Eli Rosenblatt

This dissertation argues for a new model of continuity-offered by the Jewish travel narrative form-to explain the appearance of race and racism in the literary history of Ashkenazi Jews. The ascendance of emigration in its heyday invigorated a new social order that derived its legitimacy from entirely different ways of conceptualizing Jewish identity-from a structured, territorialized Yiddishkayt of rabbinic authority, ritual observance, and the vernacular to a more ethereal Ashkenazi individuality embedded in the colonial and racial contingencies of the Atlantic world.

This dissertation argues for a new model of continuity - offered by the Jewish travel narrative form - to explain the appearance of race and racism in the literary history of Ashkenazi Jews. The ascendance of emigration in its heyday invigorated a new social order that derived its legitimacy from entirely different ways of conceptualizing Jewish identity - from a structured, territorialized Yiddishkay t of rabbinic authority, ritual observance, and the vernacular to a more ethereal Ashkenazi individuality embedded in the colonial and racial contingencies of the Atlantic world.The first part of this study examines the first Yiddish adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Vilna,1868), retitled Slavery or Serfdom, by Isaac Meir Dik. I show how the author’s rereading of rabbinic slave laws transformed Stowe’s sentimental novel of Christian abolitionism into a travel report about the ethical superiority of Jewish over Christian slaveholding practices, and thus the socio-political benefit of Jewish emigration to the United States. During the 19th century Yiddish, in contrast to Hebrew, offered a stylistically pliant medium for Atlantic and racial language to be disseminated to all segments of Jewish society. The second part of the dissertation traces the development of Lithuanian Yiddish in Southern Africa in triangulated contexts of race, travel and intertextuality. I focus on the development of Yiddish literary modernism, which first appears in the midst of the South African War (1898-1902) and culminates in the reappearance of Yiddish as a language of white resistance in the Apartheid era. I analyze biblical and rabbinic intertextuality in the Yiddish literature of Southern Africa, including in texts narrated from the point of view of black Africans.By reassessing the travel form, I argue that the literature of “Black-Jewish Relations” ought not to be understood as the objective assessment of interracial contact between Jews and African-Americans, but rather an imagined and imaginative construct, internal to modern Jewish literature and culture, and rooted in the global dynamics of Jewish modernization

William Melvin Kelley, the experimental novelist and filmmaker—who mastered and reinvented a kind of midcentury literary style crafted from a colorful array of language and perspectives—died in Manhattan on February 1, 2017, at the age of 79. For the past three decades, Kelley taught fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, where I enrolled in his seminar. We struck up a long dialogue about Jewish and African American literature and culture.

Which Yiddish past ought to inform contemporary Jewish values? This is the question Amelia M. Glaser sets out to answer in her intricate study of selected “Yiddish poetry of struggle” published in the 1930s in Communist-aligned periodicals. Glaser argues that these poems, borne out of solidarity with the global proletariat, make their non-Jewish subjects “metaphorically Jewish” through the use of “passwords” situated within Yiddish discourse—for instance, kateyger (“accusing angel”) to characterize the prosecutor of an accused Italian anarchist. For Glaser, formally complex techniques to admit non-Jewish “Others” into a Jewish fold constitute both a literary act of moral resistance against the ruling classes, and a positive expression of Jewish identity. Divided into six chapters, the book offers analyses of Yiddish poems that express solidarity with the executed anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, Palestinian Arabs in Mandate-era Hebron, massacred Chinese workers, lynched African-Americ...

This article examines the context and content of the 1936 Soviet Yiddish publication of Neger-Dikhtung in Amerike, which remains to this day the most extensive anthology of African-Diasporic poetry in Yiddish translation. The collection included a critical introduction and translations of nearly one hundred individual poems by twenty-nine poets, both men and women, from across the United States and the Caribbean. This article examines the anthology's position amongst different notions of “the folk” in Soviet Yiddish folkloristics and the relationship of these ideas to Yiddish-language discourse about race and racism, the writings of James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois, with whom Magidoff corresponded, and the Yiddish modernist poetry of Shmuel Halkin, who edited the book series in which the anthology appears. When placed alongside Du Bois's and others’ visits to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the appearance of African-American and Caribbean poetry in Yiddish translation ...

In this paper I argue that the "Revival" of Jewish Life is Poland is Janus-faced, resulting in the politically fraught circulation of both nationalist and internationalist narratives of Polish-Jewish cultural symbiosis. These narratives are based in widely divergent readings of Jewish, Yiddish and Polish literary and cultural sources.

William Melvin Kelley, the experimental novelist and filmmaker—who mastered and reinvented a kind of midcentury literary style crafted from a colorful array of language and perspectives—died in Manhattan on February 1, 2017, at the age of 79. For the past three decades, Kelley taught fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, where I enrolled in his seminar. We struck up a long dialogue about Jewish and African American literature and culture.

A list of bibliographic materials printed in the Yiddish language in California. This resource complements the collection of Western Americana Yiddish Imprints at The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. The Western Americana Yiddish Imprints collection includes over 80 titles, some of which are not yet found in WorldCat. The forthcoming catalog of these titles will enhance the knowledge of Yiddish cultural life in the Western United States during the 20th century.

Exhibition Website:  http://www.magnes.org/visit/exhibitions-programs/exhibitions/literary-minds

In 2014, The Magnes acquired twelve works by the New York Times-featured Ukrainian artist, Matvey Vaisberg, including the portraits of eight Russian Jewish authors.

Several of the authors portrayed by Vaisberg were Yiddish writers murdered by the Soviet regime on August 12, 1952: Itzik Feffer (1900-1952), Leib Kvitko (1890-1952), Peretz Markish (1895-1952), and David Hofstein (1889-1952). Other portraits include prominent writers such as Sh. Aleichem (1859-1916), O. Mandelstam (1891-1938), B. Pasternak (1890-1960), and J. Brodsky (1940-1996). These unusual works, painted on cardboard in the late 1980s, and based on archival photographic sources, reclaimed a suppressed cultural heritage on the eve of the fall of the Soviet Union.

Matvey Vaisberg, the grandson of the Yiddish author, Motl D. Gartsman (1909 - 1943), was born in 1958, and lives and works in Kiev, Ukraine.

The exhibition also includes biographical profiles of the authors, and poignant literary excerpts.