October 24, 2022, 12 PM ET
Hosted by the College of Idaho and The Ohio State University’s Melton Center for Jewish Studies
Co-coordinated by AJS Program Committee Members Nick Underwood (The College of Idaho) and Naomi Brenner (The Ohio State University)
This interdisciplinary panel examines varying perspectives on the Polish Jewish journalist S. L. Shneiderman (1906-1996) and his writing. Although Shneiderman was one of the most successful Yiddish journalists and writers of the interwar period, often called the first Jewish war-reporter, he has been neglected by academic inquiry. This panel offers several new insights by examining previously unused historical sources, asking new questions about his politics, and combining literary with historical approaches.
The papers presented by Karolina Szymaniak and Nancy Sinkoff both look at Shneiderman through the lens of his reportazhn. Szymaniak uses the early reportazhn collected in the volume Tsvishn nalevkes biz eyfl-turem (1936) to examine Shneiderman’s place on the broader map of the history of engaged journalism in East Central Europe. In contrast, Sinkoff's paper looks at Shneiderman’s late work, i.e., his biography of Ilya Ehrenburg (1968), to determine how Shneiderman’s political worldview colored his reportazh in the context of the Cold War. Magdalena Kozłowska's paper uses a variety of sources to look at Shneiderman’s war reporting, specifically on the Spanish Civil War. She explores the context in which Shneiderman sent correspondence and analyzes the differences in Shneiderman’s narrative in various versions of the same pieces.
