Join the Institute for a discussion with Danielle Drori, a winner of the 2022 Warren & Susan Stern New Perspectives in Jewish Studies Award. *This event is in-person.
In a public speech in Tel Aviv in the late 1920s, the Hebrew poet and Zionist thinker Ḥ. N. Bialik compared the Zionist movement to an act of translation. “Our entire life is a matter of translation," Bialik stated, "everything among us is created under foreign psychological influences and modes of feeling . . . our generation has been given the task of translating itself and its inner world into Hebrew: a translation that is a return to origin/the original.”
Drawing on Bialik's claim, this lecture will examine the relationship between translation and Zionism, showing how early Zionist thought in Hebrew relied on translation as both a metaphor for the so-called Zionist return to origin and an effective device for disseminating nationalist sentiment. While scholars of Zionism have argued that early Zionist thinkers translated European nationalist thought into a Jewish idiom, few have asked what Zionism may teach us about translation as a driving force in Jewish intellectual history. This lecture suggests that translation functioned as the comfort zone of early Zionist thought: a locus where Zionist thinkers could feel neither fully Western nor fully Eastern, both European and non-European, victors and victims.
Danielle Drori completed her doctoral studies at the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at NYU. She has taught courses on literary theory, modern Jewish literatures, nationalism, and gender at the University of Oxford, New York University, the City College of New York, and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where she is currently Associate Faculty. Her writing has appeared in several academic and popular publications, including Prooftexts, Dibur, Popula, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Supported by the Warren & Susan Stern New Perspectives in Jewish Studies Award.
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