Multilingual Jewish Literature and Multicultural America
University of Chicago, November 8-9, 2007

The Quadrangle Club
1155 E. 57th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
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Multilingual Jewish Literature and Multicultural America

Jewish American literature has long been, and continues to be, a multilingual enterprise, with significant work published in at least six languages (English, Spanish, Ladino, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew).  The literary study of Jewish American writing, however, has been overwhelmingly defined by an English-only approach unable to encompass its diversity, or to locate that diversity in the multilingual and multicultural landscape of American literature as a whole. The conference, “Multilingual Jewish Literature and Multicultural America,” will survey the field of multilingual Jewish American literature and the new methodological approaches that are needed, we believe, to sustain and reinvigorate the academic study of this literature. 


KEYNOTE SPEAKER:
Werner Sollors, Harvard University
"A New Literary History of America"

Participants
Stewart Figa and Ilya Levinson
"Yiddish Song Performance."

Maeera Y. Shreiber, University of Utah
" 'None Are Like You, Shulamite':  Linguistic Longings in Anglophone Jewish American Poetry."

Norman Finkelstein, Xavier University
“Ghosts of Yiddish in Avant-Garde American Poetry.”
Eric Selinger, DePaul University, will respond.

Jeffrey Grossman, University of Virginia
“The Staging of Emotion,  Or How the Yiddish Poets Read Heinrich Heine.”

Jan Schwarz, University of Chicago
“Yiddish Poetry Readings at the 92 Street Y in New York, 1963-1969.”

Hana Wirth-Nesher, Tel Aviv University
“Hebrew Letters, Boundary Crossings: Henry Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Streamn and Gilles Rozier The Mercy Room”

Ilan Stavans, Amherst College
“Ladino in the American Imagination.”

Alan Mintz, Jewish Theological Seminary of America
“Late Romanticism as a Critique of Modernity: The Case of American Hebrew Poetry.”

Mikhail Krutikov, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
"A Great American Novel in Yiddish, Russian Style: Dovid Ignatoff's Trilogy Oyf vayte vegn (1932)."

Dan Morris, Purdue University
"Another Language: Image-text Relations and Multicultural Dynamics in Contemporary Jewish American Photography"

Co-sponsored by the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Committee on Jewish Studies and the Department of Germanic Studies.

Schedule

Thursday, November 8
Events open to the public

7:30 PM: Keynote speaker: Werner Sollors, Harvard University
“A New Literary History of America”

8:30 PM: Stewart Figa and Ilya Levinson,
Yiddish Song Performance

Friday, November 9
Registration Required

Panel 1:   Anglo-Jewish and Yiddish -9:30-11:30

Maeera Y. Shreiber, University of Utah:
" 'None Are Like You, Shulamite':  Linguistic Longings in Anglophone Jewish American Poetry"

Norman Finkelstein, Xavier University:
“Ghosts of Yiddish in Avant-Garde American Poetry”

Respondent: Eric Selinger, DePaul University

Lunch: 11:30-1:00 PM

Panel 2: Yiddish in America -1:00-3:00 PM

Jeffrey Grossman, University of Virginia:
“What the Yiddish Poets learned from Heinrich Heine”

Jan Schwarz, University of Chicago
“Yiddish Poetry Readings at the 92 Street Y in New York, 1963-1969”

Mikhail Krutikov, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
"A Great American Novel in Yiddish, Russian Style: Dovid Ignatoff's Trilogy Oyf vayte vegn (1932)."

Coffee Break: 3:00-3:30 PM

Panel 3: Multilingual Jewish Literature – 3:30-5:30 PM

Hana Wirth-Nesher, Tel Aviv University:
“Hebrew Letters, Boundary Crossings: Henry Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream and Gilles Rozier The Mercy Room”

Ilan Stavans, Amherst College:
“Ladino in the American Imagination”

Alan Mintz, Jewish Theological Seminary of America:
“Late Romanticism as a Critique of Modernity: The Case of American Hebrew Poetry”