Modern Jewish Identity in the Age of Empire
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Book Talk
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
Join YIVO for a conversation with Ofer Dynes and Svetlana Natkovich exploring two new books that examine the emergence of modern Jewish identity through literature, politics, and self-expression. Dynes’ The Fiction of the State: The Partitions of Poland and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature locates the origins of modern Jewish literature within the Partitions of Poland during the late eighteenth century and argues that literature became a central venue for reflecting on the new political order during a time when most forms of political expression were banned. Rather than as 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.
Natkovich’s Questionable People: Inventing Modern Jewish Selves in the Russian Empire, 1860–1890 explores how the maskilim used self-expression, fashion, dress, and their artistic work to define themselves. Differentiating themselves from what came before, maskilim crafted Jewish identities within a modernizing Russia. Natkovich analyzes the maskilim as a group existing between social and economic classes in a time of change, a generation of thinkers forced to radically assert their selfhoods.
Moderated by Jeremy Dauber, this discussion will explore how Jewish writers and thinkers navigated shifting political and social landscapes.
About the Participants
Ofer Dynes is the Leonard Kaye Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. Dynes specializes in the literature and cultural history of Eastern European Jewry from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries, with a particular interest in the relationship between fiction and political thought. His first book, The Fiction of the State: The Partitions of Poland and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature, will be published by Stanford University Press in September 2026. The manuscript received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. He is the co-editor, with Naomi Seidman (University of Toronto), of the Prooftexts special issue The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Literature in Europe.
Svetlana Natkovich is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Jewish History and Bible at the University of Haifa. Her scholarly interests include Jewish modernization in Eastern Europe, history of Jewish literatures, and intersections between history, literature, and economy in the Jewish Eastern European context. Her book Among Radiant Clouds: The Literature of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky in Its Social Context was published in Hebrew by Magnes Press in 2015 and her new book Questionable People: Inventing Modern Jewish Selves in the Russian Empire, 1860–1890 was released by Syracuse University Press in 2025.
Jeremy Dauber is the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at Columbia University. For twelve years, he co-edited Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History with Barbara Mann. His books include Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Stanford University Press, 2004); In the Demon's Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern (Yale University Press; 2010); and The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem (Schocken Books, 2013). His most recent book, American Scary: A History of Horror from Salem to Stephen King (Algonquin: 2024), was named a best book of 2024 by the Boston Globe.