After attending the first and second panels of the Jewish Literature, World Literature conference, there were many takeaways that I was presented with as well as a mass of new information that I learned, primarily from Dr. Schachter’s and Dr. Levy’s talks. A recurring theme for me through both of these presentations was the role of women in Judaism and in Jewish culture and how they are portrayed in literature. Dr. Schachter mentioned that Jewish women writers themselves were often seen as “hysterical or historical”, and I find this to be an accurate description of many women writers I’ve read from the age of revolution up until the modern era. Names who are widely read now such as Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath, who is the namesake of the phenomenon that states poets are more susceptible to mental illness than other creative writers, were all women who were seen as emotionally and mentally distraught, yet still made their way into copious literary canons today. I believe that the racialization of Jewish women authors in particular also added to such a categorization and this drew parallels for me within the literature of African-American women writers who were often seen as too radical or dismissed as serious authors altogether. I was quite pleased when Dr. Schachter compared Lorraine Hansberry and Tillie Olsen in her presentation because this reflected very similarly to the comparison I was making on my own as a graduate student in German Studies who often looks at the intersections of the African American and Afro-German diasporas through music and literature. From listening to Dr. Schachter, something I would communicate to a broader audience is not only the affinities that women writers of other backgrounds share with Jewish women, but also how stories of Jewishness intersect with other marginalized groups. For example, this conference, I was unaware that Lorraine Hansberry had created a play with a Jewish protagonist and having been written by a Black woman who has faced her own share of discrimination in 1950’s America, I can imagine the analogies Hansberry was able to create in her work.

Since I am unfamiliar with the plot of this play, my curiosity would be to discover what issues faced by the Jewish characters can also be juxtaposed onto Hansberry’s own experiences and that of the experiences of the African American community as well. To relate this to Mapping Jewish Modernism, I feel as if this is a different type of mapping Jewishness- not necessarily referring to geographical regions, but looking at what spaces Jewishness also permeates on a social level when it comes to interaction with other minority groups in one area. This subject is discussed in Jewish literature specifically concerning the inhabitation of ghettos and what communities this encompasses in different parts of the world. In this same vein, another linguistic intersection that was new to me was the language of Ladino. I had never heard of this before and now I am anxious to learn about the Jewish experiences in Hispanic and Latin American cultures. As a Spanish speaker, I could understand small excerpts of Ladino that were shared by Dr. Levy and Dr. Balbuena and it felt similarly to how I can also understand certain words in Yiddish due to my knowledge of German. I am vaguely aware of Jewish authors that lived in Brazil and wrote in Portuguese, but I was not aware that Ladino was also a language that emerged from Jewish migration. My greatest takeaway from the Jewish Literature, World Literature conference is that there are many more overlaps with my own research interests and cultures with Jewishness and Jewish culture than I had initially expected. This excites me for future topics on Jewishness that I will learn about and what will continue to be covered via Mapping Jewish Modernism, as I will be looking for more ways to relate to Jewish literature through my own background as a student and an academic.