Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody

My first book, published in 2020 with Oxford University Press, is a study of how Jewish American writers confront the idea of world literature. I examine how Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley conceive of world literature, investigating how these writers, in English and in Yiddish, place themselves within world literature’s institutional confines, outside its purview, or, most often, in constant motion across its maps and networks. Considering world literature as both a system of circulation (in book markets, anthologies, and the distribution of prizes and awards) and a utopian republic of shared literary value, I follow Jewish American writers as they meet the demand to write not just for a national collective but for the world.

A Taytsh Manifesto: Yiddish, Translation, and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture

My second book, with Fordham University Press, calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish studies and for the study of modern Jewish culture. The book proposes a shift in vocabulary, from Yiddish to taytsh, in order to promote reading strategies that account for the ways texts named as Jewish move between languages and cultures. Taytsh is an older name for the language, a name that indicates the language’s affiliation with German; it is also a word that came to mean translation itself—to render into taytsh is to inhabit the gap between languages. This book deploys taytsh as a paradigm that can be applied to a host of modern Jewish cultural formations. Drawing on examples from Yiddish pulp fiction, Sholem Aleichem’s monologue, popular US culture, and more, A Taytsh Manifesto develops a model for identifying, in Yiddish and beyond, how cultures intertwine, how they become implicated in world systems and empire, and how they might escape such limiting and oppressive structures.

An early draft of this project appeared in Fall 2021 as a stand-alone article in Jewish Social Studies.

Other publications include: an article on the popular novels of Sarah B. Smith; a reading of Avrom Sutzkever’s late style and the politics of Holocaust Literature; book reviews examining the state of Jewish and Yiddish Studies and the future of Jewish American literary study; and a tribute to my late mentor Alan Mintz. More of my writing can be found at In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.