Libe and Linguistics: Towards an Archive of Yiddish Sexuality

The Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellowship

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In this talk, Zohar Weiman-Kelman (University of Toronto) draws on multiple projects that examined Yiddish sexuality in the twentieth century, and takes initial steps in generating a queer Yiddish archive of sexuality. This archive, situated at the confluence between sexual expression and the history of the Yiddish language, focuses on Yiddish sexologist Leonard Landes and on the projects of Max Weinreich and Mordkhe Schaechter pertaining to sexuality. Sharing her recent findings from the YIVO archives, Weiman-Kelman argues that non-normative and non-reproductive sex(ualities) are vital tools for accessing the Yiddish past and finding pleasure in its precarious present.

About the Speaker

Zohar Weiman-Kelman holds the Anne Tanenbaum Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She was born and raised in West Jerusalem, where she received her B.A. in Hebrew and Yiddish literature. She completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at UC Berkeley in 2012. Her research has led her to learn Yiddish, German and Polish, and she is deeply engaged in queer and feminist communities in Berlin, Warsaw and Israel/Palestine. Zohar is currently completing her first book manuscript, “What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting: Jewish Women’s Poetry 1880-1990.” This work brings together queer theory’s questioning of futurity with the challenge posed by Yiddish to reproductive heteronormative cultural transmission, to tell a new story of the Jewish past. She has also begun a new project, “Philology, Sexology, and the Future of Yiddish,” looking at the intersections of Yiddish language and sexuality.