A Book Chat with Samuel Spinner

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. What led figures as diverse as Franz Kafka, Isaac Leybush Peretz, and Else Lasker-Schüler to imagine European Jews in terms identical to colonized non-Western peoples? Dr. Samuel Spinner discussed his revelatory new book about Jewish cultural modernism with UVA Jewish Studies faculty member Jeffrey Grossman.

If you are interested in purchasing Dr. Spinner's book, the publisher's page can be found here, with discount code SPINNER20.

If you have any questions, please contact us at jewishstudiesprogram@virginia.edu.

Samuel Spinner is the Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Assistant Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Johns Hopkins University. His book Jewish Primitivism, on primitivism in modern Jewish literature, photography, and graphic art, was published in July 2021 by Stanford University Press. He is currently researching a book on the aesthetics of monumentality in Holocaust museums and literature.  His work has appeared in PMLA, MLN, Prooftexts, and German Quarterly. Spinner is a co-editor of “German Jewish Cultures,” a book series published by Indiana University Press and serves as an editor of the online Yiddish Studies journal In Geveb.