In the summer of 1929, a week of violence in Mandate Palestine left hundreds of Jews and Arabs dead and many more wounded. These events, which began with protests in Jerusalem, divided the world-wide Jewish Left into those who sympathized with the Arabs and those who condemned the violence as a new manifestation of the east European anti-Jewish pogrom. In this talk, Amelia Glaser will discuss how these events echoed in the transnational community of Yiddish poets, and will analyze poetry written in support of each side. The Yiddish poetry devoted to the clashes in Palestine a century ago help to illuminate how complex ideologies have long defined identity and community.

Amelia Glaser is Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, where she holds the Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (Northwestern U.P., 2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard UP, 2020). She is the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford U.P., 2015) and, with Steven Lee, Comintern Aesthetics (U. Toronto Press, 2020). She is also a translator from, primarily, Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian. She is currently writing about contemporary Ukrainian poetry.