Deviant Yeshiva: Wayward reflections for our times

The Deviant Yeshiva explores ideas, texts, and philosophy. Sessions are in-person in the Netherlands and, sometimes, online as well.

This edition of the Deviant Yeshiva is situated within the framework of the Asterisk* and presented in collaboration with -1 (Minus One) and Oy Vey.

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Reflect on a web of correspondences

Guided by researcher Yonathan Busquila Listik and artist Hannah Dawn Henderson, this edition of the Deviant Yeshiva will examine archival items from the National Collection of Architecture and Urban Planning through the prism of Jacque Derrida’s Archive Fever. Drawing influence from the accumulative and often ‘hyperlinking’ conversations of the Bavli (a codex of Jewish folkloric and legal debates based on oral traditions, compiled in Mesopotamia c. 3rd – 6th CE), this session invites participants to dwell and reflect on a web of correspondences, departing from two personal letters housed in the collections of Abraham Elzas (1907 – 1995) and Joël Meijer de Casseres (1902 – 1990).

We welcome you to meander, to speculate, to question

Selected by Busquilia Listik and Henderson during archival explorations, the letters allude to the social and political climate in the Netherlands during the period leading up to and the decades following the Shoah (Holocaust). In particular, ruptures in critical and empathic understanding are rendered palpable by what is both said and left unsaid.

The dynamics of collective memory

The session aims to reflect on the significance of absence, debt and trauma in national archives, and the lasting sociological impact of these dynamics on collective memory, concepts of (national) identity and heritage. Further, we will explore how we may be interlocutors with archival items that are often seen as peripheral within an individual’s professional collection.

Inspired by the pedagogical grammar of a yeshiva, the Deviant Yeshiva eschews the typical mechanisms of debate. Rather than simplified narratives, the Deviant Yeshiva’s desired destinations are that of question marks and all other forms of doubtful punctuation that embrace aporia.

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