Course information
This course explores modern European Jewish literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century through the lens of space and place. Attention will be thus given to the spaces where Jewish life took place—from the shtetl to the city, the yeshiva to the train, the bustling city to the post-Holocaust ruins of Jewish Europe—as well as to the literary and cultural geography of Jewish Europe—the main literary hubs and literary cultures where Jewish literatures thrived, both in Jewish languages (Yiddish, Ladino, and Hebrew) and in European national languages (German, French, Russian, Italian, English, and more). We will read mostly fiction and poetry by European Jewish writers, together with some multimedia materials, in order to examine how literature problematizes the Jewish experience across time and geography. We will consider how Jewish writers responded to modernity, technology, majority (i.e. Gentile) culture, migration, integration and/or assimilation, persecution, and cultural innovation. Major themes include exile and belonging, religious tradition and secularism, memory and trauma, and the role of language(s) in shaping Jewish identity across national borders, in or out of Jewish culture or of majority, national cultures.
About the Teacher
Dr Giacomo Loi is Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. He is particularly interested in the complex entanglements between Greco-Roman antiquity and modern Jewish culture. Specifically, his research bridges between classical literature, archaeology, and modern Hebrew literature. He has proposed a new interpretive model that traces how ancient cultural encounters with Greco-Roman civilization shaped modern Jewish identity and its relationship with European modernity and the “West” from the 19th to the 21st centuries. In the past, he has worked at the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Paris, taught Classics and Jewish studies at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, as doctoral candidate, and is among the initiators and leaders of the project Gentile Antiquity: The Reception of Antiquity in Modern Italian Jewish Literature. He has received the Kingdon Award for New Perspectives in Jewish Studies from Columbia University and has lectured at several universities in the US, Israel, France, the UK, and Italy.