Join the Institute & The Naomi Foundation for The Naomi Prawer Kadar Annual Memorial Lecture with award-winning author, Dara Horn.
This lecture will explore the life and complicated work of the 20th-century Yiddish writer Der Nister in the context of the Yiddish storytelling tradition. By examining plot structures in Yiddish literature and the challenges Der Nister and many others brought to that tradition, we will take a deep dive into our own expectations for what stories should do, their role in Jewish life, and the disturbing possibility that stories actually can't save us.
Dara Horn is the award-winning author of six books, including the novels In the Image (Norton 2002), The World to Come (Norton 2006), All Other Nights (Norton 2009), A Guide for the Perplexed (Norton 2013), and Eternal Life (Norton 2018), and the essay collection People Love Dead Jews (Norton 2021). One of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists, she is the recipient of two National Jewish Book Awards, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Harold U. Ribalow Award, and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, and she was a finalist for the JW Wingate Prize, the Simpson Family Literary Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Her books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books, Booklist’s Best 25 Books of the Decade, and San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of the Year, and have been translated into eleven languages. Her nonfiction work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and The Jewish Review of Books, among many other publications, and she is a regular columnist for Tablet. Horn received her doctorate in Yiddish and Hebrew literature from Harvard University. She has taught courses in these subjects at Sarah Lawrence College and Yeshiva University, and has held the Gerald Weinstock Visiting Professorship in Jewish Studies at Harvard. She has lectured for audiences in hundreds of venues throughout North America, Israel and Australia. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children.
This event is supported by the generosity of the Naomi Foundation.
The Naomi Prawer Kadar Annual Memorial Lecture provides an opportunity for the public to explore topics of Yiddish language and linguistics, the history of Yiddish, Yiddish children’s literature and education. The lecture is supported by the Naomi Prawer Kadar Foundation, Inc., which is dedicated to reimagining education. The Naomi Foundation champions Yiddish, Naomi’s lifelong passion, as a vibrant, rich, and contemporary language. The Naomi Foundation advances the teaching and learning of Yiddish, particularly in academic and scholarly settings.
This event will be on ZOOM.
