Around the beginning of the 20th century Jewish writers and artists across Europe depicted fellow Jews as “primitive.” Figures as diverse as Franz Kafka, Y. L. Peretz, Else Lasker-Schüler, Der Nister, and Moï Ver turned primitivism – the European fascination with and denigration of non-Western peoples – on to themselves. Jewish Primitivism uncovers this phenomenon and explains how it was used to explore the urgent political and aesthetic issues surrounding Jewish identity in Europe. Showing how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between insider and outsider, cultured and “primitive,” colonizer and colonized, Jewish Primitivism offers a new assessment of European modernism and of modern Jewish culture.

Hybrid Event
South Thayer Building Room 2022
Register for the Zoom webinar at: https://myumi.ch/844Z6

Samuel Spinner is the Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Assistant Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Johns Hopkins University. His book Jewish Primitivism, on primitivism in modern Jewish literature, photography, and graphic art, was published in July 2021 by Stanford University Press. He is currently researching a book on the aesthetics of monumentality in Holocaust museums and literature. His work has appeared in PMLA, MLN, Prooftexts, and German Quarterly. Spinner is a co-editor of “German Jewish Cultures,” a book series published by Indiana University Press and serves as an editor of the Yiddish Studies journal In Geveb.