I specialize in Jewish Studies, Gender Studies, and labor history, with particular attention to the subjects of statelessness, anti-statism, and borderlands literature.
My forthcoming book is titled Any Minute Now The World Streams Over Its Border!: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature (Yale University Press). Transnational in scope, this project examines the literary production, language politics, and religious thought of Jewish anarchist movements from 1870 to the present in Moscow, Tel Aviv, London, Buenos Aires, New York City, and elsewhere. The book’s archive includes early Proletarian (svetshop) poetry, talmudic commentary, political theology, and Modernist literature.
My second current project is a study of Polish writer, philosopher, and art critic Dvoyre Fogel. Fogel’s work exemplifies Cubist-Constructivist experimentation, translating approaches developed in photography, film, and painting into literature. Hers is a poetics of expectancy, repetition, montage, and myth—as one of her manifesto hails “the specific beauty of objectivity” (di spetsifishe sheynkeyt fun zakhlekhkeyt). Fogel’s aesthetic theory and practice anticipated postwar experimental representations of domestic temporality and women’s labor. As a Yiddish Book Center fellow, I translated her poetry collection Manekinen (Mannequins, 1934) from the Yiddish. I am currently organizing a symposium on Fogel and her circle at U-Chicago in April 2019.
My other ongoing projects include a comparative study of racialization, indigeneity, and colonial education in Puerto Rico and Native American residential schools in the mainland US.
I have also worked as a muralist, community organizer, and set designer.
Selected Publications
Any Minute Now the World Streams Over Its Border!: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature. Forthcoming with Yale University Press.
“The Horizon Blossoms and the Borders Vanish: Anarchist Diasporism and Perets Markish’s Poetry.” Jewish Quarterly Review.
“Circular Landscapes: Commodity and Embodiment in Dvoyre Fogel’s Yiddish Poetry.” Nashim.
"The Anarchist Sage (Der Go'en Anarkhist): Philology and the Radical Ethics of Rabbi Dr. Yankev-Meir Zalkind.” In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.
“'To Those Who Came Before, We Say Pa'lante': Women in the Puerto Rican Independence Movement.” With Emma Torres. Feminisms in Motion: A Decade of Intersectional Feminist Media (AK Press)
Courses Taught
- Poetry and the Human (Core Sequence)
- Gender and Embodiment in Yiddish Literature
- Stateless Imaginations: Anarchism and Literature
- Language is Migrant: Yiddish Poetics of the Border
- Queer Jewish Literature
Affiliated Departments:
Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
Jewish Studies
Center for Sexuality and Gender Studies