Evan Goldstein
Evan Goldstein is a PhD candidate in Religion & Modernity, specializing in Jewish literature, Jewish thought, and critical theories of religion, race, and sexuality. He is currently completing his dissertation, “Modernism and the Genealogies of Jewish Literature,” which explores how family, reproduction, and lineage structure the question of Jewishness in modernist literature and its afterlives. Incorporating sources in French, Yiddish, Polish, and English, this study argues that Jewish modernist writers critique the genealogical imagination that underwrites modern constructions of Jewish identity by imagining aesthetic afterlives. Through four case studies (Marcel Proust, Anna Margolin, Bruno Schulz, and Cynthia Ozick) drawn from modernist and contemporary literature, the project explores how Jewish literature registers and resists the racialized, sexualized pressures of modern identity politics. Bringing together Jewish history, modernist studies, queer studies, and critical theory, “Modernism and the Genealogies of Jewish Literature” identifies genealogy as a major theme in modern Jewish literature that exemplifies how literature deconstructs the logic of identity itself.
More broadly, Evan’s research asks how Jewish writers have confronted discourses of power and difference to articulate a sense of what it means to be Jewish in modernity. In 2019, he published an article in Religion & American Culture on the entanglement of German Orientalism with the category of religion in the work of American Jewish theologian and institutional leader, Kaufmann Kohler. Two forthcoming publications, in Prooftexts and Studies in American Jewish Literature, build on his dissertation research into the American Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick, exploring connections between her fraught relation to the dominant Western literary tradition and the sexual politics of Jewish identity. He is also in the early stages of a project tentatively titled “Ghosts of the Jewish Past,” a study of the temporalities of modern and contemporary Jewish literature.
As a teaching fellow and primary instructor at Yale and Wesleyan University, Evan has extensive experience teaching subjects such as Jewish history, American religion, the history of Christianity, method and theory in Religious Studies, and critical theory. During his time at Yale, he has been involved with the Modern Jewish History Colloquium, the Religion & Modernity Working Group, the Yale Seminar in Religious Studies, and Literature and Religion@Yale. He is an active member of the American Academy of Religion, the Association for Jewish Studies, and the Modernist Studies Association. He holds a B.A. from Boston College and an M.A. from Union Theological Seminary, both in Theology.
Publications
“Lectures to Specters: Ozick’s Genealogies,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, vol. 40, no. 3 (Fall 2023), forthcoming.
“Moloch and Monotheism: Ozick’s Aestheticism,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (forthcoming in special issue on “Ozick and the Arts of Nonfiction” ed. Michèle Mendelssohn and Charlie Tyson).
“‘A Higher and Purer Shape’: Kaufmann Kohler’s Jewish Orientalism and the Construction of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, vol. 29, no. 3 (Fall 2019), 326-360.
Review of Michael Altman, Heathen, Hindu, Hindoo: American Representations of India, 1721-1893 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), Society for US Intellectual History Blog, November 4, 2018, https://s-usih.org/2018/11/review-of-heathen-hindoo-hindu/