Zoom Book Discussion: "Jewish Primitivism" by Samuel Spinner

Description

Join a virtual discussion of Assistant Professor Samuel Spinner's new book, Jewish Primitivism, hosted by the Stulman Program in Jewish Studies, with commentary from Matthew Handelman, associate professor of German at Michigan State University, and Barbara Mann, professor of Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Spinner is the chair in Yiddish language, literature, and culture in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.

About the book:

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-Scholer, and Mo'f Ver turned primitivism — the European fascination with and denigration of non-Western peoples — onto 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.