year than we’ve ever had,” including theater, literature and film as well as dance and visual art.
As for the possibility of anti-Israel happenings, Rosenberg said, “It hasn’t been an issue, and I hope it won’t be an issue.”
“This is a group that wants to talk about art and the relationship between art and Jewish culture,” said Rosenberg, himself a professor of art at UW-Madison and a filmmaker.
The Conney Project’s mission “has always been to talk about art. That’s the thing we focus on and as far as I’m concerned, that’s the thing we’re going to continue to focus on,” he said.
As in past years, the talks and activities will be recorded and photographed, with the results appearing online, “not right away, but a short time later,” Rosenberg said.
For additional information about the conference, visit JewishStudies.Wisc.edu.
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