How Dictionaries Define Us: Margaret Boyle and Ilan Stavans in Conversation
What can dictionaries tell us about cultural crises and the politics of nationality?
Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books, and the host of the NEPR podcast In Contrast. He has written Quixote: The Novel and the World (2015), Oy, Caramba!: An Anthology of Jewish Stories from Latin America (2016), Borges, the Jew (2017), and The Wall (2018). He has recently written The Seventh Heaven: Travels through Jewish Latin America (Pittsburgh), and his book-long poem “The Wall” (also Pittsburgh) won the 2019 Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry.
What can dictionaries tell us about cultural crises and the politics of nationality?
Ilan Stavans explores Sephardic literature in this excerpt from “Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction.”
What can literature teach us about our inevitable trip to “the undiscovered country”?
How a scholar built a world-class Latin American Judaica collection, and then shipped it away.
On xenolinguaphobia and the provincialism of American Studies.
Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert introduce their new anthology, “How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish.”