IIJS Prof. Ofer Dynes will discuss his new book, The Fiction of the State, in conversation with Prof. Naor Ben-Yehoyada.
Tuesday, November 24, at noon | 617 Kent Hall
In a compelling new interpretation, this book locates the origins of modern Jewish literature within the turbulent events which reshaped Europe during the late eighteenth century: the partitions of Poland, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars. As Austria, Russia, and Prussia consolidated their rule over the Polish lands and banned most forms of political expression, literature became a central venue for reflecting on the new political order. Dynes argues that Jewish intellectuals turned to fiction—prose, poetry, and drama—to engage in political debates and make sense of new state structures. Through their writing, Jewish intellectuals positioned themselves as interpreters, mediators, and, at times, collaborators with the new imperial powers.
Combining meticulous archival research and nuanced textual readings, Dynes contextualizes modern Jewish literature as rooted in the awareness of major political upheaval. Rather than an internal Jewish struggle between tradition and modernity, he presents Hebrew and Yiddish literature as a field of negotiation among multiple local and imperial belongings. Radically expanding the literary canon, he uncovers a diverse and often unexpected array of figures and texts, including a Catholic Austrian bureaucrat who wrote poetry in Yiddish, a Prussian rabbi and French count who jointly composed a poem to the Russian Tsar; and a Hebrew novel born out of its author's collaboration with the secret police. Connecting Jewish texts with broader trends in European history, this book presents an untold story of how Jewish writers used literature to grapple with a shifting political landscape in the age of Enlightenment and empires.
Ofer Dynes is the Leonard Kaye Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia, he was an Assistant Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he taught courses on the literature and history of Eastern European Jewry and served as Head of the Program in Yiddish Studies. His first book, The Fiction of the State: The Partitions of Poland and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature, received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. His articles have appeared in Prooftexts, Jewish Social Studies, Eastern European Jewish Affairs, AJS Review, and other scholarly journals. He is a co-founder and organizer of the Hebrew Lab Faculty Seminar, a New York–based workshop for scholars of Hebrew literature. In 2027, he will be a research fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.
Naor Ben-Yehoyada is Associate Professor of anthropology at Columbia University and is the author of The Mediterranean Incarnate: Transnational Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II (Chicago Press, 2017). His work examines unauthorized migration, criminalization, the aftermath of development, and transnational political imaginaries in the central and eastern Mediterranean.
*Guests must register by Friday, November 20, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.
Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Radov families.
While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.