Biography
I am a scholar of Comparative Literature specializing in Jewish Studies. My current work examines how Yiddish literature was informed by mass migration and movements for human rights beyond the frames of statism and nationalism.
My first monograph, Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature (2024), historicizes how Yiddish literary aesthetics from romanticism to modernism were shaped by mass migration, deportation, and detention. This approach contributes to the study of diaspora by focusing on the refugee as poetic thinker; by documenting movements for human rights outside the frames of statism and nationalism; and by examining the impact of border law and censorship on transnational literary cultures.
The book documents how Yiddish radicals translated and resignified “classical” European anarchism into new forms of anarchist diasporism. I trace the transit of Jewish anarchist literature from nineteenth-century Russian Proletarian immigrant poets through the avant-garde modernisms of Warsaw, Chicago, and London to contemporary antifascist composers. Chapters study the subversive Soviet epic poemas of Peretz Markish, the feminist journalism and poetry of Anna Margolin, the linguistic projects of Alexander Harkavy, the early post-Haymarket prose of Malka Heifetz Tussman, and other works. The book both documents anarchism’s substantial contributions to labor history and uses anarchist theoretical insights as a lens for reading working-class literature.
My current book project is A Bear Flew By: Animality in Yiddish Arts and Literature (Rutgers University Press), which advances new readings of animality, disability, gender, and racialization within Ashkenazi literature, folk song, and visual art. The bear, long considered humans’ closest ‘next of kin,’ is a shapeshifting figure in Yiddish arts and literature, appearing as a metaphor for creativity, philosophical encounter with the nonhuman, political allegory for otherness, and emblem of the sublime. Centering multispecies kinship and ethics, A Bear Flew By traces the figure of the bear to investigate key theories of mimesis, prosthesis, and metamorphosis. The book's subjects include the writers Itzik Kipnis and Moyshe Kulbak, the artists Sara Shor, Marc Chagall, and Yosef Chaikov, and others. These books reveal the significance of anarchist, antifascist, and ecological thought and organizing in the development of modern Jewish literature.
In winter 2025, I organized the multiday conference Yiddish Ecologies, which featured panels on Doikeyt and Postcolonialism, Ecological History, Poetics of Landscape, and others. I am currently editing a volume to further the study of Yiddish Ecologies.
Yiddish Ecologies: Velder, Felder, Berg un Tol
Yiddish Ecologies, Part II: ‘Wonder-Woods’ — The Ecologies of Avrom Sutzkever, Poet and Partisan
With the labor historian Kenyon Zimmer (UT Arlington), I edited With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism (University of Illinois Press), the first book-length study of transnational, multilingual Jewish anarchism.
My research has examined the Polish writer, philosopher, and art critic Debora Vogel (also written Dvoyre Fogel, 1900-1942). Vogel’s aesthetic theory and practice anticipated postwar experimental representations of domestic temporality and women’s labor. In addition to the article “Circular Landscapes: Montage and Myth in Dvoyre Fogel's Yiddish Poetry” (Nashim 2019), I translated her poetry collection Manekinen (Mannequins, 1934), organized a Vogel symposium at U-Chicago, and co-edited a special issue of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies dedicated to her work.
Other recent articles on the aesthetics and archives of Jewish antifascist literature include "The Anarchist Sage/Der Goen Anarkhist: Rabbi Yankev-Meir Zalkind and Religious Genealogies of Anarchism"; a study of Yankev Meir Zalkind, the rabbi, antimilitarist, and polyglot philologist who translated the Talmud (In Geveb, 2019). My research on Peretz Markish includes a study and translation of Der fertsikyeriker man (“The Man of Forty”), the Expressionist poet’s magnum opus smuggled out hours before his arrest by Stalin’s police (Jewish Quarterly Review 2020).
Ongoing projects include a comparative study of racialization, indigeneity, and colonial education in Puerto Rico and Native American residential schools in the United States.
I serve on the International Editorial Board for Manchester University Press' Contemporary Anarchist Studies Series. I have held fellowships at the Frankel Center of the University of Michigan, National Yiddish Book Center, the Joseph A. Labadie Collection in Ann Arbor, and elsewhere. I have also worked as a muralist, community organizer, and set designer.
Affiliated Departments:
Associate Member of the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity.
Affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies; the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies; and the Slavic Department.
Selected Publications
A Bear Flew By: Animality in Yiddish Arts and Literature. Rutgers University Press, forthcoming.
“In Bahnhof Zoo, Staring Europe in the Face”: Bears and Multispecies Kinship in Yiddish Art and Literature. Comparative Literature, forthcoming.
“Too Muchness, or Queer Poetic Excess.” Oxford Handbook of Queer Modernisms. Edited by Juno Richards, Octavio González, Hannah Freed-Thall. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
“Encountering Pseudo-Territory,” ArtsEverywhere, November 2022. https://www.artseverywhere.ca/pseudo-territory/
Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature. Yale University Press (2024)
With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism. University of Illinois Press (2023)
In geveb Special Issue on Debora Vogel (Dvoyre Fogel), co-editor.
Montage-Murals: Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson’s “Present Figures” (Berlin 2021)
"Circular Landscapes: Montage and Myth in Dvoyre Fogel's Yiddish Poetry."
Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues. Number 35, Fall 5780/2019 pp. 40-73
"The Horizon Blossoms and the Borders Vanish: Peretz Markish's Poetry and Anarchist Diasporism." Jewish Quarterly Review, Volume 110, Number 3, Summer 2020, pp. 458-490
“'To Those Who Came Before, We Say Pa'lante': Women in the Puerto Rican Independence Movement.” With Emma Torres. Feminisms in Motion: A Decade of Intersectional Feminist Media (AK Press)
If you are unable to access any of my articles, you may request a pdf directly.
Courses Taught
- Poetry and the Human (Core Sequence)
- Gender and Translation
- Reading as a Writer: The Poetry and Politics of Walking
- Russian Civilizations (Core Sequence)
- Gender and Embodiment in Yiddish Literature
- Stateless Imaginations: Anarchism and Literature
- Language is Migrant: Yiddish Poetics of the Border
- Queer Jewish Literature
- Comparative Literature: Theory and Practice
