The Workers Circle is pleased to present an interactive follow-up to our popular three-part series hosted by Anthony Russell, In The Midst, an exploration of systemic racism in the United States as depicted through three moments in Yiddish culture: an avant play, a Soviet-era poem and the diverse viewpoints of the Yiddish press.
Featuring panelists from all three programs in the series, this follow-up program is an opportunity for panelists to answer questions raised during the series itself and to engage with your questions about the phenomenon of systemic racism in the US as viewed through the lens of Yiddish culture.
Moderated by Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell.
About our panelists:
Alyssa Quint is Leo Charney Visiting Fellow at the Center for Israel Studies at Yeshiva University. She is the co-editor of Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon (Harvard University Press, 2013) and (with Miryem-Khaye Seigel) a two-volume collection of plays, essays, and translated documents called Women on the Yiddish Stage (forthcoming from Syracuse University Press). She is the author of The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater (Indiana University Press, 2019), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Jordan Schnitzer Award. Besides numerous scholarly articles, Quint has written for The Forward and Tablet Magazine. She is at work on a critical edition of Avrom Goldfaden’s Shulamis (with Ronald Robboy and Nahma Sandrow) and Leyb Malakh’s Mississippi, a Yiddish play about the Scottsboro Boys.
Eli Rosenblatt received his PhD in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. His dissertation, titled “Enlightening the Skin: Travel, Racial Language, and Rabbinic Intertextuality in Modern Yiddish Literature,” explored “Black-Jewish Relations” as an imagined and imaginative construct in Eastern European Jewish literature and culture. His writing and translations have appeared in Midrasz, In Geveb, CritCom, Tablet, and the Forward. An article and translation regarding modern Jewish attitudes towards wealth, poverty, and modern slavery is forthcoming from Brown Judaic Studies.
Maia Evrona is a poet, writer, and translator. Her translations of Yoysef Kerler were awarded a 2019 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellowship. She also received fellowships for her translations of Avrom Sutzkever from the NEA and the American Literary Translators Association. Her poetry was recently supported with the inaugural joint Spain-Greece Fulbright Scholar Award.
Amelia Glaser received a BA from Oberlin College in Comparative Literature in1997, an MSt. from the University of Oxford in Yiddish in 2000, and a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 2004. She held fellowships at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and was a lecturer in Jewish Studies and at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University before joining UCSD's Literature Department in 2006. Her research and teaching interests include Russian literature and film, transnational Jewish literature, the literatures of Ukraine, the literature of immigration to the US, the Russian critical tradition, and translation theory and practice.
Jonah S. Boyarin is a white, anti-racist educator and writer, born-and-raised New Yorker, and Yiddish speaker. He co-founded the country’s first Diversity and Equity Program at a Jewish day school, at JCHS of the Bay, and serves as the Jewish Community Liaison for the New York City Commission on Human Rights. Jonah was named by the Jewish Week as one of 2020’s “36 under 36.”
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