What do we talk about when we talk about Jewish Modernism? On February 28, the Duke community was invited to explore the porous, intersecting, and ever-shifting boundaries of this question at the opening of the “Mapping Jewish Modernism” exhibit. The exhibit, housed at the Mary Duke Biddle Room between February 9 and August 10, displays key moments and figures in the history of Jewish modernism as curated by Duke and UNC students. The objects on display were the result of the work conducted by these students in Kata Gellen and Saskia Ziolkowski’s eponymous class, taught in Spring 2023.

Using materials from Rubenstein’s rare books collections, the students’ projects showcase the diversity and global expanse of Jewish life and culture in the 20th century. Some pieces map the influence of Jewish thought in modernist literature and art, including by unearthing the Jewish elements embedded in James Joyce’s Ulysses or in the creation of Hogarth Press in London by Virginia and Leonard Woolf.  The exhibit is a testament to the enduring legacy of Jewish writing in Western literature and beyond: from Franz Kafka and Stefan Zweig in Europe to Philip Roth and Alan Ginsberg in the U.S. In fact, a copy of Ginsberg’s poem Kaddish was on display at the exhibit.

The exhibition explores also Jewishness at the margins of and beyond Europe. There are artifacts that testify to the presence of Jewish communities in the remote villages of Ethiopia whose isolation provided fertile ground for the conservation and reinterpretation of Jewish traditions.  Other items recount the history of the founding of Birobidzhan, a town in the far east portion of the former Soviet Union (today’s Russia) that became the country’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast. A series of prints made by Chicago artists to support Birobidzhan reflect the utopian aspirations of the community and its significance for Jews around the world.

Across these texts and objects, the exhibition “Mapping Jewish Modernism” shows how important Jewish history and thought, broadly conceived, was for the birth and promulgation of the modernist movement on a transnational scale. The exhibition makes a clear case that this influence was due both to the global reach of the Jewish diaspora, and the affinity that many non-Jewish writers and thinkers demonstrate for Jewish intellectual history, including Jewish hermeneutics. This latter is also the argument put forward by Yitzhak Lewis whose lecture, “Reading Globally: Redrawing the Map of Jewish Modernism,” looks at the influence of Jewish literature and critical traditions across three continents.

Yitzhak Lewis is an assistant professor of the Humanities at Duke Kushnan, where he works on Hebrew, Spanish, and Yiddish literatures, as well as literary theory and world literature. Lewis is the author of A Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity (SUNY Press, 2020) and his new book on Borges’s ties to Kabbalah and other Jewish traditions is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press. Along with a team of undergraduate research assistants at Duke Kushnan, in recent years Lewis has spearheaded a project tracing the reception of Yiddish literature in China. Building on these interconnected research strands, Lewis’ lecture at Duke focused precisely on the role that Jewish thought has played in the works of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges and Chinese novelist Mao Dun.

Referring to the concept of “mapping” that guided the exhibition, Lewis considered the insufficiency of current cartographic frameworks that attempt to draw boundaries around Jewish textual practices and what Jewish modernism entails. Untethering these practices from specific communities or nations, Lewis suggests instead that the category of the “Judaic” need not be only a genetic affinity, but also an affective one. This is the case for Borges, whose short stories and literary criticism are rife with references to Jewish traditions. Lewis explores the breadth of Borges’ engagement with Jewishness, including the tension that arises due to Borges’ insistence of the purity of classical Jewish texts and his rejection of modern Jewish literature. In this sense, Lewis reads Borges’ affinity for Jewish literature as arising also from something other than aesthetic appreciation. For Lewis, while we see Borges as a canonical writer, his position within 20th century modernism is not an easily definable one. Considering the way that Jewishness is conceptualized as an emblematic Other that exemplifies the alienation at the heart of 20th century modernism, so Borges’ position in the literary landscape is one of tension rather than easy belonging. According to Lewis, this aspect of Borges’ relationship to Jewishness is as crucial as the writer’s direct engagement with Jewish thought.

In his lecture, Lewis spoke also of the research he, collaborator Anruo Bao, and his students have conducted on the reception of Yiddish literature in China, mainly through the work of novelist Mao Dun (1896-1981). Mao Dun was instrumental to the translation and promulgation of Yiddish literature in China, as in 1921 he penned an article on “A Survey of New Jewish Literature.”  As in the case of Borges, the affective affinity that Mao Dun establishes with Jewishness works along two planes: it is both material, and ideological. According to Lewis, Mao Dun found inspiration in the trajectory of Yiddish language and literature as a budding movement that was trying to establish its own independent identity apart from Hebrew. Mao Dun noticed strong parallels to China’s own trajectory and contemporary political moment, rooted in the rejection of Western hegemony. China’s national revival, as with Yiddish culture, relied on language and literature to shape national consciousness. In this sense, Mao Dun was also taken by the idea of Yiddish as a colloquial and everyday language, an aspect crucial to the creation of a literature accessible to the masses.

Both Lewis’ lecture and the “Mapping Jewish Modernism” exhibit reveal the symbiotic relationship between Jewishness and modernism. In some instances, this relationship is one of direct influence: how Jewish textual and religious practices have shaped both Western and non-Western writers and thinkers. But as Lewis argues, Jewish modernism is also about engaging with Jewish literary and textual practices as a form of Modernist expression. During his lecture, Lewis references several moments of misunderstanding and mistranslations in the works of Borges and Mao Dun, as these authors engage with traditions that are not their own. But accuracy of understanding is less important than the desire and openness to Jewish traditions, and their application to these writers’ poetics and politics. In this sense, Lewis presents a thought-provoking opportunity to any project that contends with the circulation of literature and art in a multiplicity of languages and cultures: we must reinterpret the very concept of the map, and thinking of mapping not as fixing boundaries, but rather as attempts at mapping encounters.