This November, Rachel Rubinstein, professor of American literature and Jewish studies at Hampshire College, will give the Louis and Helen Padnos Lectures. Rubinstein will give a talk at Temple Emanuel in Grand Rapids on Sunday, November 17 and at the Frankel Center on Monday, November 18.

The Padnos Visiting Professorship is made possible by a generous donation from Stuart Padnos, who in 1988 established the Professorship in commemoration of his parents, Helen and Louis Padnos. The Padnoses’ endowment enables the Frankel Center to bring a distinguished scholar to Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids each year to give a lecture. Past scholars include Yossi Turner, Sarra Lev, and Jack Jacobs.

The topic for her lecture at Temple Emanuel originated from her work co-editing a volume for the Modern Language Association for the Options for Teaching series about education and Jewish American literature. The finished work will be the first collection of essays on teaching Jewish American literature. “We aimed to emphasize the global, multinational, multilingual, and multidisciplinary nature of Jewish American literature,” said Rubinstein. “Ideally, I would want an audience to walk away from this discussion with a new framework for thinking about Jewish American literature, and a sense of a complex, vigorous, and dynamic field that is absolutely relevant in today’s university classroom.”

In Ann Arbor, she will lecture on the Mexican Yiddish writer Jacobo Glantz and his daughter, historian and writer Margo Glantz. Margo Glantz is a significant scholar of colonial Mexican literature. Her most famous work, Las genealogías, chronicles her parents’ experiences of migration and her own coming of age as a Jewish woman in Mexico. Rubenstein believes that Kristobal Kolon, Jacobo Glantz’s epic poem retelling Christopher Columbus’ voyage from the point of view of Luis de Torres, an interpreter and the only Jewish crew member, was the original inspiration for his daughter’s future work. Rubenstein explains: “Written in a rich, deliberately multilingual Yiddish with Spanish, Taino, Latin, and Hebrew borrowings, Jacobo Glantz’s epic functions as critical counter-history, a wild reimagining of a history he knew so well.”

Rubinstein’s current research is focused on questioning what is traditionally thought of as American Jewish literature. She hopes to extend the current notion of both of these terms beyond how they are typically thought of and take them further west than the Lower East Side. Specifically, she is interested in Yiddish literature about the American West and Native peoples and the intersecting the stories of Sephardi and Ashkenazi histories in Latin America.

“Yiddish writers were not creating in a small bubble or echo chamber—they were deeply engaged with the literary and cultural conversations happening in multiple languages around them, and were connected globally through transnational Yiddish networks,” says Rubinstein. “In many cases, they attracted the interest and attention of non-Yiddish speaking writers and artists, and these exchanges are also a crucial part of the story I want to tell.”