Mar 17, 2025
If you’re anything like me, you’d be intrigued by the conference title Yiddish Ecologies: Velder, Felder, Berg un Tol. You’d also be confused. What is “Yiddish Ecologies?”
Sponsored by the University of Chicago’s Franke Institute for the Humanities and the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, with funding from the Joseph S. Inkert Memorial Fund and the Bonnie Kaplan Fund for Yiddish Language, Culture, and History, as well as the Departments of Comparative Literature, Germanic Studies, and Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago, the Yiddish Ecologies conference took place on February 16-17 on UChicago’s campus. As In geveb’s editorial intern and resident UChicago undergrad, for me this conference was the perfect opportunity to sort out my confusion and see what the phrase “Yiddish Ecologies” was all about—not to mention engage in some good old-fashioned news reporting.
I am choosing to engage with this conference “reportage” in a manner that conveys the importance of its cross-divisional collaboration and the ways in which I saw this collaboration advance the field Yiddish Studies in real time. And, despite the specific, and sometimes dense, terminology and discourse of ecology, sociology, and linguistics, I was able to get a sturdy sense of the importance of evaluating Yiddish in the context of its landscapes, for it breaks the boundaries that are self-imposed between the human and their built environment.
Dashing out of the flurries of February snow and into the Franke Institute, I was rightfully apprehensive but wrongfully fearful; yes, this conference presented complex and technical research—and this was my first academic conference as an undergrad—but when I stepped into the seminar room, there was a palpable eagerness of the conference-goers to interact with this research as a community of Yiddishists—student and teacher, admirer and speaker, budding and blossomed—that was bound to lift the scholarship from its pages.
I am not one to snag a seat in the first row of any symposium, but here, I had extra reason — camera, notebook, and pen in hand — to settle in towards the back. I was ready to play observer, to glean all that I could from the ensuing papers, capturing it through a camera lens where possible and through the written word where capable. Another feature of the back row: it allowed me to passively observe the audience’s engagement. Most everyone was ready to put pen to paper and take with them the words that resonated most. I, for one, was furiously scribbling in the notebook that I take to every over-my-head lecture that appears on UChicago’s master event calendar.
Upon sitting, I was touched by the chatter of my fellow attendees, some reuniting after years of virtual collaboration or separate enterprise, some sharing in the excitement of like-minded lovers of yidishkayt. This was, perhaps, the first time that I heard people engage in conversational Yiddish of their own accord, and it was a strikingly pleasant reminder that the language is alive and well in quotidian routine.
It was then the turn of co-organizer and University of Chicago Comparative Literature Professor Anna Elena Torres to offer opening remarks. Starting with a hearty gut morgn, she posed the central questions of the conference: what happens when the focus of Yiddish Studies shifts from “diaspora” to “ecology”? How might we think about the ecology of language and Do’ikayt? (More on that term later.) Quoting anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose, Torres framed the conference’s scholarship as chiefly related to the entanglement of and conversation between humans and their natural environment—plants, animals, and the development of once-natural land.
“Is ecological language more than a metaphor? How might we think of ecological time in relation to poetry, the reinvention of language again and again by those who speak it and learn it?” asked Torres in her opening remarks.
Each of the conference’s five panels followed a roughly similar format of paper presentations followed by a question and answer session, in which the panel’s moderator would allow for dialogue between the presenters themselves before opening the floor for audience questions.
The conference’s opening panel was titled On Do’ikayt and Postcolonialism, moderated by Professor Torres. Presenting first was Mindl Cohen, academic director of the Yiddish Book Center, her paper entitled “Do’ikayt/Hereness between the human, the natural, and the built in the works of Moyshe Kulbak.” Cohen explained that the human, the Jewish, and the built environment are entangled within Kulbak’s work. “The setting takes center stage,” said Cohen, his characters intricately connected to the places in which they live. In Kulbak’s novella, The Messiah of the House of Ephraim, natural landscape descriptions emphasize religious naturality, and throughout his work, man-made decay gives way to new forms of life. Defined as “hereness,” the theme of Do’ikayt is exemplified by the blend of the human and the city, the experience of the protagonist and their relationship to their built environment.
Following Cohen’s paper was Auden Finch, joining the conference from Geneva as a Master’s student at the Geneva Graduate Institute, presenting “Beyond the Speculative Borderlands: The Geo-Colonial Imaginaries of Lazar Borodulin’s Af Yener Zayt.” Using the myth of the Sambatyon River, Borodulin uses the natural sciences to teach his readers, largely unlearned in the formal sciences, through Yiddish. In doing so, he builds the land through the sciences as well as the Jewish connection to the land.
Before transitioning into the question and answer session, Eyshe Beirich, PhD student in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University, presented his paper, “Dead Stones, or Desolated Palestine in the Polish-Yiddish Imagination of Mendel Mann.” Beirich noted that the non-human and the landscapes serve as the protagonists of Mann’s writing of Palestinian villages, and upon their abandonment, the land “cries out,” its trees creaking and animals croaking, taking on the pain of its former inhabitants. It is in this way that there grows an ecology of silence.
A view of the audience of the well-attended conference.
Breaking for lunch, I noticed the attendees’ immediate draw towards each other. Whether it was to resume their previous conversation of the morning, or to gauge the interpretations of the work just presented, there was, at no point, a stoppage of dialogue on Yiddish Ecologies, a topic that had, just hours before, perhaps perplexed the minds of admirers of the language.
A community of grad students was, too, amongst the conference attendees. Maggie Goldberger is a Yiddish student and PhD student in Religions of the Americas at the Divinity School, where she focuses on topics of race, nationalism, community building, and place making in the United States. “While I previously didn’t think of these themes as being particularly ‘ecological,’” said Goldberger, “this conference has really allowed me to re-think that assumption.”
The afternoon panel, titled Ecological History, transitioned the sub-focus from human engagement with natural elements of land towards human engagement with the division and habitation of land. Moderated by Jessica Kirzane, co-organizer and Professor in Yiddish in the University of Chicago’s Germanic Studies department, the panel featured three more scholars.
First, on the intersection of Yiddish ecologies and education, Yiddish Book Center Fellow Caleb Sher presented his paper, “Gemores and Geviksm: Writing Yiddish Nature Education with Avrom Golomb.” Pictures of frogs, shrubbery, and other wildlife graced the screen to underscore the importance of the botanical in Yiddish pedagogical material for children. Sher argued that the natural world is a mode of modernity; there is religious understanding associated with nature and wildlife—a bird as the coming of the Moshiach, for example—yet there is also a secular understanding that propelled the Jewish experience into the modern era at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is this pull between the religious and the secular that makes Yiddish children’s literature so quintessentially inbetween, noted Sher, quoting Yiddish children’s literature translator Miriam Udel.
To my great interest and surprise, the next paper took us into the strongly sociological realm, one that explicated the effects of man-made land boundaries on the development of Yiddish culture. Cecile E. Kuznitz, Professor of History at Bard College, presented “Building Doikeyt through Engagement with Nature: The Example of Vilna.” The divisions of the city of Vilna into its concentric zones, as shown in Kuznitz’s research, helped, first, to make prominent the role of Jewish political communities, and second, to emphasize that, when Jews were to step out of their ‘zones’ through natural outings as part of these communities, they were to forge themselves into the natural environment to develop a sense of Do’ikayt, of belonging in the natural world.
Hannah Pollin-Galay, Professor in the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University, joined us over Zoom to present her paper, “Forced Outside of Nature: Yiddish Ecopoetry of the Holocaust,” to round out this panel. Struck by the claim that discourse about the climate crisis echoes that of the Holocaust, I was keenly interested in the question Pollin-Galay then posed: how did Jews write about the natural world after being defined as an “ecological pollutant” by the Nazi project?
Yiddish poet Dovid Bergelson, said Pollin-Galay, participated in Jewish reinvention by speaking about a new “earth-bound lifestyle” in Yiddish in the Russian hinterlands. Yet in Vilna, the land was regressed by the violence of the Holocaust, and this is the opposite of the usual progression of natural development. For the natural environment to be a sign of such cultural development and regression simultaneously is distinct to the Jewish experience. These conflicting associations with the natural land, argued Pollin-Galay, were present, too, in the poetry of Chava Rosenfarb, who grappled with the contradictions of post-war freedom by writing “The Ballad of Yesterday’s Forest,” where the death of the forest trees is likened to the arbitrary, forgettable nature of Jewish death in the Holocaust.
The conference continued into the night with a concert by Adah Hetko and Lysander Jaffe, held at the home and salon of University of Illinois Chicago professor Karen Underhill. Underhill’s salon has become a central focal point for Chicago’s corner of Yiddishland. While I was unable to make it to the concert, which I am told featured mesmerising performances of nature songs in soft, close harmonies, attendees informed me that “their performance, in tandem with the panels, helped to fulfill our goal of making the guiding questions of the conference accessible and meaningful to folks from as many backgrounds as possible, such as academia, the arts, and community activism,” said conference co-organizer and Doctoral Fellow in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago Chana Toth-Sewell. “As a graduate student, it was important to me to bring together early career researchers and established scholars to take on the project of defining Yiddish ecologies collaboratively. I was especially grateful for the opportunity to integrate music into the program through the concert.”
The second day of the conference continued in the Tea Room of the Social Science Research Building.
The gathering, in a way similar to its first day, began with the casual conversation that categorized this experience as one that not only belonged to the academic sphere, but also to a very real and distinct cultural realm. After the previous night’s concert performance, I gathered from Kirzane that the sense of community had been heightened and the humanistic connection to this work strengthened, and this was palpable going into the next set of panels.
The second day was introduced by Toth-Sewell and then the first panel, Eco Feminism and Gender Studies, was moderated by Anne Eakin Moss, Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at The University of Chicago. To set the day’s tone, Moss framed the idea of the natural limit, or the boundary, and how these elements of rivers, of cacti, of concentric zones might circumscribe ‘ecology.’ Then came the panel’s three papers, each with a focus on the female protagonist of Yiddish writings and her connection to a particular aspect of the natural world, and, in turn, how that natural aspect worked to shape her experience in literature.
First to present from the early-morning hours of Melbourne was Hinde Ena Burstin, Yiddish poetry writer and translator, “Der ruder fun khvayles [The churning of the waves]: Nature motifs in Shifre Kholodenko’s poetic cycle on menstruation.” This paper focused on the ways in which Kholodenko’s own personal experience with menstruation, when connected to the natural oceanic processes, liberated menstruation from its religious connotations of shame and stigma and restored it to a place of natural reverence. By connecting the menstruation cycle to nature, Kholodenko exemplifies the early twentieth century transition in Yiddish culture towards secularism that characterized Kholodenko’s coming-of-age. Her poems signify bodily autonomy, freeing the protagonist’s corporeality and subverting Jewish cultural expectations. This presentation was made complete by Burstin’s reading of the poetry in both its original Yiddish and English translation, giving voice to the emotion behind Kholodenko’s original words and what that looked like in translation.
Next, we heard from Carolyn Beard, a PhD candidate in the Study of Religion and Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. Her paper, entitled “Sorrow and the Samovar: Reading Gender and Landscape in Itzik Manger’s Ruth Cycle,” reimagined the biblical reading of the Book of Ruth in the context of the nineteenth century Eastern European landscape.
Through Manger’s Ruth Cycle, it is only when the biblical women, migrants Naomi, Ruth, and Orpah, leave the land that we get an account of their internal experiences. Furthermore, Ruth uses the land to harken her own death, while we get, too, an instance of “theophony”—God revealing himself through nature. Theophony in Manger’s cycle is a reminder that Yiddish cannot be severed from its religious tradition, and it became evident through Beard’s presentation that, because migration is an integral part of the Ashkenazi story, humanistic connection to the land—home and foreign—must be as well, and this is well-expressed through the Yiddish language. To close, Beard acknowledged two questions that arise from the reading of Manger’s text and let the audience sit with them: is this a story of return to a homeland or a migration to a foreign land? Is Manger’s fragmentary Ruth Cycle representative of the whole Biblical text?
Toth-Sewell was the third presenter, and her paper “Beehives and Birdsong: Animals and the Making of New Women in Alexandra Kollontai and Yente Serdatzky’s Fiction” explored how animal utopianism was used to shape leftist projects and literature in the Yiddish tradition. Toth-Sewell elucidated how these images reflect social—including pedagogical—and political philosophies; the globalization of bird-related imagery was an important symbol of broader social imagery, and beehive imagery was distinctly related to settlement.
Toth-Sewell explained that, as co-organizer and graduate student, the topic of Yiddish Ecologies was inspired in part by the niche’s overlap with her own research. “The topic resonates with my own research on what attention to animals can reveal about the aspirations of twentieth-century leftist women writers working across distinct cultural, linguistic, and political contexts.”
“In general, I think that focusing on ecology helps us to think critically about power, agency, and accountability, which is an important task for those of us working within Yiddish studies and beyond.”
Corporeal entanglement with nature was the throughline of this panel’s question and answer period, which first offered these three scholars the opportunity to ask questions about each other’s work before accepting questions from the audience. These papers were particularly well-suited for conversation with each other because of their great thematic overlap, perhaps more so than any other panel. Two particularly interesting questions were, what problems occur when translating ecological texts? And what differences do we see between wild and cultivated spaces in these literatures?
Panelists Hinde Ena Burstin, Carolyn Beard, and Chana Toth-Sewell, with moderator Anne Eakin Moss, discuss Eco Feminism and Gender Studies.
The second panel, Poetics of Landscape, featured two papers, University of Michigan professor Julian Levinson’s “A Flood on the Argentine Pampas: Mordecai Alperson and the Modernist Moment in Yiddish Landscape Writing” and Monash University PhD candidate Daniel Ari Baker’s “Es Brent, Briderlekh: Bushfires in Australian Yiddish Fiction.” This panel was moderated by Darya Tsymbalyuk, professor in the Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.
“It takes a long time to get the Jew out of Eastern Europe,” wrote Alperson, of the Jewish agricultural settlements of late nineteenth century Argentina. Levinson introduced these settlements, mythologized in Yiddish literature, as the focus of Alperson’s work, a migrant himself. Alperson did not invent Yiddish words to describe the lyrical experience, but instead rendered the Jewish experience in Spanish; however, to Alperson, some of this experience remained untranslatable, suggesting the limits of the Argentine-Yiddish relationship, yet Alperson wrote, “We are colonists,” the mother tongue enduring in this foreign landscape.
Shifting the focus to the opposite end of the southern hemisphere, Baker defined the natural phenomenon of the bushfire as integral to both Australian mythology and its natural landscape. The land, in response, has incorporated the bushfire into its natural processes. This generative, reconstructivist view of fire is in tension with the Jewish reception of fire as largely catastrophic and traumatic—burning shtetls threatened destruction and radical change. Thus, Baker presented a dual picture, one of destruction and of regeneration, within Australian Yiddish literature, as the geographic location of the continent, far from the European centers of Jewish life, threatened cultural extinction yet engendered the possibility of freedom; these two ends are exemplified through the bushfire motif.
I was unable to escape the grips of my Calculus class that day, so I was pulled away from the third panel and the conference’s closing remarks. I later learned that the panel’s three papers on the topic of animality were all delivered in person. The first, Bar Ilan University Professor Ber Kotlerman’s “Peretz Hirschbein and Deer City in Japan,” was delivered in Yiddish. It considered how writer and world traveler Peretz Hirschbein found himself connected to nature through his encounter with Japanese culture, which he saw as uniquely close to the natural world. Integrating photographs and the poetry of Hirschbein’s wife, Esther Shumiatcher, Kotlerman delivered a broad view of Hirschbein’s association with the famed and sacred deer.
Turning from deer to bears, conference co-organizer Anna Elena Torres delivered her paper “On Dancing Bears,” thinking through texts that represent empathetic relations between humans and bears through text and image that push back against the way Jewish figures have been dehumanized through comparison with animals and posing questions about what it means to be civilized and what it means to be caged.
In the final paper of the conference, Michael Lukin, researcher at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, spoke about “Birds in Yiddish Folk Songs: Semiotics of an Image” drawing us in to Yiddish folk sources in which doves and golden peacocks flutter, connecting speakers to distant, longed- or hoped-for places, times, and ideas.
After my Calculus class, in my effort to make it back to see the conference wrap up, I arrived at the Tea Room a little too late, just as Kirzane offered thanks and everybody began to clap. But through my dejection, I was shocked to see that the orientation of the room had changed—the once forward-facing rows of chairs had shifted into a large circle. Before the conference had come to its conclusion, conference participants — attendees and presenters alike — had been invited to engage each other in direct dialogue, a dynamic that differed greatly from the presenter and audience binary that had characterized the conference’s first day.
In her closing remarks, Kirzane shared her English translation of a poem by Pessie Pomerantz-Honigbaum, Fun ale mayne lider. Pomerantz, settling in Chicago in 1913, was a part of the group of modernist poets who referred to themselves as the Young Chicago poets.
Winds
A band of winds sweep through you, Chicago,
And rush Lake Michigan at you,
I love to stroll on Michigan Boulevard
When the winds are on the move.
Winds search and crouch in all your corners,
Shake your walls and windowpanes,
Drive curls of smoke and dark clouds,
And toss handfuls of dust in your eyes.
They chase down your trains and trams
And laugh in the faces of your halls of wealth;
They bear the stench of your slaughterhouses
As gifts to your poorest quarters.
In dark nights, pitch black,
They settle comfortably in your open parks
And whistle out symphonic elegies to you,
Bolstering your grand city symphony.
1
1
Pomerantz Honigbaum, Pessie. “Vintn.” In Royter toy. Chicago: L. M. Shteyn, 1939. This translation has been previously published in Kirzane, J., (2024) “Pessie Hershfeld Pomerantz and Shloyme Shvarts, By the Shores of Lake Michigan: Selected Poems”, Absinthe: World Literature in Translation: Translating Jewish Multilingualism, 29. doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/absinthe.5068. Read editor Marina Mayorski’s reflections on editing the issue Translating Jewish Multilingualism here.
“Pomerantz’s poetry is attentive to the natural world and her relationship with it, and her poetry draws us into the physical landscape in which we find ourselves today in this conference, as well as the social realities of human life, its joys and its deep injustices, which are part of that landscape and play themselves out upon it,” remarked Kirzane.
I was relieved to learn that, like me, Kirzane shared in my initial intrigue about the topic of Yiddish Ecologies. “To be honest, when Anna [Elena Torres] and Chana [Toth-Sewell] first proposed the conference topic I didn’t feel like I really knew what “Yiddish Ecology” could mean,” she said. But now, she has a tentative understanding, one that sees the “I” as blended, inseparable from its present physical environment, even if, because of migration, the “I” is not rooted in the land that it now inhabits.
“One of the things we are doing in this conference is walking, as it were, on interpretive paths that are not independent – we are allowing the winds of one another’s thoughts and ideas to drift toward us, maybe scattering some seeds, maybe cross-pollinating. Ours is an ecology of thought that grows interconnectedly as we learn together, here in this windy city, but also hopefully elsewhere, in all our contexts,” Kirzane said to the crowd.
In a word, this conference was generative, a word that Kirzane herself used to describe the experience, and one I think is most apt to describe the learning process unfurled over the course of the conference’s duration.
I asked Maggie Goldberger, a graduate student in attendance at the conference, about her impressions. In her own work, Goldberger is interested in the centering of “space and place’” in Jewish studies. “Talks about anxieties over Jews’ identity as ‘urban’ rather than ‘rural’ people, the morality ascribed to relationship with the natural world, as well as this conference’s focus on space and place as guiding themes have led me to deepen the questions I’m asking in my own work. I’m excited to bring these perspectives into my own research.”
“The conference was a timely and valuable intervention,” said conference participant Hannah Pollin-Galay, in light of our current and ceaseless ecological change. “Every field in the humanities needs to incorporate ecological concerns into its agenda and ecologically-concerned people need to address humanistic concerns in order to fight climate catastrophe effectively.”
Pollin-Galay posed three follow-up questions that she hopes to discuss through future inquiry: does passion for non-human nature translate into climate-crisis awareness? How can we further integrate currents of antisemitism and eco-fascism into these studies? What are the full range of Jewish ideological movements that promoted outdoor activity and ecological belonging — beyond Doikayt — such as the Haskalah, Zionism or Soviet socialism?”
In one month, the second iteration of Yiddish Ecologies, titled ‘Wonder-Woods’: The Ecologies of Avrom Sutzkever, Poet and Partisan, will take place virtually and focus on the relationship between Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever and ecology. You can register here for the Zoom session, which will take place On April 7, 2025 at 10 AM local (Chicago) time. That there can exist a conference agenda based solely on Sutzkever’s ecological connections speaks to how rich this niche is, and how much left there is to explore. The growth of this “ecology of thought,”’ as Kirzane puts it, is surely far from over.
