Can Jewish literature, transnational and multilingual, also be considered in the framework of, and central to, literary nationalisms? Does a double perspective furnish a better comparative approach to diasporic literatures?This collaborative panel was conceived by the Jewish American Literature Forum and the Global Literature Forum as an opportunity to investigate the formation of Jewish literature as a global and transnational literature, in dialogue with understandings of Jewish literature as participating in literary nation-building. This panel builds on emerging scholarly work that examines Jewish literature, long understood as diasporic and transnational, in the context of new understandings of “world” literature, which have to some extent excluded discussions of Jewish literature, understanding it to be “a marginal phenomenon limited to the small pantheon of major-language Jewish writers,” as Lital Levy and Alison Schachter wrote in PMLA in 2015 (“Jewish Literature/World Literature: Between the Local and the Global,” 130:1, 105). Levy and Schachter argue alternatively that the “rich, multilingual body of modern Jewish writing exemplifies the dynamic interaction of diverse literary cultures along circuits of exchange in the so-called global peripheries” (105).

For instance, Yiddish writers in Latin America understood themselves as part of a Yiddish literary network with diasporic nationalist underpinnings (what Rachelle Grossman, a participant in our panel, calls “Yiddishland”), but also self-consciously participated in literary formations of local nationalisms in Mexico, Cuba and Argentina.

This panel aims to bring together in timely fashion the discussion of Jewish literature as world literature, with Jewish literatures as engaging in complex ways with the nation-state. In doing so, our participants traverse boundaries between different historical moments, geographic locations, and linguistic contexts. Crucial to these explorations is the opening up definitions of key terms, often treated as self-evident: “Jewish,” “American,” “Global,” and even “Literature.” Our panel proposal, distributed broadly through the MLA website, garnered thirteen submissions, clearly striking a responsive chord with the work in which many scholars are engaged. We have selected three papers that represent a fascinating diversity of approaches, disciplinary identities, and institutional and geographical contexts, that will encourage robust dialogue. We will hold all to a strict fifteen-minute limit, thus leaving time for discussion and collaborative exploration.

Our first panelist, Ben Fried explores the parallel migrant trajectories, and combined creative impact, of Canadian writer Mordechai Richler and migrant publisher André Deutsch, considering their relationship and collaboration during their sojourns in postwar multinational London among its network of Canadian, Caribbean, and African writers, and the institutional transformations that contributed to the creation of “Commonwealth Literature.” Our second speaker, Rachelle Grossman, considers postwar Yiddish and how translation operates in tension with the worldliness of Yiddish. Decreasing linguistic mastery led to new initiatives to translate a Yiddish canon into the everyday languages of a postwar-born generation. Comparing postwar Yiddish translations in Spanish, Polish, and English, three target languages that themselves connote different relative positions of dominance and marginality within a global literary system, Grossman explores the ways Yiddish translation “localized” this literature even as it problematized “Yiddishland” as a conceptual space made concrete through the circulation of literature. Finally, our third speaker, Wendy Sun, undertakes a comparative study of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Chinese graphic narrative A Jewish Girl in Shanghai, written by Wu Lin and illustrated by He Youzhi, to explore how these graphic novels, each from distinct cultural and linguistic contexts, contribute to and expand the concept of literary nationalism by embedding personal and collective histories within a global narrative framework. Sun asks whether a dual perspective – a focus on both the Holocaust’s epicenter and its reverberations in East Asian contexts -- offers unique insights into the broader phenomena of cultural hybridity and global interconnectedness.

Our collaborative panel demonstrates our commitment to opening up new approaches to and areas of inquiry within Jewish literary studies as well as in comparative and global literary studies more broadly, through an expansive understanding of Americanness (hemispheric and transatlantic), as well as Jewishness and Jewish creative expression.