GTU Prof to Discuss Asch's 'Vengeance of God'

By Alexander Talcott | Monday, October 29, 2001

'They say the girls are something else on Broadway (on Broadway).' So begins the second verse of 'On Broadway' from Smokey Joe's Cafe. The girls of another Broadway show, 'God of Vengeance,' are something else, as those who attend an upcoming lecture by Naomi Seidman, an Assistant Professor of Jewish Culture at California's Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, will learn. The lecture is entitled 'Staging Tradition: Lesbianism and Torah in Sholem Asch's 'God of Vengeance.''

Seidman's lecture will take place on Tuesday, October 30, at 4:00 p.m. in Rockefeller 1. The event is being funded by a gift from Leon Black '73, and is being advertised by the Jewish Studies Program and the Women's Resource Center.

But who is Naomi Seidman and what is she talking about?

After earning her B.A. at Brooklyn College, Seidman went on for a M.A. from the University of California-Davis and a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley. She has been a core faculty member at the GTU since 1995, where she has recently taught courses in critical theory, myth, and modern Hebrew literature and the Midrashic imagination. Her research interests include translation and queer studies, and modern Yiddish literature. Some forthcoming publications are a chapter on modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature in Feminist Readings of Jewish Texts, an article on sexual transformation in Queer Studies and the Jewish Question, and a piece called 'The Erotics of Jewish Tradition' in Studies in Contemporary Judaism.

In the Introduction of her A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, Seidman begins with a quote by George Steiner: 'Eros and language mesh at every point. Intercourse and discourse, copula and copulation, the sub-classes of the dominant fact of communication...To speak and to make love is to enact a distinctive twofold universality...[T]ogether they construe the grammar of being.' However, in speaking on Asch's 'God of Vengeance,' Seidman will not need to dig deep to find eroticism.

Asch was a Yiddish novelist, dramatist, and essayist who lived from 1880 to 1957. Some of his most noted works were dramas performed on Russian, Polish, and German stages, the most widely known being the 1907 'God of Vengeance,' or 'Got fun Nekomeh.' Upon completing an early read-through of the play, Y.L. Peretz, Asch's mentor (who encouraged him to abandon writing in Hebrew) said, simply, "Burn it." A controversial play about a well-to-do brothel owner who discovers his daughter is in love with one of his prostitutes, an English language version premiered on Broadway in 1923. 'God of Vengeance' marked the first appearance of a lesbian relationship on Broadway. The producers and cast were jailed on obscenity charges after the first performance. Asch, defending his work, said, "I was not concerned whether I wrote a moral or immoral play. What I wanted was an artistic play and a true one.' The bulk of Asch's works are housed at Yale, where Seidman participated in an Asch conference last May and referred to Torah and lesbianism as the 'ambiguous muse' while delivering the same lecture she is to give Tuesday.

GTU Prof to Discuss Asch's 'Vengeance of God'

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