Justin Cammy
Professor of Jewish Studies and of World Literatures
Biography
Justin Cammy is a literary and cultural historian of Yiddish. He is chair of both the Program in Jewish Studies and the Program in World Literatures, and also holds appointments in Middle East Studies, Russian and East European Studies, and Translation Studies. He is one of five elected members of Faculty Council (2024-27) and co-director of the Student Research in Departments (STRIDE) program.
Cammy’s literature courses include offerings in Yiddish literature, Jewish American writing, Jewish fiction, and Holocaust literature, while his historically oriented-courses include classes on Jews in the medieval and modern worlds, the history of Zionism and Israel, and Yiddishlands.
Cammy’s critical edition and translation of Abraham Sutzkever’s From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg (McGill-Queen’s UP) received the 2022 Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies from the Modern Language Association. His most recent writing includes an essay on “Sutzkever in Africa” which anchors a new translation of the Yiddish poetic cycle Elephants at Night, and an afterword to Levi Shalit’s memoir of the Siauliai Ghetto. He is now at work as co-editor of both The Cambridge History of Yiddish Literature and of a multilingual translation and critical study of the interwar Yiddish journal Yung-Vilne.
Cammy’s grants and fellowships include a multiyear grant from the Lithuanian Research Council as co-investigator of a project on avant-garde journals (2024-27); Aresty visiting scholar-in-residence at the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University (Spring 2024); Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge (Fall 2023); 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).
At Smith’s 2023 Commencement, President Kathleen McCartney presented him with the Honored Professor Award, acknowledging "distinction in teaching, research, scholarly work, and service to Smith College." He also is the recipient of the Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching.
Selected Publications
Books (Edited and/or Translated)
Justin Cammy and Rachel Rubinstein, eds., The Cambridge History of Yiddish Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2027 (in progress).
Translator and editor, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony by Abraham Sutzkever, Montreal McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021. Winner of the 2022 MLA Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies. As Nuo Vilniaus Geto Iki Niurnbergo, ed. Cammy and Valiunaite with a new introduction for Lithuanian readers by Cammy. Vilnius: Hubris, 2024.
Justin Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint, Rachel Rubinstein, Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Jewish Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Harvard Center for Jewish Studies, 2008 (721 pages). Includes Cammy, “Judging the Judgment of Shomer: Jewish Literature versus Jewish Reading” (article) and “The Judgment of Shomer, by Sholem Aleichem” (annotated translation from Yiddish), pp. 85-185.
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
“Sutzkever in Africa.” In Abraham Sutzkever, Elephants by Night, trans. Mel Konner. Cincinnati: Naydus Press, 2024, 125-155.
“Afterword.” In Levi Shalit, So We Died: A Memoir of Life and Death in the Ghetto of Siauliai, Lithuania. Trans. Veronica Belling, Ellen Cassedy, Andrew Cassel. University of Alabama Press, 2024.
“The Poetics of Landkentenish: Elkhonen Vogler, Forgotten Poet of Yung-Vilne.” In Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery, ed. Nancy Sinkoff and Halina Goldberg. Rutgers University Press, 2023.
“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.
“Vision and Redemption: Abraham Sutzkever’s Poems of Zion(ism),” Yiddish After the Holocaust, ed. Joseph Sherman. Oxford: Boulevard Books, 2004, 240-265.
“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 Discourse
“Wartime Diary,” The Times of Israel, December 1, 2023
Theresienstadt Archive: A Woman's Micro-History of the Holocaust (2018)
Office Hours
Wednesday 10–10:55 a.m., 1:30–2:30 p.m.,
and by appointment