Jews, whores, and mothers will be on the agenda when Dr. Ruth Panofsky of Ryerson University comes to speak on Thursday, February 15th at 4:30. Her lecture to Concordia University students is titled, “This was her punishment: Jew, Whore, Mother in the Fiction of Adele Wiseman and Lillian Nattel.”
According to the announcement from the Concordia Institue for Canadian Jewish Studies:

Miriam Waddington’s 1942 poem “The Bond” characterizes a “Jewish whore” as “twice outcast”, “twice isolate”. As “Jewess” and as whore, the woman who forms the locus of Waddington’s poem is positioned at the margins of Canadian society. Ostracized for being a Jew - she experiences anti-Semitism on Toronto’s Jarvis Street where she works during the 1940s - she is condemned to further isolation for her crime of prostitution and suffers alienation. In fact, as historian of medicine Lara Marks confirms, the Jewish prostitute faced “a triple oppression - as a woman, as a Jew and as a member of the Jewish working-class” - and she “symbolized the tenuous position and vulnerability of Jewish women as a whole”. A rare enough figure in Canadian literature, the Jewish prostitute reappears in the fiction of Adele Wiseman and Lilian Nattel, with an important difference: she is also a mother. Through a study of two novels, Wiseman’s Crackpot (1974) and Nattel’s The Singing Fire (2004), this talk considers the punishing cost to Jewish prostitutes who dare to become mothers.

The lecture will take place in the EV Building, 001-605.