JEWISH LITERATURE BEYOND BORDERS, University of Toronto Symposium

18 Oct 2012 - 12:00 / 18 Oct 2012 - 12:00

Hart House Debates Room
U of T
Toronto

The Yiddish literary critic Baal Makhshoves famously declared that Yiddish and Hebrew
literature represent “one literature in two languages.” As this remark suggests, the bilingual roots of
Hebrew and Yiddish burgeoned into a diasporic literary culture that transcended territorial
boundaries. Yet the assumed parting of ways of Hebrew and Yiddish letters during the twentieth
century is both driven and matched by the division of these languages and cultures within the field
of modern literary studies, a division that betrays a broader tendency to separate literary cultures
according to existing physical, political and linguistic borders of nation-states.
The recent “transnational turn” in literary and cultural studies furnishes new possibilities for
the study of modern Jewish literature. Transnational theory takes as its starting point the recognition
that in a world increasingly defined by migration, Diaspora and globalization, collective identities can
no longer be defined solely in terms of geopolitical location, language and ethnicity. Thus,
transnationalism favours a comparative perspective that stresses interaction, overlap and intermixing
among cultures. This symposium is dedicated to exploring modern Jewish literature(s) within a
context of shifting affiliations that transgress normative borders of space and culture. Does the
transnational approach encourage us to reclaim the bilingual literary culture that Baal Makhshoves
described, or challenge his formulation by bringing the study of Hebrew or Yiddish into relation
with other languages and cultures? How might this approach complicate a geography of Hebrew and
Yiddish cultures, traditionally confined to the Ashkenazi realm of Central and Eastern Europe, to
include Sephardic and Mizrahi writing, as well as Yiddish and Hebrew writing from North America
and beyond? To what extent does transnationalism require us to re-think the familiar conception of
the Jew as the marginalized “other” of modernity? And how might such questions help bring forth
a new definition of “minority” literature? These are among the many questions to be explored.
The symposium will take place on October 18, 2012, in the Hart House Debates Room, 7
Hart House Circle, at the University of Toronto. Over the course of the day, speakers from various
universities who will present their recent research. Paper topics range from German-Hebrew
bilingualism, to the relationship between African and Yiddish diasporas, to traces of Yiddish and
Arabic in Hebrew literature, to Montreal’s “Yiddishland.” The day will conclude with the annual Dr.
Max Gianna Glassman Israel-Exchange Scholar Lecture by the illustrious scholar of modern Jewish
literature and Israel Prize recipient, Dan Miron (Hebrew University, Columbia University), entitled
“Centres and Peripheries in Current Jewish Literary Studies.” All events are free and open to the
public, and are presented by the Centre for Jewish Studies, with the support of the Posen
Foundation, the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, the Department of Germanic
Languages and Literatures and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Organizer: Rachel Seelig
Ray D. Wolfe Post-Doctoral Fellow
Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto