Conference I wish I had known about.....

I just found out that this symposium -- on "Jews, Indians and the Western World Order"  took place Sunday at Columbia University in New York. Some of it sounds a tad, uh, academic -- but it certainly focuses on a lot of issues that I have been investigating. There are links to the papers at the conference web site, and I look forward to reading them.

The topics under discussion included:

In what ways are Jews and Native Americans similarly and differently “Other” to “the West”?
What has been the shape of historical interactions between Native Americans and Jews?
Do Jews and Native Americans share a relationship of particular significance?

Speakers and papers included:

Jonathan Boyarin --Trickster's Children: Paul Radin, Stanley Diamond and Filiation in Anthropology

Christopher Bracken -- If Indians were Jews: William Apess's Concept of Right

Sarah Casteel -- Sephardism and Marranism in Native American Fiction of the Quincentenary: Dorris and Erdrich's The Crown of Columbus and Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus

Christian Cwik -- Sephardic Networks and the Guajira Peninsula Contraband in the 17th Century

Jennifer Glaser -- Sovereignty, Diaspora, and the Indigene in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

James Hatley -- Naming Adam Naming Coyote

Nimachia Hernandez --  “Coming Home in America: Native American and Jewish Participation in the Making of a National Narrative”

Noah G. Hoffman -- “Rothko with Reservations”

Stephen Katz -- A One-Sided Dialogue: E. E. Lisitzky’s Indian Poems

David Koffman -- Violence, Native Americans and the Winning of the Jewish West

Jack Kugelmass -- A Yiddish Traveler in Peru

Alan Mintz -- Three Constructions of the Native American in American Hebrew Poetry

Akim D. Reinhardt -- Contested and Overlapping Notions of Indigenousness Among Jews and Indians

Michael Rom “I Have Good Friends Amongst the Jews”: Louis Riel and the Chosen People

Rachel Rubinstein Tribes Lost and Found: Mestizaje and the Jewish Question

Zalman Schachter Shalomi For the Dialogue with Native Americans

David Seidenberg The Kabbalah of the Sweatlodge