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“A Magical Power Commends Us, and We Sing:” Rachel Katznelson and the Ventriloquizing Power of Hebrew

Tue, December 17, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Hilton Bayfront San Diego, Sapphire 411B

Abstract

In a 1918 Hebrew essay titled “Language Wanderings” (״נדודי לשון״), the pioneer Hebrew literary critic Rachel Katznelson theorized her generation’s conscious attempt to “abandon” their native Yiddish, and adopt Hebrew as a sole spoken and cultural language of the yishuv. From her position as a second Aliyah immigrant, a laborer, and a woman Hebrew essayist, Katznelson framed the transition from Yiddish to Hebrew as a desirable revolutionary turn against the “self.” This paper traces the narrative that underlies Katznelson’s argument in “Language Wanderings” and other writings, showing that in the cultural imagination of the Jewish settlement in Palestine, Hebrew was figured as a powerful mechanism of identification that inaugurated a space in which its speakers could no longer recognize themselves. According to Katznelson, it is through the iterated betrayal of Yiddish and the disorienting shift between languages, that the option of a revolutionary subjectivity emerges. At the same time, the self-alienating encounter with Hebrew seems to bear a violent dimension, and Katznelson’s ambivalent portrayal of Hebrew literature reveals it to be a manipulative agent of coercion and control. Focusing attention on metaphors of gender violence, this paper explores Katznelson’s account of the constitution of “native” Hebrew subjectivity in the future nation-state.

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