American Jewish Literature Working Group

The American Jewish Literature Working Group of the Grant Center at Tulane convened at the suggestion of Michael Cohen, and has been co-organized by Maeera Shreiber and Josh Lambert. The group has hosted a couple of scholarly gatherings, has gathered and published data about the subfield, and has convened a Zoom reading group for scholars in the field. 

First gathering, Tulane University, October 2022: 

For its first gathering, in October 2022, the working group invited senior scholars (i.e., those with tenure) to meet at the Grant Center at Tulane and share their thoughts on what pressing issues they see in the subfield. Before the meeting, a graduate student, Alex Ullman, gathered some data about the field that he shared with the participants. The group included Maeera Shreiber and Josh Lambert, who co-organized the gathering, as well as Tahneer Oksman, Sarah Casteel, Dean Franco, Victoria Aarons, Julian Levinson, Benjamin Schreier, and Joel Dinerstein. Ullman also joined us. Each participant presented, and then we spent time generating ideas and creating proposals for new initiatives. Of these initiatives, the ones that came to fruition were a Zoom reading group; another gathering, this time for graduate students and junior scholars; and the publishing of the data Ullman had gathered (which is forthcoming in Studies in American Jewish Literature). 

“Why ‘American Jewish Literature’ Matters,” Vanderbilt University, February 2024: 

Ben Schreier, Vicki Aarons, and Alex Ullman worked created a CFP, and connected with Allison Schachter at Vanderbilt, who offered to host. Ben, Vicki, Alex, Allison, Josh Lambert, and Maeera Shreiber worked together to select participants from among the applicants and planned the event. Funding was contributed by Vanderbilt U., Penn State U., Wellesley C., the U. of Utah, and the Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience at Tulane. Fifteen junior scholars, including Alex, participated, and Allison, Maeera, and Josh served as the faculty. The participants ranged in rank from first-year PhD students to an advanced tenure-track assistant professor, at the following institutions: UC Berkeley, Columbia U., UW Madison, UC Irvine, U. at Buffalo, Arizona State U., U. of Colorado Boulder, U. of Pennsylvania, U. of Oregon, Yale U., Temple U., Indiana U. Bloomington, and Vanderbilt U. Each participant shared a paper in advance of the conference, and these were grouped into “Fishbowl” sessions, where the paper-writers introduced their work, responded to one another’s work, and then opened up the discussion to everyone else.

“Decentering Jewish Literature of the Americas,” University of Texas at Austin, February 2025:

This conference seeks to explore, analyze, and theorize Jewish literature in the Americas—Canada, the United States, and Latin America and the Caribbean—outside traditional national and U.S.-Americanist paradigms. Where can we locate centers of gravity for the study of hemispheric Jewish literature when we destabilize identity-concepts like “Jewish” and “American,” or when we don’t take for granted categories like “Jewish American literature,” or hierarchies valuing North over South, or the privileging of the U.S. in the understanding of America? What do literary historical, literary theoretical, and cultural critical methods look like that aren’t shaped by methodological nationalism, that displace US normalization, or that are anchored in other critical traditions such as Latin American and Caribbean theories or other theories that displace national norms? How can we imagine—or desire—a decentered literary practice?