Type: Lab
In the first decades of the twentieth century, artists and authors reacted to various social, economic, technological, and political changes with new forms of creative expression, a global phenomenon that has been labeled modernism. This exhibit, on view in the Mary Duke Biddle Room, highlights the transnational, cross-cultural, and multilingual dimensions of Jewish modernism, which includes both Jewish authors and the role of Jewishness in modernist works.
This exhibition is shaped by the undergraduates and graduate students who took the Spring 2023 course “Mapping Jewish Modernism," associated with the Global Jewish Modernism Lab, a Humanities Unbounded initiative. Taught by the co-directors of the lab Kata Gellen (German Studies) and Saskia Ziolkowski (Romance Studies), the students explored modernist Jewish literature and its movements, ultimately producing final research projects and exhibit labels for their chosen materials from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
The exhibition will open on February 28, 2024 with a lecture by Yitzhak Lewis (Duke Kunshan University) entitled “Reading Globally: Redrawing the Map of Jewish Modernism” and a series of student presentations.