Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939
a Mayrent Research Seminar with
Allison Schachter
Vanderbilt University
Thursday, December 5
9:00 – 10:30am CT
Zoom
To attend: Professor Schachter will pre-circulate a chapter from her recent book Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939 (Northwestern UP, 2021). If you are interested in joining the conversation, please RSVP to yudkoff@wisc.edu by Monday, December 2. This event will be limited to 20 participants. Faculty and students at all levels are warmly welcome.
In Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939, Allison Schachter rewrites Jewish literary modernity from the point of view of women. Focusing on works by interwar Hebrew and Yiddish writers, Schachter illuminates how women writers embraced the transgressive potential of prose fiction to challenge the patriarchal norms of Jewish textual authority and reconceptualize Jewish cultural belonging. Drawing from the research of this monograph, Schachter will present a chapter that analyzes the writing of Polish Yiddish modernist Debora Vogel, turning her attention to the affordances of the “montage” as a space for investigating women’s aesthetics labor and the agencies of the woman artist.
Allison Schachter holds the Winkelried Family Chair in Jewish Studies and is Professor of Jewish Studies, English, and Russian and Eastern Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in the Twentieth Century (Oxford 2013) and Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939 (Northwestern University Press, 2022), which was awarded the 2024 Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies and was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. She is the co-translator, with Jordan Finkin of From the Jewish Provinces, Selected Stories of Fradl Shtok, which was awarded the 2022 MLA Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies and was a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association translation prize. She is currently working on a translation of Rokhl Brokhes’ selected stories with Jordan Finkin, for which they received a 2-year NEH Translations fellowship.