Producing Radical Presence: Yiddish Literature in Twenty-first Century Israel

Abstract

Should literature be taught as space of imagination or as a tool for building social conscience? This is a question heard and asked often these days. Given the current challenges facing the humanities – declining enrollment, profit-based measures of educational success, technological incursions on learning practices, and public leaders who proudly assert that they do not read – many scholars seek new ways to articulate the value of their profession, to defend literature in the public sphere. Martha Nussbaum has famously argued that the humanities are crucial for creating and maintaining a “people-sensitive democracy” (Nussbaum 2010, 25). Not all are pleased with this line of thinking. Nussbaum’s detractors complain that, in arguing for the ultimate “use” of the humanities, she echoes the instrumentalism of those who want to destroy these same fields. Ben Saunders puts it this way: “We value money instrumentally, because it allows us to consume other things that we value intrinsically. Art and culture, I suggest, are such goods: worth spending money on because we value them in themselves, rather than regarding them as investments expected to produce some further benefit, either economic or political” (Saunders 2013, 250). I would like to move away from the dichotomy between instrumental outcomes (strengthening democracy) versus intrinsic value (aesthetic or experiential pleasure) by thinking instead about the capacity of literature to produce presence – a notion that has been richly developed by the critic Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Gumbrecht defines presence as “a spatial relationship to the world and its objects. Something that is ‘present’ is supposed to be tangible for human hands, which implies that, conversely, it can have an immediate impact on human bodies.” (Gumbrecht 2004, xiii). Perhaps counterintuitively, since literature is often considered an art of words rather than objects, Gumbrecht argues that certain texts have the ability to create presence, both by making readers more alive to the sensations of the moment that they are currently living, more attentive to the other human faces before them and also by re-presenting moments of the past, calling them up into the physical space of here and now (Gumbrecht 2003). I believe that Yiddish literature has an especially valuable presence to produce today, particularly when taught in contemporary Israel. I first arrived at this proposition in the spring of 2018, my first teaching at Tel Aviv University. As part of an introductory course on Yiddish literature, I taught the classic fiction, Di