About this program:

TALK | When Yiddish Was Young in Israel, with Shachar Pinsker

Featuring: Shachar Pinsker

Focusing on “Yung Yisroel” (Young Israel), the name of a group of Yiddish writers in 1950s–1960s Israel, this talk will examine the history of Yiddish as it played out in cultural production. Shachar Pinsker examines the writers in Israel who continued to write and publish in Yiddish, and he explains the influence of Yiddish on Hebrew cultural production from the establishment of the state in 1948 until today.  

 

Shachar Pinsker is a professor of Judaic studies and Middle East studies and associate director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. His scholarly writings include two award-winning books: Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (2011) and A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (2018). He is the editor (with Sheila Jelen) of Hebrew, Gender, and Modernity (2007), Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores (2016), and Where the Sky and the Sea Meet: Israeli Yiddish Stories (forthcoming). He is currently writing a book on Yiddish in Israeli literature and co-directing an NEH-supported research project, The Feuilleton, the Public Sphere, and Modern Jewish Cultures.