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The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History
With the rise of digital media, the "death of the book” has been widely discussed. But the physical object of the book persists. In her new book, The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History, through the lens of materiality and objects, Barbara E. Mann tells a history of modern Jewish literature, from novels and poetry to graphic novels and artists’ books. Bringing contemporary work on secularism and design in conversation with literary history, she offers a new and distinctive frame for understanding how literary genres emerge. Join YIVO for a discussion exploring this new publication with Mann in conversation with literary and cultural historian Justin Cammy.
Event streamed live on May 4, 2023.
Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature
Spanning the last two centuries, Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature by Anna Elena Torres combines archival research on the radical press and close readings of Yiddish poetry to offer an original literary study of the Jewish anarchist movement. Torres examines Yiddish anarchist aesthetics from the nineteenth-century Russian proletarian immigrant poets through the modernist avant-gardes of Warsaw, Chicago, and London to contemporary antifascist composers. The book also traces Jewish anarchist strategies for negotiating surveillance, censorship, detention, and deportation, revealing the connection between Yiddish modernism and struggles for free speech, women’s bodily autonomy, and the transnational circulation of avant-garde literature. Rather than focusing on narratives of assimilation, Torres intervenes in earlier models of Jewish literature by centering refugee critique of the border. Jewish deportees, immigrants, and refugees opposed citizenship as the primary guarantor of human rights. Instead, they cultivated stateless imaginations, elaborated through literature. Join YIVO for a discussion with Torres about this new book, led by scholar Amelia Glaser.
Co-sponsored by The Tamiment Library at NYU and the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA).
Event streamed live on on Feb 12, 2024.
Jewish Children's Literature in Russian and Yiddish | YIVO and the Bodleian Library
Scholars, archivists, and curators explore the rich world of Jewish children’s literature in pre-WWII Europe. This webinar outlines the contours of this body of work and discusses its features through the collections of the Bodleian Library and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Scholar Miriam Udel (Emory) speaks about children's literature written in Yiddish which flourished in the early 20th century as a variety of new Yiddish language school systems educated a generation of Jewish children in Yiddish. Scholar Catriona Kelly (Oxford) presents work by important Russian Jewish authors and illustrators in the Bodleian Library’s Opie Collection, including Samuil Marshak, Natalia Sats, Nina Simonovich-Efimova, and David Shterenberg. YIVO's Director of Archives Stefanie Halpern and the Bodleian's Curator César Merchan-Hamann will also join the program, showing colorful and handsomely illustrated examples from the two collections.
The Rise of David Levinsky : Realism, Sex, and Capital
This is an audio recording of a lecture presented in 2011 by YIVO. Speaker Eitan Kensky, then of Harvard University, presents a paper that looks at Abraham Cahan’s 1917 novel within the context of Yiddish and American realism. Cahan’s novel presents a knotty intertwining of clothes, sex, and capitalism that can only be unpacked by understanding the nuances of his literary thought.
I.L. Peretz Yiddish Writers' Union Records (RG 701)
The I.L. Peretz Yiddish Writers’ Union (YWU), also sometimes called the Jewish Writers’ Union, was founded in New York in 1915 as a labor and mutual aid organization for Yiddish journalists. Its first president was Hillel Rogoff, of the Forverts, and its first secretary was Joseph Margoshes, of the Tog. The Union represented all Yiddish writers and journalists at the three major New York City Yiddish papers, the Tog, Morgn Zhurnal and the Forverts. This collection contains the minutes, correspondence and financial records of the YWU from its founding in 1915 until 1973. Among the correspondence is a fair amount concerning the Fund for Jewish Refugee Writers, unions and union grievances, requests for aid from Jewish writers and activists in New York and abroad, and labor disputes and strikes.