Join the Institute for the first of a two part series on The Jews of Eastern Europe featuring Saul Noam Zaritt, author of Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody and Samuel Spinner, author of Jewish Primitivism.

Until the Second World War, Eastern Europe was home to the largest Jewish community in the world. This demographic concentration fostered the development of many important religious, cultural, literary, and political movements that continue to define Jewish life to this day. Focusing on recent scholarship that deals with Yiddish literature and Jewish life in interwar Yiddishland, this book series hopes to shed light on how the history of this important Jewish community a century ago has much to teach us today.

Saul Noam Zaritt is an Associate Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody (OUP, 2020) and is currently at work on a book entitled A Taytsh Manifesto: Yiddish, Translation, and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture. He was a founding editor of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.

Samuel Spinner is the Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Assistant Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Johns Hopkins University. His book Jewish Primitivism, on primitivism in modern Jewish literature, photography, and graphic art, was published in 2021 by Stanford University Press. He is currently researching a book tentatively titled Monuments of Books on the aesthetics of monumentality in relation to Holocaust literature. He has also translated the oldest Yiddish book written by a woman, Meneket Rivkah (JPS, 2009). His work has appeared in PMLA, MLN, Prooftexts, and German Quarterly. Spinner is a co-editor of “German Jewish Cultures,” a book series published by Indiana University Press and serves on the editorial board of the Yiddish Studies journal In Geveb.

Supported by the generosity of the Radov Family.

This event will be on ZOOM.

While all Institute events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.