Dates: Sunday, February 16 10am-5pm and Monday, February 17 10am-5pm
Location: Franke Institute for the Humanities
The conference Yiddish Ecologies: Velder, Felder, Berg un Tol will bring together students, artists and scholars to consider new questions relating ecology and Yiddish language and literature:
- What is Yiddish ecology, and how does translation engage it?
- How did Yiddish poets encounter and translate North and South American, European, SWANA, and other landscapes across genres?
- How does philology shape ecological thinking? How were poetic encounters with ecology shaped by Yiddish language, philology, and linguistics?
- How did poets draw from vocabularies of nature – vernacular, scientific, botanical – to represent their experience of the landscape?
- How did Yiddish writers adapt forms (such as pastorals, hymns of praise for creation, or secular lyrics) to represent new environments?
- How might contemporary eco-criticism shed light on the corpus of Jewish writing about land?
- How are animals and animality represented in Yiddish literature?
- How are representations of land gendered in Yiddish verse?
- How do poets translate and transpose human entanglement with ecological systems through migration narratives?
- How did Yiddish artists and writers represent the ecological effects of war and genocide?
- Is “Doikeyt” an ecological movement/aesthetic?
Panels will include discussions of Eco-Feminism, Doikayt and Postcolonial Thought, Landscape Poetics, and others.
This event is sponsored by the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, and the Department of Comparative Literature.