Notes From The Field - Prof. Sven-Erik Rose “Ethics in Collapse: The Warsaw Ghetto Writings of Yitskhok Bernshteyn”

Departments of German & Russian and Comparative Literature
Affiliated Faculty, Graduate Program in the Study of Religion

“Ethics in Collapse:  The Warsaw Ghetto Writings of Yitskhok Bernshteyn”

Descended from a renowned Hasidic family, Yitskhok Bernshteyn was born in Plotsk in 1900. An educator and author before the war, in the Warsaw ghetto he became a member of Emanuel Ringelblum’s underground team of documenters, writing a number of short prose texts in Yiddish for the Oyneg Shabes archive. Ranging from literary criticism to philosophical-theological meditations sometimes bordering on sermons to literary vignettes or prose poems, these writings constitute a significant corpus of ghetto writings that to date has received virtually no scholarly attention.

In this talk I analyze how Bernshteyn’s writings reflect, and reflect on, the changing status of ethics and moral judgement over a two-year period from autumn 1939 through late 1941. Bernshteyn’s persistent preoccupation with ethics allows us to follow an evolution from early confidence and optimism that reinvigorated ethical values could provide Jewish Warsaw an effective means of contending with the crisis initiated by the war to a vastly more dire situation in which the prerequisite of ethical judgment—that people in fact possess ethical agency—has fallen into horrific doubt.

Bernshteyn was killed in an “action” in the Warsaw ghetto in early 1943.

Lunch Served. All are welcome

Lunch is served at noon. Talk begins at 12:10