Thayer Building – Room 2022

"Can a Literary Mafia Affect Your Choice of Books?": Jews, Publishing, and American Literature Josh Lambert, Wellesley College   In the 1960s and 1970s, many American authors, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, complained about a “Jewish literary mafia.” While perniciously circulating antisemitic ideas, such claims also reflected the remarkable success of Jews in the U.S. publishing […]

Samuel J. Spinner The unlikely poetic relationship between the German poet Else Lasker-Schüler and the Yiddish and Hebrew poet Uri Zvi Grinberg spans the political range of Jewish primitivism from the bohemian left to the radical right. Aesthetic primitivism catalyzed Lasker-Schüler’s poetry and visual art and is most strikingly evident in the “Society of Savage […]