May 20, 2005
Milestones
Riding
High
The MHC riding teams have once again finished the year with a bang.
Both the dressage and the huntseat equitation teams took home reserve
championship honors
from their national competitions. The dressage team lost its bid to extend
its three-year national championship streak by one point to the
host team Lake Erie
College. The huntseat team finished four points behind defending champion Virginia
Intermont College. The team has competed at nationals seven of the past nine
years, and won the championship in 2000. In individual competition, huntseat
rider Kyla Makhloghi ’06 walked away as the National Open Flat Champion
and was reserve champion in the prestigious Cacchione Cup class, comprising
the top 28 riders in the country.
Haunted
July
English professor Donald Weber’s Haunted in the New World: Jewish American
Culture from Cahan to “The Goldbergs” is due out this July. According
to the book’s publisher, Indiana University Press, “Drawing on scholarship
in a range of disciplines, including the sociology of manners, the study of the
role of foodways in the formation of ethnic identity, the psychoanalysis of shame
and self-hatred, and the role of memory for those unsettled by the experience
of migration, Donald Weber traces the impact of the tension between nostalgia
for the world left behind and the desire to blend into American culture, as evidenced
in a number of key texts in the canon of Jewish American expression. These range
from early immigrant fiction and cinema, through the novels of Anzia Yezierska
and Henry Roth, to Hollywood's representation of Jews in The Jazz Singer and
Gentleman's Agreement, to Saul Bellow, Gertrude Berg (Molly Goldberg), and the
comedians Milton Berle, and Mickey Katz.” Calling the book “capacious
and startlingly original,” James E. Young, professor of English and Judaic
studies at UMass/Amherst, observed, “Donald Weber’s Haunted in
the
New World is the wisest, most sophisticated exploration of Jewish American culture
in all of its rich diversity to appear in the last 30 years. It sets a new benchmark
for Jewish American literary and cultural criticism.”
Faculty
Retirements
his June marks celebrations of retirement for two faculty: Tadanori
Yamashita, professor of religion, and Sharon Crow, professor
of physical education and athletics. The MHC board of trustees
voted to grant both emeritus status at their May 6–7 meeting.
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