The 2026 Cytron Family Lecture Series in Jewish Studies
“Psychoanalysis for Diabetics: Freud in the Popular Jewish Press”
Naomi Seidman
University of Toronto
Tuesday, March 24
4:00pm
Memorial Union, Old Madison Room
800 Langdon St (Madison, WI)
Also available on Zoom – click here to register and receive the link.
The Austrian journalist Karl Kraus reportedly quipped, “Psychoanalysis is the disease of assimilated Jews; Eastern European Jews make do with diabetes.” And yet, Eastern European Jews were fascinated by Freud and psychoanalysis, flocking to lectures on the subject and following Freud’s life and career with curiosity and enthusiasm. This lecture will trace “the Freud craze” in the burgeoning Yiddish press of the interwar period, when readers eagerly sought information about “the most famous Jew in the world.”
Naomi Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts in the Department for the Study of Religion and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016, and a National Jewish Book Award in 2019. Her writings include the 2006 Faithful Renderings: Jewish—Christian Difference and the Politics of Difference, The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature (2016) and Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (2019). Her award-winning podcast, “Heretic in the House,” was released in 2022. Her fifth book, Translating the Jewish Freud: Psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish, was released in 2024.
