Justin Cammy
Professor of Jewish Studies and of World Literatures
OFFICE HOURS
Mondays 3:00-4:00pm (in person, Pierce 102)
Tuesdays 2:30-3:30 (Zoom: See syllabus or email Professor Cammy for Zoom link.)
Justin Cammy is a literary and cultural historian with research and teaching interests in Yiddish literature, Eastern European Jewish cultural history, and contemporary Israel. He is chair of both the Program in World Literatures and the Program in Jewish Studies, director of the Translation Studies Concentration, faculty co-director of STRIDE (Student Research in Departments), and Secretary to the Faculty. He also is a long-time member and advisor in the Programs in Middle Eastern Studies and Russian and East European Studies.
Cammy's publications range from essays on Yiddish literary history to scholarly translations of historical texts to introductions to new editions of works by Yiddish writers and memoirists. He is a leading authority on the writers of the interwar literary group Yung-Vilne (Young Vilna). His critical edition of Abraham Sutzkever’s From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg won the 2022 Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was a finalist of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award.
Cammy has served as resident research fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan (winter 2020), translation fellow at the Yiddish Book Center (2018), resident research fellow at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (2014), and Mellon Senior Scholar on the Holocaust and visiting professor of English at UCLA (2009). He is a longtime faculty member of the Steiner Yiddish summer program at the Yiddish Book Center and the Naomi Prawer Kadar International Yiddish summer program at Tel Aviv University (for which he also has served as on-site director since 2019).
Cammy is an associate editor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, and sits on the academic advisory boards of both the Jonah Goldrich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at Tel Aviv University (where he was a senior fellow in 2013-14, 2018-22) and the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies at UMass-Amherst.
In 2006, Justin Cammy was awarded Smith College’s Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching.
Education
- A.M., Ph.D., Harvard University
- B.A., McGill University
- JYA, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Publications
Books (Edited and/or Translated)
- Translator and editor, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony by Abraham Sutzkever, with an afterword by Justin Cammy and Avraham Novershtern. Montreal McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021.
- Editor, Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Jewish Literature and Culture, with Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint, and Rachel Rubinstein. Cambridge: Harvard Center for Jewish Studies, 2008.
- Translator and editor, On Long Winter Nights: Memoirs of a Jewish Family in a Galician Township 1870-1890, by Hinde Bergner. Cambridge: Harvard Center for Jewish Studies, 2005.
Articles or Book Chapters
- “The Prose of Everyday Life: Moyshe Levin’s Vilna Peoplescapes” (journal article with 3 original translations). Colloquia: Journal of the Lithuanian Institute of Literature and Folklore (2021).
- Thinking Through Yiddish, ed. Julian Levinson and Justin Cammy (University of Michigan Library, 2020), including Cammy, "Oysdakhtungen: The Yiddish Trace in Contemporary Jewish Fiction."
- “Introduction.” In The Canvas and Other Stories, trans. Ruth Murphy. Teaneck: Ben Yehuda Press, 2020, xiii-xxiii.
- “Unsettling the Linguistic and Geographical Borders of Jewish American Literature: Régine Robin’s La Québécoite.” In Teaching Jewish American Literature, ed. Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein. MLA, 2020.
- Introduction to The Full Pomegranate: Poems of Avrom Sutzkever, selected and translated by Richard Fein. SUNY Press, January 2019.
- “The Untold Story of Yungvald,” Catalog of the Leyzer Ran Collection. Cambridge: Harvard College Library, 2017, 23-42.
- Avrom Novershtern and Justin Cammy, “Written in Moscow, Summer 1944,” Hebrew introduction to Avrom Sutzkever, Geto Vilna. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2016, 9-49.
- “Foreword,” Vilna, My Vilna: Stories by Abraham Karpinowitz, trans. Helen Mintz. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015, ix-xxiii.
- Chaim Grade and His World. New York: Yivo Encyclopedia Extracts No. 3 - Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, 2010, 22 pages.
- “Judging the Judgment of Shomer: Jewish Literature versus Jewish Reading” (article) and “The Judgment of Shomer, by Sholem Aleichem” (annotated translation from Yiddish), Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon. Cambridge: Harvard Center for Jewish Studies, 2008, 85-185.
- Cammy and Marta Fliglerowicz, “Translating History Into Art: The Influences of Cyprian Kamil Norwid in Avrom Sutzkever’s Poetry,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 27:3 (2007), 427-473.
- “Vision and Redemption: Abraham Sutzkever’s Poems of Zion(ism),” Yiddish After the Holocaust, ed. Joseph Sherman. Oxford: Boulevard Books, 2004, 240-265.
- “The Politics of Home, the Culture of Place: ‘Yung Vilne’: A Journal of Literature and Art (1934-1936),” Judische Kultur(en) im Neuen Europa: Wilna 1918-1939, edited by Marina Dmitrieva and Heidemarie Petersen. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004, 117-133.
- “Jung Wilnie i kultura jidysz w miedzywojennym Wilne,” Poezja i poeci w Wilnie lat 1920-1940, edited by Tadeusz Bujnicki and Krzysztof Biedrzycki. (Krakow: Taiwpn Universitas, 2003), 257-286. Translation into Polish and expansion of “Tsevorfenebleter: The Emergence of Yung-Vilne,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Vol. 14, edited by Antony Polonsky. London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001, 170-191.
Public History and Online Journals
Courses Recently Taught
- Yiddish Literature and Culture (Smith College)
- Yiddishlands (Smith College)
- Holocaust Literature (Smith College)
- American Jewish Literature (Smith College)
- Jewish Fiction (Smith College)
- History of the Jews of Eastern Europe (Smith College)
- The Holocaust (Smith College)
- History of Israel (Smith College)