IIJS Book Talk "Games of Inheritance" with Yitzhak Lewis

In this talk, Yitzhak Lewis will discuss his new book, Games of Inheritance: Kabbalah,

Tradition, and Authorship in Jorge Luis Borges, where he explores the thought of Argentine author and public intellectual Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) on questions of authorship and literary tradition. The book focuses on Borges’ engagement with Jewish literary and intellectual traditions, highlighting the role of this engagement in developing and expressing his views on these questions. The book argues that the primary relevance of Borges’ persistent reference to “the Judaic” is not for understanding his attitude towards Jews and Judaism but for understanding his position in contemporary Argentinian debates about nationalism and literature, empire and postcolonialism, populism and aesthetics. By broadening the frame of “Borges and the Judaic,” this book shifts the scholarly focus to the poetic utility of Borges’ engagement with Jewish literary and intellectual traditions. This allows a better understanding of the nuance of his views on the issues that most animate his oeuvre: authorship and writing, literature and tradition.

Yitzhak Lewis is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Duke Kunshan University. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2016. His research interests include comparative literature in Hebrew, Spanish, and Yiddish, literary and cultural theory, transnational writing, and world literature. His book, A Permanent Beginning: Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity (SUNY, 2020), explores the connections between the storytelling of Nachman of Braslav and imperial modernization processes in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 18th century. His book Games of Inheritance: Kabbalah, Tradition, and Authorship, in the Writing of Jorge Luis Borges (Rutgers, 2025), explores the central role of Jewish literary and intellectual traditions in the writings of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. He has edited a volume on “Yiddish and the Transnational in Latin America” for In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (2021) and is currently co-editing a collection titled One Hundred Years of Yiddish Literature in China about the reception history of Jewish literature in China from World War I until today. His work has been published in Variaciones Borges, In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, and Journal of Latin American Jewish Studies.

*Guests must register by Monday, December 8 to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus.

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Appel families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

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