The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History

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With the rise of digital media, the "death of the book” has been widely discussed. But the physical object of the book persists. In her new book, The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History, through the lens of materiality and objects, Barbara E. Mann tells a history of modern Jewish literature, from novels and poetry to graphic novels and artists’ books. Bringing contemporary work on secularism and design in conversation with literary history, she offers a new and distinctive frame for understanding how literary genres emerge. Join YIVO for a discussion exploring this new publication with Mann in conversation with literary and cultural historian Justin Cammy.

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About the Speakers

Barbara E. Mann is the inaugural holder of the Stephen H. Hoffman Professorship in Modern Hebrew Language and Literature at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (Stanford, 2006) and Space and Place in Jewish Studies (Rutgers, 2012).

Justin Cammy is professor of Jewish Studies and World Literatures at Smith College. Cammy is the translator from the Yiddish of Sholem Aleichem's Judgment of Shomer, Hinde Bergner's On Long Winter Nights: Memoirs of a Jewish Family in a Galician Township, and most recently Abraham Sutzkever's From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021).