Devora Neumark will be participating in the upcoming RAIQ conference Arts Interdisciplinaires: Hi-Tech, Lo-Tech, No-Tech? (May 28 and 29, 2010) at the MAI (www.raiq.ca). Her talk, which begins at 15h15 on Friday the 28th, is called The Jewish Home Beautiful: A Case Study in Interdisciplinarity.

Working with ‘The Jewish Home Beautiful’ community play as a critical case study, Devora will examine the ambivalent status of both beauty and home in identity politics. Her analysis will necessarily be interdisciplinary and intercultural as ‘The Jewish Home Beautiful’ – first written in the 1930s and performed on occasion by North American Jewish congregations ever since – was committed as much to the affirmation of beauty as to the affirmation of home and thus straddled the worlds of aesthetics, religion and politics; strengthening intracultural alliances amongst different Jewish communities, but resulting in a disastrous lingering impact on the non-Jewish people of Palestine.

Devora Neumark is an artist-in-residence at matralab.