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Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poets and Social Justice

A Conversation with Amelia Glaser

A Public Webinar Discussion
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
7:00pm-9:00pm EDT

Register for Event


Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth― African Americans, Spanish Republicans, and others―in Yiddish verse. In her new book, Songs in Dark Times, Amelia Glaser examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed.

Join us for a remote roundtable discussion with Amelia Glaser on October 21 at 7 pm EDT. Participants will be:

Amelia Glaser

Amelia Glaser is a professor of comparative literature at the University of California at San Diego. Her authored and edited books include: Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets; Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising; Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands; and Songs from Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine.

Murav

Harriet Murav is the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois. Her books include: Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels & the Poetics of Cultural Critique;; Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner; Music From a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia; and David Bergelson’s Strange New World: Untimeliness and Futurity.

Dragan Kujundžić is a professor in the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. Apart from numerous edited volumes and several documentary films, his publications include the monographs Critical Exercises; The Returns of History; Tongue in Heat; Out of Interculturality (2016). His film, The First Sail: J. Hillis Miller; has been released together with the film-book (Kujundžić, Hillis Miller, et. al.), 2015.

Roy Holler

Roy Holler is an assistant professor of Israel Studies in the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. His current book project, All Things Must Pass: Negotiating Identity/Difference in Modern Hebrew Literature, explores he phenomenon of passing in a comparative context. Roy’s work on Israeli and African American literatures awarded him with the 2020 Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Prize by Columbia University and Fordham University.

Jack Kugelmass is the Melton Legislative Professor at the University of Florida and a cultural anthropologist. He has published broadly on Yiddish literature, Holocaust memory in Poland, and Jewish culture in the US. His books include From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (1998) and Key Texts in American Jewish Culture (2003).