Yiddish Poetry and Politics

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

Instructor: Anita Norich

Yiddish American poetry was once called “the rhyme department of the Jewish labor movement.” Zishe Landau, who coined the phrase, meant it disparagingly, but in this mini-course we will reconsider the political content and context of a range of works and consider a range of questions. What effect can political poetry have? How were the hopes for a “nayer, frayer tsayt” [a new, free time] expressed? How did these writers respond to the horrors of lynching, or the trial of the Scottsboro Boys? What is the connection between poetry and workers’ movements? What does “Jewish geography” in the 20th century mean to writers who wrote about both emigration and immigration? How did so many of these poems become songs?

We’ll divide the course into three sections: one week will be devoted to labor and protest, one to race relations, and one to the politics of places (Israel, the “Old Country,” the U.S.). Authors to be considered include Dovid Edelshtat, Yankev Glatshteyn, Moyshe Leyb Halpern, Aaron Kurtz, Malke Lee, Esther Shumyatsher, Dora Teitelbaum, Berysh Vaynshteyn, Chaim Zhitlowsky, and more. All readings will be in English, and Yiddish texts, songs, and videos will be provided for those who wish to have them.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally to students throughout the class.

Anita Norich is the Tikva Frymer-Kensky Collegiate Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century (2013), Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust (2007), The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (1991); and co-editor of Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (2016), Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext (2008), and Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures (1992). She translates Yiddish literature, and teaches, lectures, and publishes on a range of topics concerning modern Jewish cultures, Yiddish language and literature, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature.

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