Professor Justin Cammy
Justin Cammy is chair of the Program in World Literatures and the Program in Jewish Studies at Smith College in Massachusetts, and has published a range of works on Yiddish literary history.
Justin Cammy (PhD Harvard ’03, BA McGill ’93) is a literary and cultural historian who specializes in Yiddish. He is chair of both the Program in World Literatures and the Program in Jewish Studies at Smith College in Massachusetts.
Cammy’s publications range from essays on Yiddish literary history to scholarly translations of foundational texts to introductions to new editions of works by Yiddish writers and memoirists that open them up to a broad readership. His scholarship on the generation of “when Yiddish was young” challenges post-war mythologies of Yiddish. His critical edition and translation of Abraham Sutzkever’s From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg (McGill-Queen’s UP) won the 2022 Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies from the Modern Language Association. His past honors include resident research fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan; translation fellow at the Yiddish Book Center; resident research fellow at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem; and Mellon Senior Scholar on the Holocaust and visiting professor of English at UCLA.
Justin Cammy is a 2006 recipient of the Smith College’s Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching. At the 2023 Commencement, President Kathleen McCartney presented him with the Honored Professor Award, acknowledging “distinction in teaching, research, scholarly work, and service to Smith College.”
Select publications
BOOKS EDITED AND/OR TRANSLATED
- Translator and editor, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony by Abraham Sutzkever, Montreal McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021.
- 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.
ARTICLES/BOOK CHAPTERS
- “The Poetics of Landkentenish: Elkhonen Vogler, Forgotten Poet of Yung-Vilne.” In Polish Jewish Culture beyond the Capital: Recentering 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).
- “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.
- “Foreword,” Vilna, My Vilna: Stories by Abraham Karpinowitz, trans. Helen Mintz. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015, ix-xxiii.
- “Vision and Redemption: Abraham Sutzkever’s Poems of Zion(ism),” Yiddish After the Holocaust, ed. Joseph Sherman. Oxford: Boulevard Books, 2004, 240-265.
Further links
https://www.smith.edu/academics/faculty/justin-cammy