Public Lecture, Trinity College Dublin
Bryan Cheyette, “From the Venice Ghetto to Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem’ and beyond”
A lecture as part of the Aspects of the Irish Jewish Experience seminar series.
Please register here.
‘Little Jerusalem’, based within the South Circular and Portobello neighbourhood of Dublin, including Lower Clanbrassil Street, is often thought of as a ghetto. Bryan Cheyette’s maternal Irish-Jewish family, raised in Leixlip and educated in Dublin, were outsiders when it came to Little Jerusalem. What does it mean to call this area, housing Jewish migrants mainly from Lithuania, a ghetto? Why do Irish people still cling to the idea of Little Jerusalem as a ghetto just as Americans do in relation to the Lower East Side of New York, and British people do in relation to the East End of London?
To help answer these questions, Prof. Cheyette will trace the word ghetto—as both place and concept— across Jewish history. It will begin with three hundred years of ghettoization on the Italian peninsula, followed by the nineteenth-century imaginary ghetto; the urban ghetto, which includes Little Jerusalem; the Nazi genocide of Jews in Europe; and black ghettos in America’s northern cities. It will end with the “global ghetto” or slums, townships and favelas in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.
About the speaker:
Bryan Cheyette began his career as a specialist on James Joyce publishing in the Joyce Studies annual. He notes that Leopold Bloom’s boyhood home is most often thought of as 52 Clanbrassil Street. Cheyette has subsequently authored or edited twelve books and still writes on Joyce. He is currently working on a brief history of Testimony, which will complement his The Ghetto: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020).