Rethinking Exile: A Celebration of the Anthology "Exile and the Jews"

The Departments of Jewish, Islamic, & Middle Eastern Studies (JIMES), Comparative Literature & Thought , and Global Studies at Washington University in St. Louis are proud to host a book event and public conversation featuring Prof. Nancy Berg’s latest book Exile and the Jews: Literature, History, and Identity

Professors Mona Kareem, Edward McPherson, Matthias Göritz, and Tabea Linhard will discuss the book; Prof. Berg will share a brief response.

The event is free and open to the public and will be held in the Hurst Lounge of Duncker Hall on the Danforth campus of Washington University in St. Louis.

A reception will begin at 5:30 p.m., followed by the main program at 6:00 p.m.

About the Book: Exile and the Jews is the first comprehensive anthology examining Jewish responses to exile from the biblical period to our modern day. The book gathers texts from all genres of Jewish literary creativity to explore how the realities and interpretations of exile have shaped Judaism, Jewish politics, and individual Jewish identity for millennia. By illuminating the multidimensional nature of "exile"- political, philosophical, religious, psychological, and mythological - widely divergent evaluations of Jewish life in the Diaspora emerge. The collected material invites the reader to rethink the concept of exile, and to contemplate immigration, displacement, evolving identity and more.

About the Editors:

Nancy E. Berg is professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq and More and More Equal: The Literary Works of Sami Michael. With Naomi Sokoloff she edited the National Jewish Book Award–winning What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) and Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making. Her coedited volume with Dina Danon, Longing and Belonging: Jews in the Modern Islamic World is scheduled to be published February 2025.

Marc Saperstein was the inaugural holder of the Gloria M. Goldstein Professor of Jewish History and Thought at Washington University and served as principal and professor of Jewish history and homiletics of the Leo Baeck College, London. He also taught at the Harvard Divinity School and held the Charles E. Smith Professorship of Jewish History at George Washington University. His more than dozen books include National Jewish Book Award-winning volumes Jewish Preaching, 1200-1800 and Your Voice Like a Ram’s Horn: Themes and Texts in Traditional Jewish Preaching; as well as Witness from the Pulpit: Topical Sermons 1933-1980; Exile in Amsterdam: Saul Levi-Morteira’s Sermons to a Congregation of New Jews; and most recently, Jewish Preaching in Times of War, 1800-2001.

About the Panelists:

Mona Kareem is an assistant professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature in the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Previously at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Zora Neale Hurston Fellowship at Bard College, the Arab American National Museum, Poetry International, and Banff Center. She is an editor at The Massachusetts Review and a member of the West Asian forum executive committee of the Modern Languages Association. In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Kareem is the author of three poetry collections, and the translator of Octavia Butler, Ashraf Fayadh, Ra’ad Abdulqadir, among others. She will be a faculty fellow at the CRE2 in the spring.

Matthias Göritz is an author, translator, poet, and editor. He is currently Professor of Practice in Comparative Literatureand Thought at Washington University. He has published three volumes of poetry, and several novels, the most recent of which is Die Sprache der Sonne (Beck). Among the recognition he has garnered is a first place in the Warsaw Haiku contest, the Hamburg Literature Prize, the Mara Cassens Prize, the Robert Gernhardt Prize and the very first William Gass Award. Göritz was Writer-in-Residence at Bard College, New York, at the “Deutsches Haus” at NYU, and guest in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, as well as the Max Kade Writer here at Washington University. He is the host of Versopolis, a video course on translating poetry.

Tabea Linhard is the Director of Global Studies, and Professor of Spanish in Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author most recently of Unexpected Routes: Refugee Writers in Mexico (Stanford UP) Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory (Stanford UP), and Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War (Routledge). Her new book project, Agents’ Secrets, involves the relationship between gender and espionage during the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the early years of the Cold War. She coordinated the installation of Hostile Terrain 94 @ Washington University in St. Louis and is one of the founding members of the Genealogias de Sefarad Research Collective.

Edward McPherson is an associate professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of three nonfiction books: Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat (Faber & Faber), The Backwash Squeeze and Other Improbable Feats (HarperCollins), and The History of the Future: American Essays (Coffee House Press). His next book, Look Out: the Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View (Astra House), will be published in fall 2025. His essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, and the American Scholar. His recent Guggenheim Fellowship joins his Pushcart Prize and PEN Southwest Book Award and other accolades.

Those with specific inquiries about this event can contact Julia Clay at jclay@wustl.edu.