Borges and the Jews

This is a seminar course and enrollment will be capped at around 25 students.

Instructor: Ilan Stavans

Throughout his life, Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina, 1899-1986), arguably the most important Latin American writer of the twentieth century, found inspiration in Jewish themes and motifs. His interests went from Kabbalah and Spinoza to Kafka, Buber, and Agnon. He wrote about the Jewish agricultural colonies in the Pampas, opposed Nazism, manifested himself against Perón, decried anti-Semitism, and wrote works like “The Aleph,” “Emma Zunz,” “Death and the Compass,” “The Secret Miracle,” and “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.” He visited Israel on a couple of occasions, including one to receive the Jerusalem Prize. One of his mentors was Alberto Gerchunoff and his friends included Gershom Scholem. Through in-depth analysis of a selection of Borges’s stories, essays, poetry, and lectures, this course examines his Judeophilia and the reaction it received from his contemporaries.

Course Materials:
Students should purchase these books before the first day of class:

• Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Eliot Weinberger (Purchase)
• Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Alexander Coleman (Purchase)
• Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley (Purchase)
• Borges, the Jew by Ilan Stavans (Purchase)

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American, and Latino Cultures at Amherst College, publisher of Restless Books, host of NPR’s podcast In Contrast, and a regular contributor to the New York Times en Español. An international bestselling author, his books include On Borrowed Words (2000), Spanglish (2002), Dictionary Days (2010), and Quixote (2015). Among his graphic novels are Latino USA: A Cartoon History (2000), El Iluminado (2012), Angelitos (2017), and an adaptation of Don Quixote of La Mancha (2018). He is the editor of, among others, The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998), The Schocken Book of Sephardic Literature (2008), Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2011), Becoming Americans (2013), and Oy Caramba!: An Anthology of Jewish Stories from Latin America (2017). His work, adapted into theater, TV, film, and radio, has been translated into twenty languages.

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