Allison Schacter offers a counter history of Jewish modernity by looking at the women writers, in the interwar period, who embraced the transgressive potential of prose fiction to reimagine Jewish culture beyond the traditionally male world of Jewish letters. These women revolutionized Jewish fiction at a pivotal moment in Jewish history, transcending the boundaries of Jewish minority identities. This talk tells their story and in so doing calls for a new ways of thinking about Jewish cultural modernity.

Allison Schachter is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, English, and Russian and East European Studies at Vanderbilt University, where she chairs the Jewish Studies Department. She is the author of Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century (Oxford 2013) and Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939 (Northwestern 2021). She is also a translator from Yiddish. From the Jewish Provinces: The Selected Stories of Fradl Shtok which she translated with Jordan Finkin, is just out from Northwestern University Press.