Jews, Art, and Inequality: Lee Conell's The Party Upstairs with Josh Lambert

Published in the summer of 2020, and set on a single day on the Upper West Side of New York, Lee Conell's dazzling first novel, The Party Upstairs, is a sharply perceptive, hilarious, and finely pitched study of how the astonishing gaps in income and wealth which characterize recent American history play themselves out in the lives of two Jewish millennial women.

In this talk, Josh Lambert explores how the novel extends a literary tradition that runs from the Yiddish klasikers through Mike Gold and Grace Paley, and what the novel wants to tell us about the possibilities for meaningful Jewish art in our time.

About the Speaker:
Josh Lambert is the Sophia Moses Robison Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and English and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College. Books he's written and edited include American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide, Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture, and How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish.