Office Hours: Tuesdays, 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m., Wednesdays, 2:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m., and by appointment

Specialties: German, Yiddish, and comparative literature since the late 18th century, German-Jewish culture, literary theory, translation and transmission of knowledge and texts

INTERESTS

German, Yiddish, and comparative literature since the late 18th century, German-Jewish culture, literary theory, translation and transmission of knowledge and texts

Graduate:

• Jews, Germans and the Response to Modernity
• Memory and Recollection in the Age of Goethe
• Intellectual History II (i.e. from Hegel to Habermas)
• Post-Wall German Literature

Undergraduate:

• German Jewish Culture and History (co-taught w/Gabriel Finder)
• The Faust Legend in European Literature (cross-listed in Comparative Literature)
• Faust and Frankenstein
• Literary Responses to the Holocaust (cross-listed in Comparative Literature)
• Jewish Culture and History in Eastern Europe (co-taught w/Gabriel Finder)
• Elementary Yiddish Language and Culture

BOOKS

The Discourse on Yiddish in German Literature from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (Camden House, 2000)

Translator, Christian Wiese. The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas. Brandeis UP 2007.

Co-editor, with Petra Ernst and Ulrich Wyrwa. The Great War: Reflections, Experiences and Memories of German and Habsburg Jews (1914 - 1918). Spec. Issue of: Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History: Journal of Fondazione CDEC. N. 9 October 2016; url: www.quest-cdecjournal.it/

BOOK MANUSCRIPTS IN PROGRESS

The Yiddish Turn in German Jewish Culture: A Study in Translation and Knowledge of the East

ARTICLES

Select articles

“Vom Schtetl zum Ghetto. Oder wie man einst in Deutschland die jiddische Kultur(v)erkannte.” Konzepte von Ehre und Anerkennung aus diversitätstheoretischer Perspektive, edited by Christine Kanz und Ulrike Stamm. Film – Medium – Diskurs Series. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2017 (forthcoming).

“France as Wahlheimat for Two German Jews: Heinrich Heine and Walter Benjamin,” under submission for a volume on the subject of Wahlheimat/Spiritual/Elective Homelands, ed. Richard I. Cohen and Asher Biemann.

“Heine’s Disparate Legacies: A Response to Jeffrey Sammons,” Nexus 3: Essays in German Jewish Studies. Ed. William C. Donahue and Martha Helfer. Special Section on Heinrich Heine. 2017: 41-48.

“Yiddish Writers / German Models in the Early Twentieth Century,” German Jewish Transnationalism, ed. Leslie Morris and Jay Howard Geller, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 66-90.

“From Shtetl to Ghetto: Recognizing Yiddish in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums,” in Naharaim: Zeitschrift für deutsch-jüdische Literatur und Kulturgeschichte Spec. Section: Yiddish-German relations. 10.2 (December 2016) 215-244.

“The Yiddish-German Connection: New Directions,” Poetics Today. 36:1.2 (June 2015) 59-110.

“The Dilemmas of Translation: Cultural Politics, German Jewish Identities, and Yiddish Literature around World War I,” European-Jewish Literatures and World War One, ed. Petra Ernst, vol. 1 of the Yearbook for European Jewish Literature Studies, Jahrbuch für europäisch-jüdische Literaturstudien 1 (2014): 78-99.

“Romanticism Rejected and Recovered: Heine and Germanistik in the Early Post-War Federal Republic of Germany,” Seminar: Spec. Issue: The New German Romanticism 50.3 (2014): 353-378.

“The Invention of Love? Or How Moyshe Leyb Halpern Read Heinrich Heine,” Leket: Yiddish Studies Today, ed. Marion Aptroot, Efrat Gal-Ed, R. Gruschka, S. Neuberg. Yiddish: Editions and Research Series. Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf UP, 2012. 129-52. [Discussed in the review of the volume in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 December 2012, p. N3]

“Émigré Intellectuals, Memory and the View of Kafka as Prophet of the Holocaust, ”Journal of the Kafka Society of America: New International Series 36 (2011-2012): 38-49.

“The Business of Memory: German Jewish Studies Today: Review Article,” Monatshefte 103.4 (2011)

“Translation and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Germany and North America,” in Trans-lation – Trans-nation – Trans-formation: Übersetzen und jüdische Kulturen, ed. Petra Ernst, Hans-Joachim Hahn, Daniel Hoffmann, Dorothea Salzer. Hanover, Germany: Studienverlag 2012. 167-80.

“Heinrich Heine, Berthold Auerbach, and the Question of Bildung in German and German Jewish Culture,” Yearbook of the Duke German Jewish Studies Workshop, ed. William C. Donahue and Martha Helfer,” Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies 1 (2011): 85-107.

“Fractured Histories: Heinrich Heine’s Responses to Violence and Revolution,” in Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture. Ed. Carl Niekerk and Stefani Engelstein. Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik 79. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2010. 67-87.

“Das Fortleben des Jiddischen vor und nach 1945: Übersetzungen und Transformationen,“ in Dialog der Disziplinen: Jüdische Studien und Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Eva Lezzi and Dorothea Seltzer. Minima Judaica 6. Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2009. 77-104.

“Pictures of Travel: Heine in America,” in German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation, ed. Lynne Tatlock and Matthew Erlin. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005.

“‘Die Beherrschung der Sprache’: Funktionen des Jiddischen in der deutschen Kultur von Heine bis Frenzel.” In: 1848 und das Versprechen der Moderne. Ed. Jürgen Fohrmann and Helmut Schneider. Königshausen und Neumann, 2003. 165-178.

“Heine and Jewish Culture: The Poetics of Appropriation.” In: A Companion to Heinrich Heine, ed. Roger Cook. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002. 251-282.

“From East to West: Translating Y. L. Peretz in Early 20th-Century Germany.” In Orality, Textuality, and the Materiality of Jewish Tradition: Representations and Transformations, ed. Israel Gershoni and Yaakov Elman. New Haven: Yale UP. 2000. 278-309.

“Wilhelm von Humboldt's Linguistic Ideology: The Problem of Pluralism and the  Absolute Difference of National Character - Or, where do the Jews fit in?” German Studies Review 20.1 (1997): 23-47.

“The Reception of Walter Benjamin in the Anglo-American Literary Institution.” The German Quarterly 65.3-4 (1992): 414-428.

BOOK REVIEWS

Review of Sven-Erik Rose, Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2014. 381 pp. Monatshefte, 108.3 (Fall 2016): 417-420.

Review of Jan Scheithauer, “Land der Philister”—”Land der Freiheit.” Jüdische, deutsche und französische Identitäten beim jungen Heine. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. Monatshefte 107.1 (Spring 2015).

Review of Dietmar Goltschnigg and Hartmut Steinecke, eds., Heine und die Nachwelt Geschichte seiner Wirkung in den deutschsprachigen Ländern. Texte und Kontexte, Analysen und Kommentare, 1856-2006. 3. vols. Berlin: Erich Schmidt: 2006-2011. In Monatshefte 104.3 (2012).

Review of Paul Reitter, The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2008, in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Winter 2010 issue, vol. 28, no. 2.

Review of Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews and The Claims of Modernity. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002. Modern Language Review 100.3 (2005): 860-62.

Review of Contemporary Jewish Writing in German: An Anthology, ed. Leslie Morris and Karen Remmler. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. Colloquia Germanica (Spring 2005).

Review of Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment. Ideas in Context Series. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (April 2004).

AWARDS, GRANTS AND HONORS

DAAD Research Award (Re-Visitation Program), 2011

Sesquicentennial Research Fellowship, University of Virginia, 2010-2011

Professor Bernard Choseed Memorial Fellow, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2006-2007

NEH Fellow, Summer Institute, “German & European Studies in the U.S.: Changing World, Shifting Narratives,” organized by U of Massachusetts Amherst, 2005         

Mead Endowment Teaching Award, 2003           

Fulbright Fellow, German Studies Seminar: “History and Memory: Jewish

Present and Past in Germany,” 2000

Fellow, Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 1995-1996

Fulbright Postdoctoral Research Grant – Israel Junior Researcher Award (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), 1992-1994

University of Texas Continuing Graduate Fellowship, 1991-1992

DAAD - Dissertation Research in Federal Republic of Germany, 1989-1990

University of Texas Continuing Graduate Fellowship, 1988-1989