(no subject)

[rm]

I didn't really want to start working on it so soon, but here I am noodling on the proposal for Culture, Contamination and Collaboration: Jewish Identity in the World of Harry Potter

Comments

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

Don't forget to ponder the Wizarding version of the Hollerith census tabulation machine. Rounding people up with punch cards...

[rm.livejournal.com]

OH yes.

My three main things here are:
- the goblins
- the Ministry's dealings with half-bloods and muggle borns
- Severus Snape

It blows me away that despite my being such a non-practicing Jew (I mean we did Passover, Yom Kippur, Roshashanna and Yom Kippur in my home as a kid, but I don't read Hebrew, I never attended temple or any of that, and all of my Jewish family came to this country long long before the Holocaust), but yet so much of my Book 7 response was profoundly connected to my Jewishness, on a very primal level. And when I raise issues about Snape as the Jewish collaborator at cons people look at me like I have 5 heads, make me explain all sorts of crap to them they should already know and then spend the rest of the weekend telling me how moving I am -- clearly, the Jew paper must be written.

!

[lilchiva.livejournal.com]

There is a Kafka paper with a remarkably similar title

[newsbean.livejournal.com]

OMG. Yes, Please.

[newsbean.livejournal.com]

It must be!

[threewalls]

I'd be interested in reading this. Would you be intending this to be an essay posted somewhere online, or is it for a conference paper?

[phaenix-ash.livejournal.com]

oh my. yes. yes. and yes.

[rm.livejournal.com]

conference paper, for Terminus, but I'll be sharing it once it's post-conference

I'd been toying with the idea after Phoenix Rising, when I was at a panel where someone said somethign about how the other purebloods must not know Snape's blood status, and I disagreed and then launched into this digresion about Jews who worked at teh concentration camps, and peopel kept coming up to me about it ALL WEEKEND. Book 7 has given me way more material on this theme than I ever expected though.

[mizg.livejournal.com]

I once read an article about a woman who got her son, who had temporarily dropped out of his Jewish day school, to return by comparing it to being at Hogwarts. I can probably find the article if you want.