CONTESTED JEWISH FUTURES:

A SYMPOSIUM
Recovering an Era of Ferment
and Possibility in Jewish Life

Tuesday, February 2 and

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Hosted by
Nick Block & Miriam Udel
Emory University

Featuring a keynote lecture by
Steven J. Zipperstein
Stanford University
 Contested Jewish Futures
This symposium focuses on the decades from
1880-1950, a time of cultural, political, and economic
ferment in Euro-American Jewish communities,
when thinkers, writers, and artists generated a host of
platforms and ideas about what shape the Jewish
future would take in the twentieth century. Leading
scholars gather to present papers and discuss the wide
array of possibilities for Jewish life – many now
forgotten – that this vibrant, often stormy period
generated, and to consider how these trends both
emerged from and further shaped the era’s views of
what the future would hold.


This scholarly event is presented by the Tam Institute for
Jewish Studies and cosponsored by the Fox Center for
Humanistic Inquiry; Laney Graduate School; Department of
History; Institute for the Liberal Arts; Graduate Division of
Religion; Department of Religion; Department of German
Studies; Department of Comparative Literature; and the
Program in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies.


The keynote lecture, the Twentieth Annual Lecture in the
Tenenbaum Family Lecture Series in Judaic Studies,
is cosponsored by the Hightower Fund; Fox Center for
Humanistic Inquiry; Laney Graduate School; Department of
History; Institute for the Liberal Arts; Graduate Division of
Religion; Department of Religion; Department of German
Studies; Department of Comparative Literature; and the
Program in Russian, Eurasian, & East European Studies.
 Symposium Schedule
Tuesday, February 2, 2016 Dobbs University Center (DUC) E-338
9:15am INTRODUCTION & WELCOME
Miriam Udel and Nick Block
Emory University
10:00am PANEL I: BACKWARD TO GO FORWARD: A RETURN TO ORIGINS
Moderator: Eric Goldstein, Emory University
Noam Pianko
University of Washington
The Origins of Peoplehood and the Future of Jewish Collectivity
Nick Block
Emory University
Tales of the German-Jewish Future: Fear, Destruction, and Yiddish
Takeovers
Marc Caplan
University of Michigan
Arnold Schoenberg’s Jewish Trauerspiel: The Status of Language,
Law, and Symbol in Moses und Aron
12:00pm LUNCH
1:30pm PANEL II: LISTENING TO THE FUTURE AT THE CHASM’S EDGE
Moderator: Peter Höyng, Emory University
Anna Shternshis
University of Toronto
Imagining the Jewish Future in 1942: Soviet Red Army Soldiers Singing
in Yiddish
Kevin C. Karnes
Emory University
Listening Together: Aurality and the Everyday in Riga before the Shoah
3:00pm BREAK
7:30pm TENENBAUM FAMILY LECTURE IN JUDAIC STUDIES
Michael C. Carlos Museum
Steven J. Zipperstein
Stanford University
Catastrophe and the Contemporary Jewish Imagination: The 1903
Kishinev Pogrom as Fact, and Fiction
 Symposium Schedule
Wednesday, February 3, 2016 Dobbs University Center (DUC) E-338

9:00am PANEL III: SOCIALIST PAST AND FUTURES

Moderator: Cornelia Wilhelm, Emory University
Miriam Udel
Emory University
To Instruct, Delight and Indoctrinate: Politics and Poetics in Soviet and
American Children’s Literature Between the Wars
Hannah Pollin-Galay
University of Pennsylvania
Remembering Our Beautiful Future: Communist Holocaust Survivors
Look Back at the 1930s
Andrea F. Bohlman
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Anthologies of the Voice: Recollecting Polish-Jewish Futures in Sound
11:00am PANEL IV: THE FUTURE OF TRANSLATIONS
Moderator: Elena Glazov-Corrigan, Emory University
Na’ama Rokem
University of Chicago
Jewish Politics in All the Languages of the World: Multilingualism and
Contingency in Hannah Arendt
Anita Norich
University of Michigan
Contesting Translations: The Future of Yiddish in English
12:00pm LUNCHEON & CONCLUSION
 Abstracts & Bios
NICK BLOCK
Visiting Assistant Professor; German Studies, Emory University
Tales of the German-Jewish Future: Fear, Destruction, and Yiddish
Takeovers
German-Jewish authors at the beginning of the twentieth century wrote
various accounts foretelling the destruction of German Jewry. This theme
in German-Jewish writing evokes the question: At what point in time, if
any, could it have been possible for German Jews to see the writing on
the wall? In other words, at what point in time before an event like the
Holocaust can the historian stop accusations of teleology and start
claiming causality? Specifically, I will offer a meta-analysis of readings of
Hugo Bettauer’s 1922 The City without Jews and contextualize this work
alongside other pieces from the period, including Nathan Birnbaum’s
1907 After a Thousand Years and Felix Theilhaber’s 1911 The Demise of the
German Jews.
Nick Block is a Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at Emory University, currently
working on a manuscript entitled Journey to a Jewish Other: German-Jewish and Yiddish
Modern Identities. This work details the transnational interdependence of early twentieth-
century German and Yiddish modernist projects. Block received his Ph.D. in German Studies
and Ph.D. Certificate in Judaic Studies from the University of Michigan. His research engages
with transnational/migration studies, German-Jewish intellectual history, German and
Yiddish modernisms, and Orientalism. He has articles published and forthcoming in German
Studies Review, The German Quarterly, the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, and Nexus:
Essays in German Jewish Studies.

ANDREA F. BOHLMAN
Assistant Professor of Music; University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill
Anthologies of the Voice: Recollecting Polish-Jewish Futures in
Sound
Looking forward and looking back in time, I connect two projects from
the 1980s that try and come to grips with Polish-Jewish history in the 20th
century through music/sound, particularly vocality/bodies. Both occurred
within the auspices of the Independent Culture movement (a network
within the opposition to state socialism) and were therefore
fundamentally about situating Jewish cultural practice at the base of a
new civil society. One is an (unofficial) radio program that narrates the
ghetto uprising. The journalists involved turned to pre-WWII recordings
of sacred and liturgical music as they fashioned an anthology of historical
narratives by survivors and historians like Władysław Bartoszewski in
audio-collage. The second is a collective jazz improvisation inspired by the
Book of Job that wrestled with the narrative as an allegory for the Polish-
 Jewish twentieth century. The mysticism that was framed as an
inspiration for this underground performance and collaboration
(released on CD in 2005) was framed as a sacred rendering of the body
that situated the voice as the foundation of agency. In other words, this
paper explores how late-twentieth century projects recuperate and re-
present the past in order to turn up the volume, so to speak. The
materials from the radio program extend to 1910; the Book of Job analysis
builds on short stories from 1900 through the interwar period.
Andrea F. Bohlman is assistant professor of music at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Her monograph in preparation is a study of the interaction between political
action, listening, and music in Poland in the late twentieth century. She has also worked
extensively on the composer Hanns Eisler and European popular musics, in particular the
Eurovision Song Contest. Her current project is a history of sound media in twentieth
century Poland that engages economies of amateur music worlds, the persistence of old
media such as magnetic tape and radio, and audio-visual documentary practices. An article
on sound documentation and protest is forthcoming in the Spring 2016 issue of the Journal
of Musicology.

MARC CAPLAN
Research Fellow, Frankel Institute; University of Michigan
Arnold Schoenberg’s Jewish Trauerspiel: The Status of Language,
Law, and Symbol in Moses und Aron
Arnold Schoenberg’s opera fragment Moses und Aron, abandoned in
1932, offers many points of comparison with Walter Benjamin’s
contemporaneous study of the Baroque Tragic Drama, Ursprung des
deutschen Trauerspiels (1928). In common with Benjamin’s analysis of the
Trauerspiel, Schoenberg imagines his sovereign protagonist, Moses, as a
tyrant and a martyr; Aaron (Aron, in Schoenberg’s idiosyncratic spelling)
similarly fulfills the dramatic functions of a courtier, betraying the
sovereign he serves through the one respect that his master depends on
him, his superior eloquence. Just as Benjamin hinges his Epistemo-
Critical Prologue on the paradoxical status of representation to the
truth claims of the work of art, and therefore a theory of aesthetics,
Schoenberg’s retelling of the Exodus narrative is preoccupied with the
limits, temptations, and transgressions of representation itself. Where
Benjamin argues that the Baroque strategy of allegory inadequately
substitutes for the non-rational, ahistorical status of the symbol – which
belongs not to an epoch of history, but of myth – Schoenberg returns to
a myth of origins for the Jewish people, with whom his own re-
identification provided the impetus for writing the opera itself, to portray
the blasphemy of symbolic representation, the transgressive status of
language even at the moment when invested in its lawgiving functions.
Just as Benjamin reimagines the Silesian courtly drama from the
perspective of a crypto-kabalistic philosophy of language, revelation, and
 redemption, Schoenberg attempts to reimagine the national origins of
the Jewish people through aesthetic criteria devised, like the musical
form of the opera itself, at the heart of baroque aesthetics.
Marc Caplan is a native of Louisiana and a graduate of Yale University. In 2003 he earned his
Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. Since then he has held
appointments at Indiana University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and
Johns Hopkins University, as well as visiting fellowships at the Universität Konstanz
(Germany) and the Center for Jewish History (New York). In 2011 he published How Strange
the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms – a
comparison of Yiddish and African literatures – with Stanford University Press. Currently he
is a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan,
where he is completing his next book project on Yiddish literature written in Weimar
Germany, considered in comparison with contemporaneous German literature, theater, and
film. His presentation today will contribute to the concluding chapter of this project.

KEVIN C. KARNES
Winship Professor of Music History; Department of Music, Emory
University
Listening Together: Aurality and the Everyday in Riga before the
Shoah
Before losing nearly all of its Jews in 1940-41, the city of Riga was a vital
hub of Jewish life in western Russia and the Republic of Latvia, boasting
a population of some forty thousand that included such eminent figures
as the historian Simon Dubnow and the composer Efraim Shklyar. Since
the time of glasnost, when it again became possible to study the
multicultural history of the city, its social spaces have been widely
characterized as defined by a state of Sich-Voneinander-Absondern: of
linguistic and religious communities isolating themselves from each
other. In this presentation, I counter this characterization by drawing
our attention to a range of documents attesting to histories of pervasive
and unremarkable encounter and exchange. I focus on three varieties of
archival materials that bear traces of habits or occasions of listening
together – of individuals and communities listening to each other and to
any number of others in their midst. Discussing examples of Latvian
broadside ballads parodying relations between Jews and others,
accounts in the city’s Russian press of the musical programs of Jewish
social organizations, and Yiddish songs reflecting on everyday
experiences of diversity, I argue that listening together across communal
lines constituted a principal form of social practice among Riga’s resident
individuals and groups. I suggest in conclusion that attuning to this
aspect of historical aurality can help us to glimpse a Jewish future for the
city that ultimately did not come to pass: one in which Jews, Russians,
Latvians, and others lived and listened together in a shared urban space.
Kevin C. Karnes’s research explores sounding expressions of identity, difference, and
belonging in central and eastern Europe from the nineteenth century throughout the
present day. His recent work includes Arvo Pärt: Tabula Rasa (Oxford UP, 2016), Jewish Folk
Songs from the Baltics: Selections from the Melngailis Collection (A-R Editions, 2014), and A
Kingdom Not of This World: Wagner, the Arts, and Utopian Visions in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
(Oxford UP, 2013). He is currently the Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Music at
Emory University.

ANITA NORICH
Tikva Frymer-Kensky Collegiate Professor of English Language and
Literature and Judaic Studies; University of Michigan
Contesting Translations: The Future of Yiddish in English
Contestations over translations from and into Yiddish are as old as the
language itself. This presentation will consider the following questions:
Does translation serve to disseminate Yiddish literature or to distort it?
What criteria do we use for judging translations? How and why have
those criteria changed over the past century? What might this tell us
about the future of translations from Yiddish into English and other
languages?
Anita Norich is the Tikva Frymer-Kensky Collegiate Professor of English and Judaic Studies
at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation
in the 20th Century (2013), Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in
America During the Holocaust (2007), and The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of
Israel Joshua Singer (1991), and co-editor of Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures:
Comparative Perspectives (2016), Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext,
(2008), Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures (1992). She teaches,
lectures, and publishes on a range of topics concerning Yiddish language and literature,
modern Jewish culture, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature.

NOAM PIANKO
Samuel N. Stroum Professor of Jewish Studies; University of
Washington
The Origins of Peoplehood and the Future of Jewish Collectivity
Peoplehood emerged as a key word in American Jewish life as a
nationalist critique of political Zionism. Over the last century the original
intent of peoplehood as an alternative to Zionist conceptions of defining
Jews as a collective group has been largely forgotten. Instead, leaders
have appropriated the idea of peoplehood to galvanize support for the
state of Israel, rather than to rethink the role of statehood in defining
Jewish life. Can the forgotten origins of peoplehood inform new models
for Jewish collectivity in the 21st century?
Noam Pianko is the Samuel N. Stroum Professor of Jewish Studies and Associate Professor
in the Jackson School of International Studies. Pianko also directs the Samuel and Althea
Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and serves as the Herbert and Lucy Pruzan Chair of Jewish
Studies. Pianko’s research interests include modern Jewish history, Zionism, and American
Judaism. His first book, Zionism and the Roads not Taken: Rawidowicz Kaplan, Kohn
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010) uncovers the thought of three key interwar
Jewish intellectuals who defined Zionism’s central mission as challenging the model of a
sovereign nation-state. His second book, Peoplehood: An American Innovation (New
Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2015) traces the history of a key word in modern Jewish
life. In addition, Pianko has published articles in leading journals, including the Journal of
Modern Jewish Studies, Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in
the Post-Society Space, American Jewish History, and Jewish Social Studies. Pianko serves
on the Executive Board of the American Jewish Historical Society, and the Association for
Jewish Studies board. In addition, Pianko lectures widely on topics related to Judaism,
Zionism, and Technology. He has been awarded a Mellon Foundation Fellowship, a UW
Technology Teaching Fellowship, a Royalty Research Award, and a Wexner Graduate
Fellowship.

HANNAH POLLIN-GALAY
Primo Levi Research Fellow, Katz Center; University of Pennsylvania
Remembering Our Beautiful Future: Communist Holocaust
Survivors Look Back at the 1930s
This paper examines how life-long, committed Communists living in Post-
Soviet Eastern Europe recall the ideological enlightenment of their
youths in the 1930s. Looking back after the Holocaust and collapse of the
Soviet Union, they still live with the vision of these years. Aesthetic
philosopher Boris Groys describes communism as an attempt to un-mute
one’s fate, to enable people to debate the future in language, rather than
numbers, which are illegible in human conversation. How can Groys’s
notion of communist futurity help us read retrospective reflections on
this belief system? In life story narratives of long-term, committed Jewish
communists from the Former Soviet Union, narrators recall converting to
a Communist vision in their youths in the 1930s. Their expectations were
brutally defied – in a way that related to their Jewish identities. Yet, that
hypothesis about what was supposed to have happened (a uchronic
dream or future-anterior) remained and remains a concrete reality
throughout their lives, a potentiality that shaped the way they
experienced the Holocaust, Soviet and post-Soviet years. This paper tries
to locate where and how this unfulfilled expectation lingers in their
stories, how the 1930s and the 2000s insist on conversing with one
another, despite what transpired in between.
Hannah Pollin-Galay completed her Ph.D. in History at Tel Aviv University in the fall of 2014.
She is currently the Primo Levi Research Fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced
Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research, which draws from both
literature and history, explores the connection between language, ethics and historical
imagination in Holocaust testimony. She has taught courses on Yiddish and Holocaust
Studies at Ben Gurion University, and the University of Haifa and has held a Rothschild
Postdoctoral Fellowship at Columbia University. She has published and forthcoming work
in journals such as Jewish Social Studies, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Prooftexts and
Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust. Dr. Pollin-Galay is currently working on a book entitled
Ecologies of Witness: Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony, which is based on her
dissertation research.

NA’AMA ROKEM
Associate Professor, Department of Near Eastern Languages and
Civilizations and Department of Comparative Literature; University
of Chicago
Jewish Politics in all the Languages of the World: Multilingualism
and Contingency in Hannah Arendt
In November 1942, Hannah Arendt wrote an op-ed piece about the
Language Wars in the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine for the New York Yiddish
Daily Morgen Zshurnal. Written in Yiddish as an impassioned appeal for
Jewish multilingualism within the Zionist context, the piece challenges
many of the commonly held assumptions about Arendt, her politics and
her identity. I’d like to use it to reconsider the question of Arendt’s
relationship to Zionism and of her response to the Holocaust. A key term
for this reconsideration – contingency – comes from Arendt’s
philosophical writing, in particular her reflections on Natality in The
Human Condition. My reading ties the multilingual dimensions of that
book (which was written twice, in English and in German, two very
different versions) with Arendt’s philosophy of contingency and with her
struggle, in 1942, to find open horizons in a political reality overshadowed
by catastrophe.
Na’ama Rokem is Associate Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and
Near Eastern Languages at the University of Chicago. Her book, Prosaic Conditions:
Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature, was published by Northwestern UP in
2013. She is currently completing a book about the encounter between Yehuda Amichai and
Paul Celan and working on a new project, tentatively titled World Literature in Jerusalem:
Zionism, Humanism and Comparative Literature.

ANNA SHTERNSHIS
Al and Malka Green Associate Professor in Yiddish Studies;
University of Toronto
Imagining the Jewish Future in 1942: Soviet Red Army Soldiers
Singing in Yiddish
Based on newly discovered Yiddish songs, recorded in 1941-1947 in the
Soviet Union, this paper discusses the ways Soviet Yiddish speakers made
sense of their lives during World War II and how they planned for the
future without Hitler.
Anna Shternshis holds the position of Al and Malka Green Associate Professor of Yiddish
studies and the Acting director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the
University of Toronto. She received her doctoral degree (D.Phil.) in Modern Languages and
Literatures from Oxford University in 2001. Shternshis is the author of Soviet and Kosher:
Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 - 1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2006). Her second book tentatively entitled When Sonia Met Boris: Jewish Daily Life
in Soviet Russia is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She is the author of over 20
articles on the Soviet Jews during World War II, Russian Jewish culture and post-Soviet
Jewish diaspora. Shternshis is a co-editor-in-chief of East European Jewish Affairs and a
stand-in board member of Oxford Bibliographies Online in Jewish studies.

MIRIAM UDEL
Associate Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture;
German Studies, Emory University
To Instruct, Delight and Indoctrinate: Politics and Poetics in Soviet
and American Children’s Literature Between the Wars
In the early decades of the twentieth century, one important arena for
contesting the Jewish future was the consciousness of the Yiddish
speaking child. This talk considers a selection of works composed for
children and published in the Soviet Union and in New York City between
the wars. Leyb Kvitko’s verse narratives are overtly communist, while
Khaver-Paver’s children’s novel Labzik is equally emphatic in illustrating
and promulgating socialism. Both authors tend toward mimetic realism,
in contrast to the romanticizing, folkloric predilections of much of Yiddish
children’s literature of the period. We will untangle complicated knots of
politics and poetics that help to stick these works together and place
them in relation to the emerging canon of fiction and poetry for children
that emerged during the perfervid 1920s and 30s.
Miriam Udel received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 2008,
having begun teaching at Emory in 2007. Her dissertation focused on the ethics of speech
and conversation in modernist fiction, and it concentrated on Yiddish and American
literature. Portions of her dissertation were published in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish
Literary History and in a peer-reviewed festschrift for Ruth Wisse, her graduate adviser,
Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon (Harvard University Press, 2008). Her first book, Never
Better! The Modern Jewish Picaresque, appears in the Spring 2016 catalog of the University
of Michigan Press, as part of the new series Michigan Studies in comparative Jewish
Cultures. Her current research focuses on the politics and poetics of Yiddish children’s
literature and encompasses both a critical study of this neglected corpus and an annotated
translation, under contract to New York University Press for publication in 2018. Currently
the Dr. Emmanuel Patt Visiting Professor at the YIVO Institute in New York, she has also held
the Starr Fellowship in Judaic Studies at Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. In 2013, she
was among the first cohort of Translation Fellows at the National Yiddish book Center.
Udel’s research and teaching interests include Yiddish modernism and anti-modernism, the
rise of the Yiddish novel, children’s literature, continuity and disjunction in Jewish literature
over time, and genre and forms. Udel is also a passionate and devoted teacher, who offers
a year-long Yiddish language course and alternates teaching courses about Yiddish
literature and modern Jewish culture. In fall of 2009, her Yiddish language students founded
A KLEYNE VELT!, the world’s only all-Yiddish college a capella group. The group has
performed for audiences both on campus and in the larger Atlanta community.

STEVEN J. ZIPPERSTEIN
Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish History and Culture; Stanford
University
Catastrophe and the Contemporary Jewish Imagination: The
1903 Kishinev Pogrom as Fact and Fiction
Kishinev’s pogrom of 1903 was the first event in Russian Jewish life to
receive international attention. The riot that left 49 dead in an obscure
border town dominated the headlines of the western press for weeks,
intruded on US-Russian relations, and left its impact on an astonishing
array of institutions: the nascent Jewish army in Palestine, the NAACP,
and likely the first version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Why did
it have this impact, and why did it provide the prism through which so
much of the contemporary Jewish experience would be seen?
Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at
Stanford University. He has written and edited eight books, has taught at universities in
Israel, Russia, Poland, France, Australia and England (where he lectured at Oxford for six
years) and has garnered the National Jewish Book Award, the Leviant Prize of the Modern
Language Association, and the Smilen Award for the best book in Jewish history. His essays
have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, New Republic, Jewish Review of
Books and elsewhere.
Notes
Tam Institute for Jewish Studies
Emory University
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