Yiddish Poetry and Jewish Identity in 1930s America
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Book Talk
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
Introspectivism: Yiddish Poetry and Jewish Identity in 1930s America studies the poetry written in New York by the In Zikh, also known as the “Introspectivists” or Inzikhistn. Introspectivism forced social and political topics into the margins in order to create space for imagination and fantasy distant from the lived experience of the poets. As such, the worsening conditions of European Jews and the rise of totalitarianism in the early 1930s pushed the poets to address the theme of cultural heritage and reconnect with their Jewish roots. Although the Inzikhistn have been acknowledged as one of the most important groups of Yiddish writers, only certain aspects of their poetry and poetics have been explored. Itay Zutra focuses primarily on In Zikh’s poetry to show how it determined the course of the group’s development and the development of Introspectivism as a movement. By developing a methodology that explores Yiddish poetry as context for the expansion of individualism in Jewish culture, Zutra affirms how the overall movement carved out room for Yiddish-speaking American Jewish identity.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Zutra about this new book moderated by Justin Cammy.
About the Speakers
Itay Zutra is an instructor of Jewish studies at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg. His articles have appeared in H-Reviews and the American Jewish Archives Journal.
Justin Cammy is professor of Jewish Studies and World Literatures at Smith College. An alum of YIVO's Uriel Weinreich Yiddish Summer Program and a past recipient of YIVO's Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar fellowship, he also serves as on-site summer director of the Naomi Prawer Kadar International Yiddish Summer Program at Tel Aviv University. Cammy is a leading expert on the interwar Yiddish literary group Young Vilna. His translation of Abraham Sutzkever's From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg (McGill-Queen's) won the 2022 Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies from the Modern Language Association.