Fordham-NYPL Lecture Series in Jewish Studies: Shachar Pinsker on ‘When Yiddish as Young in Israel”

In his talk, Shachar Pinsker will examine the role of Yiddish in Israeli culture. He will argue that even with the denial and self-repression of Yiddish, the language continued to have a generative power and exert an influence on Israeli culture, sometimes in covert and unacknowledged ways. Examining Yiddish literature and culture enables us to tackle anew the difficult issues that still bedevil the country: trauma, victimhood, conflicts, and tensions between both Israeli Jews and Palestinians and Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews.

About the Speaker
Shachar Pinsker is a professor of Judaic studies and Middle East studies at the University of Michigan. Pinsker is the author of two award-winning books: Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (Stanford University Press, 2011) and A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (NYU Press, 2018). He is the editor and co-editor of Hebrew, Gender, and Modernity (University of Maryland Press, 2007), Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores (Wayne State University Press, 2016), and Where the Sky and the Sea Meet: Israeli Yiddish Stories (Magnes Press, 2023). He is currently writing a book on Yiddish in Israeli literature and co-directing the NEH-supported research project: “The Feuilleton, the Public Sphere, and Modern Jewish Cultures.”