Meet Our Recent Visiting Faculty: Brett Kaplan and Jackie Feldman
Profiles written by Alana Goldman, ’24, the Center’s Lori and Eric Sklut Undergraduate Intern for 2023-24.
Brett Ashley Kaplan
2023-2024 Keohane Distinguished Professor
The Keohane Distinguished Professorship brings prominent faculty to serve as visiting professors at UNC and Duke for a one-year period. This program is managed by the provost offices at both campuses, last year in collaboration with the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies and the Duke Center for Jewish Studies. The Center is very thankful for the opportunity to have helped host the Keohane Distinguished Professor. In addition to giving three community lectures, Brett Ashley Kaplan was a guest speaker at several Jewish studies classes, co-hosted two Emerging Scholars talks with our students, led a career development conversation with grad students, met with colleagues at Ackland Museum of Art and NC Museum of Art, and had dozens of student and faculty meetings.
Professor Brett Ashley Kaplan was at lunch with a close friend, telling him about the novel she was working on and a problem she had come across.
“You know, these whales are trying to communicate with humans, and they’re so frustrated because the humans are not listening,” Kaplan said.
Without missing a beat her friend replied, “Well they’re speaking Yiddish of course.”
Such became the basis of Kaplan’s first novel, Rare Stuff, published in 2022. The novel is a multimedia braided narrative about loss and belonging, climate conservationism, a quest to find a missing person, and Yiddish-speaking whales.
Aside from novels, Kaplan has written many scholarly works regarding the convergences of memory, the Holocaust and race. She was drawn to this field after a seminar in graduate school on Holocaust representation left her with enduring questions on how to solve such an unsolvable problem. After studying race and Jewish literature in Philip Roth’s novels, Kaplan became interested in the convergences between Blackness and Jewishness in contemporary cultural products. She is currently co-editing an anthology of contemporary Black Jewish voices.
Kaplan decided to write novels because they have the capacity to reach a wider audience than that of scholarly works. Fiction allows her to explore the emotional content of her research and draw people in, encouraging her readers to understand things in a way that scholarship, with its lack of emotional pull, cannot.
Her current novel, Vandervelde Downs, was the subject of her lectures as the 2023-2024 Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor. It follows Poppy Solomon, the daughter of a Kindertransport survivor, who becomes drawn into the search for a Velazquez portrait that was looted from her mother’s family during the Holocaust.
Kaplan loves that anything can happen in fiction, and enjoys constructing these events that are totally unreal but technically possible. For example, the Velazquez painting in Vandervelde Downs is real. There is a big gap in the provenance, meaning that “if no one knows where this painting was, all kinds of things could’ve happened to it,” Kaplan said. It technically could’ve been looted by Nazis, which is investigated in the novel.
Through her work in Vandervelde Downs, Kaplan experiments with putting different moments of displacement, refugeeism, and migration into conversation with each other, which enables us to see how experiences often treated separately can converge.
Professor Brett Ashley Kaplan strives to construct imaginative universes that readers can engage with and expand our horizons. Her unique combination of fiction and scholarly research casts a wide net to open up possibilities for cross-cultural intersections and understanding.
Brett Ashley Kaplan received her Ph.D. from the rhetoric department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 and is now a professor and Conrad Humanities Scholar in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies.
Jackie Feldman
Jackie Feldman was a visiting professor in fall 2023, sponsored by the Israel Institute, and taught a course on tourism in the Holy Land. Feldman also led academic seminars and participated in the Center’s programming. He is an associate professor of anthropology at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, where he also heads the Rabb Center for Holocaust Studies. He holds a Ph.D. from Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Visiting Professor Jackie Feldman’s research focuses on the intersections of tourism, identity, and memory, with a focus on Israel and Holocaust memorial sites. His fall 2023 course at Carolina, “Israel, Palestine, Holy Land: Tourism Imaginaries and Practices,” aimed to understand the complexities of Israeli society through the lens of tourism.
Feldman first became interested in tourism through his own experiences as a tourist in Israel, and later as a licensed tour guide. He was fascinated by the ways in which tourism can change a person’s identity and alter their life choices. Feldman says the experience of the tourist is “to be there but not to belong; to know one can go elsewhere.”
Feldman’s most recent book, A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land: How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli, analyzes his experiences as a Jewish Israeli guiding Christian pilgrims and working for a Palestinian company. Many of his clients had never met a Jew or traveled abroad before. Feldman seeks to answer the questions of how to negotiate and present Israel and Judaism to many different publics and how it affects the person who is presenting. As a tour guide, Feldman’s role was to bring to life the Bible his tourists had spent their lives reading, and he had to know how to pick the right sites, work within their expectations, and translate in a way that made sense to them.
Feldman is currently working on a project titled, “From the Era of the Witness to Digital Remembrance: New Media, Holocaust Sites and Changing Memory Practices.” It examines the phenomenon of Jewish and Israeli trips to Poland. Originally intended to bear witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust and Auschwitz, these trips have changed in the 21st century. Most of the survivors that used to accompany these groups have passed on or are now too old, and the advent of mobile phones and social media means tourists have already heard the stories and seen the pictures before visiting Auschwitz. Feldman seeks to answer the questions of what it means to say “I was there” without living witnesses to say it, and what it means to visit the site with intentions other than for commemoration.