Borns Jewish Studies Program

My research focuses on the ways Jewish communities respond to catastrophe and major changes in their communities, especially the Jewish communities of the United States. I am especially interested in the relationship between literary production, especially poetry and fiction, speaks to and influences the ways Jewish communities understand their relationship to both history and religion -- how they fit themselves into big narratives of time and space and meaning. I am also a dedicated scholar of Yiddish literature and culture, especially in the United States.

My current project, American Yiddish Holocaust Poetry, examines the ways in which Yiddish-speaking writers in the United States responded to the Holocaust as an ongoing event, and confronted the extreme changes facing their community. These writers were highly aware both of their own relative safety and of the threat the Holocaust posed to Judaism and Jewish life in its entirety. Understanding the unfolding events within the contexts of Jewish history, literature, and theology, the authors I examine confront the question of what it means to maintain a Jewish communal identity and to imagine a future for the Jewish people from within that darkness and uncertainty. I show that these authors continually reflect on what it means to be witnesses to the destruction, and, as Jewish tradition dictates, speakers for a community under existential assault and that, in doing so, this wartime literature responds not just to the physical destruction of European Judaism, but to the radical dissolution of the foundations of modern Jewish identity.

I have also written more broadly about the reception history of the Holocaust in the United States. I am especially interested in the relationship between literature and popular culture and political discourse surrounding the Holocaust in the middle decades of the 20th century. In addition, I write regularly on teaching and pedagogy, with a special emphasis on accessible and inclusive classrooms and approaches to teaching.

My work has appeared in American Jewish Literature, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and a number of other academic journals and platforms, and edited volumes.