Book Launch - Naomi Seidman's "Translating the Jewish Freud: Psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish"

Panel featuring University of Toronto’s Rebecca Comay, Marsha Hewitt, and Miriam Schwartz. Remarks by Naomi Seidman (Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts, University of Toronto).

Naomi Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of five books, including, most recently, The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature (2016, winner of the Borsch-Rast Prize and Fania Levant Prize in Yiddish Studies from the Modern Language Association), Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (2019, Winner of a National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies), and Translating the Jewish Freud: Psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish (Stanford, 2024). Aside from the book prizes, she is the recipient of many major awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), an NEH Senior Scholar Fellowship at the Center for Jewish History (2016-2017), a SSHRC Insight Grant, two SSHRC Connections Grants, and a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant.  She also wrote a popular podcast on the experience of leaving Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox communities, Heretic in the House, Heretic in the House - Shalom Hartman Institute, which won a Signal Award in 2023. 

Book Description

There is an academic cottage industry on the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. This book takes a different approach, turning its gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to "touch" Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud's responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, "rescue," and connect with the famous Professor from Vienna.

About the panel

Rebecca Comay is professor of philosophy and comparative literature, a core member of the Literature and Critical Theory Program (Victoria College), and an associate member of the Germanic Languages and Literatures Department and the Centre for Jewish Studies.

Marsha Hewitt is a professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, and the Faculty of Divinity at Trinity College. She is a psychoanalyst. Professor Hewitt teaches courses in method and theory in the study of religion, Freud and critical theory, and psychoanalysis, culture and society. Professor Hewitt’s books include Critical Theory of Religion: A Feminist Analysis, Freud on Religion, Legacies of the Occult: Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Unconscious Communication. Some of her most recent published articles: “Freud and the Unconscious”, “Christian anti-Judaism and early Object Relations Theory”, and “Trance, Dreams, and Possession: A Comparative Psychoanalytic Study”.

Miriam Schwartz is a PhD candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the collaborative program with the Anne Tanenbaum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research explores the representation of speech in Jewish literature written in Yiddish and Hebrew during the first half of the twentieth century, in Eastern Europe, Israel, and North and South America. She focuses on issues of translation, orality, and ideology. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, Miriam earned her BA in Literature and MA in Yiddish Literature at Tel Aviv University.

Anna Shternshis is the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies in the Department for the Study of Religion and is the Director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. The author of several books, she has served as a visiting professor at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the President’s Impact Award at the University of Toronto.