Ongoing Research

Artists’ Books and the Repurposing of Jewish Literature

This project explores the material history of Jewish literature by examining a trio of artists’ books featuring the work of early twentieth century poets. Each artists’ book treats its original source material as a physical object. As a group, these books illuminate the often-precarious conditions in which modern Jewish literary sources were produced, and their ongoing physical vulnerability in archival settings. This appreciation for literature’s material qualities allows for a better understanding of how residue traces of the sacred continue to shape the evolution of secular literary genres. I use the term “repurposing” to indicate how these works respect the autonomy and inviolability of the earlier texts while also promoting the creation of new meaning for contemporary readers.

The Unlocked Diary: Collected Works (2021), contains facsimile reproductions and translations of poems and excerpts from a personal diary by Matilda Okinaite, a Lithuanian Jewish poet who was murdered in 1941.

Urban Poem: Unpublished Poems by Leah Goldberg, Inspired by Woodcuts by Franz Masareel (2012), includes expressionist wood cut prints and images of handwritten poems from a 1929 Masareel edition once owned by Goldberg herself.

Moshe Gershuni’s Thirteen Etchings for Poems by
H. N. Bialik (1987) reproduces pages of the landmark 1923 edition of Bialik’s collected poems, illustrated by Yosef Budko, alongside Gershuni’s prints;

Sites of Memory in Israel/Palestine

Landscape and memory continue to be ongoing research interests; an essay analyzing the textual and physical traces of Palestinian memory in the Jaffa neighborhood of Ajami, “'An Apartment to Remember': Palestinian Memory in the Israeli Landscape," appears in History & Memory (2015).

Watch this short testimony, filmed in 2012 during an on-site visit with Zochrot to the remains of the village of Summeyl.

Artists’ Books and the Repurposing of Jewish Literature

Urban Poem: Unpublished Poems by Leah Goldberg, Inspired by Woodcuts by Franz Masareel (2012), includes expressionist wood cut prints and images of handwritten poems from a 1929 Masareel edition once owned by Goldberg herself.

Moshe Gershuni’s Thirteen Etchings for Poems by ​H. N. Bialik (1987) reproduces pages of the landmark 1923 edition of Bialik’s collected poems, illustrated by Yosef Budko, alongside Gershuni’s prints;

Sites of Memory in Israel/Palestine

Moshe Gershuni’s Thirteen Etchings for Poems by
H. N. Bialik (1987) reproduces pages of the landmark 1923 edition of Bialik’s collected poems, illustrated by Yosef Budko, alongside Gershuni’s prints;