Modern Jewish Identity in the Age of Empire

Join YIVO for a conversation with Ofer Dynes and Svetlana Natkovich exploring two new books that examine the emergence of modern Jewish identity through literature, politics, and self-expression. Dynes’ The Fiction of the State: The Partitions of Poland and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature locates the origins of modern Jewish literature within the Partitions of Poland during the late eighteenth century and argues that literature became a central venue for reflecting on the new political order during a time when most forms of political expression were banned. Rather than as an internal Jewish struggle between tradition and modernity, he presents Hebrew and Yiddish literature as a field of negotiation among multiple local and imperial belongings.

Natkovich’s Questionable People: Inventing Modern Jewish Selves in the Russian Empire, 1860–1890 explores how the maskilim used self-expression, fashion, dress, and their artistic work to define themselves. Differentiating themselves from what came before, maskilim crafted Jewish identities within a modernizing Russia. Natkovich analyzes the maskilim as a group existing between social and economic classes in a time of change, a generation of thinkers forced to radically assert their selfhoods.

Moderated by Jeremy Dauber, this discussion will explore how Jewish writers and thinkers navigated shifting political and social landscapes.