Jewish Italian Literary Continuities and Contiguities

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

This panel offers a transhistorical approach to the continuities and contiguities of Jewish Italian literature, which tends to be left out of field-forming studies, from Ruth Wisse’s THE MODERN JEWISH CANON to Dan Miron’s FROM CONTINUITY TO CONTIGUITY. While many of the same frameworks are productive in considering Jewish Italian literature, the literature of Italian Jews, who have lived continuously in the peninsula from before antiquity to today, also challenge some of the guiding narratives of Jewish literary studies, as well as Italian literary studies. This panel will emphasize the consistent multiculturalism of Jewish Italian works, due to both regional exchanges and continuous transnational movements, which can be distinguished from larger migration stories, often told about Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and English Jewish literary traditions. While the panel will end with contemporary work, it also engages medieval, nineteenth-century, and twentieth-century Italian literature in order to ask what considering Jewish Italian literature over time reveals about the constructions of literary histories, ideas of national identity, and Jewish Italian experiences. This panel aims to build on current debates in Jewish literary studies and Italian literary studies and put them in conversation with each other through specific cases, medieval Sicily, Jewish Italian Writers and the Dreyfus Affair, and Yiddish traces in Italian literature. The panel both questions who is excluded from Italian literary discussions, despite writing in Italian, and also who is excluded from many Jewish literary discussions. While many narratives of Jewish literature end with the United States and Israel, this panel investigates what new questions arise when Italian literature is made the center of examination.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish Literature and Culture

Chair

• Giacomo Loi, University of Haifa Israel

Individual Presentations

• Jewish Literary Experimentation in Medieval Sicily - Isabelle Levy, Columbia University

• Nineteenth-Century Jewish Italian Writers and the Dreyfus Affair - Gabriella Romani, Seton Hall University

• Yiddish in Contemporary Italian Literature - Saskia Ziolkowski, Duke University

Respondent

• Dario Miccoli

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 08