In Shaul Bassi's November 15th, 2019 article, "Waters Close Over Venice" – printed in the New York Times – we are reminded once again of the fragility of memory and of its material trace. Overlapping forces, both global and local, caused record-breaking floods to engulf the city in water: "The flooding is all but a natural catastrophe, caused by the indiscriminate tampering with an ecosystem nurtured by Venice for centuries, the impact of cruise ships, threatening new and intrusive excavations of the lagoon and the rapacious investment in tourism." The devastating effects of climate change are yet another dimension that our working group, The Venice Ghetto Collaboration, must now take into account as we consider how the space itself asks us to think about memory work. At the 2020 MSA, the research collaboration would like to consider the fragility and resilience of memory, the impact of rising waters, the possibility of poetry, and the imperative to function as guardians and stewards of memory – both rooted and global, static and travelling, archival and digital, in the 21st century. We echo Bassi's call in an interview with NPR on November 30th, 2019:"…we need to imagine what climate change is going to be like. And for that, you need the artist, you need the intellectual, you need the poets, you need philosophers, you need the historians."
The Venice Ghetto Collaboration is an interdisciplinary and mutually supportive working group of humanities scholars interested in a set of shared questions. Individually and as a group, we develop projects that examine both the specificity of the Venice Ghetto and the symbolic power of ghettos more generally. Our scholarship investigates the history, conditions, physical space, and lived experience of the Venice Ghetto, as well as broader questions about the legacy of the ghetto, how and why the ghetto became a paradigm, and how comparisons have been drawn between compulsory, segregated, and enclosed spaces in discourse, literature, and academic research.
The Ghetto organizes memory in multiple ways. The site itself urges us to think about time in a non-linear fashion: it is a touchstone for memory that is both rooted and global, both metaphorical and concrete. The Ghetto becomes a laboratory for thinking through how heritage sites "do" memory work. The physical place itself is key to Jewish Venetian memory where tangible traces of this vibrant past can be palpably experienced through monuments, archives, and museums. However, the space has also traveled in the realm of the imaginary – appearing as a literary image in novels and poetry across the globe. The original ghetto has served as the blueprint for other cities' efforts to think through issues of segregation and inclusion. Finally, the way in which this site travels changes again once we enter the realm of the digital: virtual tours, maps, and exhibits. We question: How do we resist conceptualizing the Ghetto as static and instead focus on its revitalization as a hub for global interchange?
