Hope and Fear: Y. L. Peretz and the Forging of Modern Jewish Culture

Symposium Presented in honor of the 100th anniversary of Y.L. Peretz’s death. Watch the video

Y. L. Peretz (1852-1915) was the father of the Yiddish cultural revolution that transformed Jewish life in the early 20th century. The first to bring high literary talent to the workers’ movement, the first to use Jewish folklore for literary creation and the first Jewish cultural figure to enlist in electoral politics, Peretz championed a culture that embraced both tradition and modernist invention, and fought for its right to flourish in dangerous times.

Keynote Lecture
Hope and Fear: Y. L. Peretz and the Forging of Modern Jewish Culture
Michael Steinlauf (Gratz College)

Peretz’s Jewish Comedy
Jeremy Dauber (Columbia University)

Hasidism and Beyond: Peretz between Yiddish and Hebrew
Ken Frieden (Syracuse University)

Why Y. L. Peretz Isn’t Funny
Martin Peretz (Harvard University, Emeritus)

About the Participants

Jeremy Dauber is a professor of Yiddish literature at Columbia University, where he also serves as director of its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and teaches in the American Studies program. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard and his doctorate from the University of Oxford, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. His previous books include In the Demon's Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern (Yale University Press) and Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Stanford University Press). He frequently lectures on topics related to Jewish literature, history, humor, and popular culture at the 92nd Street Y and other venues throughout the United States. 

Ken Frieden is the B. G. Rudolph Professor of Judaic Studies at Syracuse University. His books include Classic Yiddish Fiction (SUNY Press) and anthologies of Yiddish literature in translation, such as Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler (Random House) and Classic Yiddish Stories (Syracuse University Press). He has been a visiting professor at the universities in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Heidelberg, and UC Davis; he has been a research fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, at the Free University of Berlin, and at Harvard. At Syracuse University Press, Frieden edits the series on Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art. He translates from Yiddish and Hebrew and has edited collections of short stories by the Israeli authors Etgar Keret (Four Stories) and David Ehrlich (Who Will Die Last). He recently completed a book on sea tales at the source of Jewish fiction.

Martin Peretz was raised in a Yiddishist household in New York, attending Sholem Aleichem Folk Shul #45, the Sholem Aleichem Mittelshul and the Jewish Teachers Seminary, where he studied with Shmuel Niger and Philip Friedman. Peretz studied history at Brandeis University and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. A lecturer at Harvard for nearly 50 years, Peretz endowed the university’s Martin Peretz Chair in Yiddish Literature, whose first incumbent was Ruth Wisse. From 1973-2011, Peretz was the editor-in-chief of The New Republic. Peretz is politically active in the defense of Israel and is currently working on a memoir, The Book of Grudges and Other Loves. He is the father of two children: Jesse, a film director and Evegenia, a journalist and the grandfather of five. In 1952, Peretz spoke at the 100th anniversary of Y. L. Peretz’s birth and dedication of I. L. Peretz Square on the Lower East Side. He is a trustee of YIVO.

Michael Steinlauf is professor of history and director of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program at Gratz College in Philadelphia. He is the author of Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse University Press) and contributing editor to the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. His writings have been translated into Hebrew, Polish, German and Italian. Steinlauf is also active in various kinds of Jewish memory work in Poland and has served as chief historical advisor and curator of modern Jewish culture for the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which recently opened in Warsaw. He is currently at work on a study of the Yiddish writer and activist Y. L. Peretz.