Evelyn Torton Beck

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Evelyn Torton Beck (born January 18, 1933 in Vienna ) is an American literary scholar , psychologist and emerita for women's studies at the University of Maryland . She published books and essays on Judaism and became known as the editor of the first anthology of lesbian Jews in the USA.

Life

Evelyn Torton Beck was born into a Jewish family in Vienna. Her father Max Torton was born in Butschatsch (1919–1939 Buczacz, Poland), her mother Irma, née Lichtmann, in Vienna. In 1938 the family had to leave their apartment and ended up in a ghetto . The father was arrested and deported to Dachau , then to the Buchenwald concentration camp , from which he was released under unknown circumstances. In 1939, when Evelyn was six years old, her parents fled to Italy with her and her younger brother Edgar and lived in Milan for a few months. Since the family only received four visas, their grandmother stayed behind in Vienna and was later deported and murdered by the National Socialists. In June 1940, the parents and Evelyn were able to travel to the USA on the last ship that left Italy with emigrants. Edgar survived the Holocaust and only emigrated to New York after the war.

Evelyn grew up in Brooklyn , New York. Her father, who had owned a small business in Vienna, worked in a relative's factory, where he met Yiddish- speaking compatriots from Eastern Europe. As a girl, she joined the HaSchomer HaTzair , a Zionist youth movement that was preparing to emigrate to Palestine . In an interview with Elisabeth Malleier in 2001 she said that the pioneering spirit, the community in the scout camps, the experience of belonging and a common goal had shaped her a lot, as well as that women and men did the same work.

In 1954 she married Anatole Beck and had two children with him: Nina Rachel (born 1955) and Micah Daniel (born 1958). In 1974 the couple divorced. A few years after the divorce she came out and lived with her partner, psychologist L. Lee Knefelkamp, ​​for many years.

Research and Teaching

Evelyn Torton Beck studied Comparative Literature at Brooklyn College and received her Masters in 1955 from Yale . With a dissertation on Franz Kafka and the influence of Yiddish theater on his work , she received her doctorate in 1969 at the University of Wisconsin , where she taught comparative literature, German and women's studies for a total of twelve years until 1984, as a professor from 1982. She found her way back to Judaism through dealing with Kafka. In 1972 she founded a section for Yiddish in the Modern Language Association . She introduced courses on Jewish subjects and writers, such as Scholem Alechem , into the curriculum and translated works by Isaac Bashevis Singer , with whom she worked, from Yiddish into English. She dealt with his thinking in various essays, such as in 1982 in The Many Faces of Eve: Women, Yiddish, and Isaac Bashevis Singer .

On campus , she openly confessed to being a Jew and a lesbian. In the Second Women's Movement in the United States, Evelyn Torton Beck was one of the first to advocate the integration of lesbians into Jewish circles and of Jewish women into feminist circles. She criticized that anti-Semitism was not taken seriously in either the feminist or the lesbian movement . In 1982 she gave Nice Jewish Girls. A Lesbian Anthology , in which lesbian Jewish women describe their painful encounters with anti-Semitism in society and among lesbian feminists, and at the same time testify to the pride and creative power of being Jewish.

In 1984 Evelyn Torton Beck was appointed to a professorship at the University of Maryland to set up the Institute for Women's Studies . She was also an associate member of the Faculty of Jewish Studies and Comparative Literature. In 2002 she retired.

For many years Evelyn Torton Beck collected material for a book on the subject of wounds of gender. Frida Kahlo and Franz Kafka (English for: wounds of the sex). For her second doctorate, which she in 2004 Clinical Psychology gained at Fielding Graduate Institute, she worked it an interdisciplinary dissertation titled Physical Illness, Psychological woundedness and the Healing Power of Art in the life and work of Franz Kafka and Frida Kahlo from , which was awarded the Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Award .

Evelyn Torton Beck was an active member of the B'not Esh ( Hebrew for: Daughters of Fire ), a group of women founded in the 1980s who wanted to renew Judaism with the knowledge of feminist theology and from their experiences as Jewish feminists and spiritual Ceremonies developed for women. She is on the editorial board of Bridges magazine, founded in 1990 . A Journal For Jewish Feminists and Our Friends .

Awards

  • 1994: Outstanding Woman of the Year Award from the University of Maryland
  • 1995: Distinguished Scholar / Teacher Award from the University of Maryland
  • 2004: Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Dissertation Award

Fonts (selection)

  • Kafka and the Yiddish Theater. Its Impact on his Work , University of Wisconsin Press, 1971 (dissertation)
  • Nice Jewish Girls. A Lesbian Anthology (ed.), Persephone Press, 1982. Reprinted: Beacon Press, Boston 1984 and 1989
  • Physical illness, psychological woundedness and the healing power of art in the life and work of Franz Kafka and Frida Kahlo , University of Wisconsin – Madison , 2004 (unpublished dissertation)

Book contributions

  • On being a pre-feminist feminist OR How I came to Women's Studies and what I did there , in: A. Ginsberg (Ed.): The Evolution of American Women's Studies. Reflections on Triumphs, Controversies, and Change , Palgrave Mcmillan, New York 2008, pp. 110-130
  • Frida Kahlo . in: B. Zimmerman (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Homosexuality , Second Edition, Volume I: Lesbian Histories and Cultures, Garland Publishing, New York 1999
  • Why Kafka? A Jewish Lesbian Feminist Asks? , in: R.Siegel & E. Cole (eds.): Patterns in Jewish Women's Lives. A Feminist Sampler, Haworth Press, New York 1997, pp. 187-200
  • Judaism, Feminism and Psychology. Making the Links Visible , in: K. Weiner, A. Moon (Eds.): Jewish Women Speak Out. Expanding the Boundaries of Psychology , Canopy Press, Seattle 1995
  • The Place of Jewish Experience in a Multicultural University Curriculum , Marla Brettschneider (Ed.): The Narrow Bridge. Jewish Perspectives on Multiculturalism , Rutgers University Press 1996, pp. 163-177

Essays

  • Kahlo's World Split Open , in: Feminist Studies , No. 32, 1/2006, pp. 54–83
  • The Many Faces of Eve: Women, Yiddish, and Isaac Bashevis Singer , in: Studies in American Jewish Literature No. 1/1981, pp. 112-123
  • LB. Singer's Misogyny , in: Lilith. The Jewish Women's Magazine, Spring 1980

literature

  • Claudia Wurzinger: Torton Beck, Evelyn. In: Brigitta Keintzel, Ilse Korotin (ed.): Scientists in and from Austria. Life - work - work. Böhlau, Wien et al. 2002, ISBN 3-205-99467-1 , pp. 754-756.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d e Liora Moriel: Evelyn Torton Beck (b. 1933) in: Jewish Women's Archive
  2. ↑ a b c Elisabeth Malleier: Nice Jewish Girls. Interview with Evelyn Torton Beck , Hagalil, June 13, 2001
  3. ↑ Joyce Antler: Radical Feminism and Jewish Women , in: Hasia R. Diner, Shira M. Kohn, Rachel Kranson: A Jewish Feminine Mystique? Jewish Women in Postwar America , Rutgers University Press 2010, ISBN 978-0-8135-4792-3 , pp. 227-228
  4. ↑ Jeffrey S. Gurock: American Jewish Life, 1920-1990. American Jewish History , Routledge 1997, ISBN 978-0-415-91925-8 , p. 16
  5. ↑ Martha A. Ackelsberg: Spirituality, Community, and Politics: B'not Esh and the Feminist Reconstruction of Judaism , in: Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 2, No. 2/1986, pp. 109-120. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25002046
personal data
SURNAME Torton Beck, Evelyn
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American literary scholar
DATE OF BIRTH January 18, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna