Home – CURRENT

Nick_Block_2013

Welcome to my online portfolio, a site to showcase my research and teaching. See my CV.

Currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at Boston College, I am writing a manuscript tentatively titled Schlepping Culture: The Jewish Renaissance between German and Yiddish, 1880-1930, for which I have already received two awards for published articles and the 2016 Leo Baeck Institute Early Career fellowship. This research details the transnational cultural transfers between German and Yiddish modernism as a result of mass migration. My research interests more broadly engage with German-Jewish intellectual history, Yiddish literature, Jewish-Muslim relations in contemporary German culture, Orientalism, and the quest for a new language in German literature since 1945. I have worked as a translator for the PBS television series Finding Your Roots and as an archivist for the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.

Schedule an Office Hour Appt

Articles

 Berkowitz_sq
“Ex Libris and Exchange: Immigrant Interventions in the German-Jewish Renaissance.” The German Quarterly 86, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 334-353.
 
“If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem: The Jewish Exilic Mind in Else Lasker-Schüler’s IchundIch.” Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies 2 (2014): 103-120.
 
“On Nathan Birnbaum’s Messianism and Translating the Jewish Other.” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 60 (2015).
“A Berlin Republic Convivencia? Ethnic Tensions in the Turkish-German-Jewish Triangle.” German Studies Review 40, no. 2 (May 2017). (forthcoming)

 

Book Reviews

Review of Kafka’s Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openness of Tradition by David Suchoff. German Studies Review 37, no. 3 (October 2014): 678-680.

Translations

Sholem Asch. “The Little German Jew.” (Der kleyner daytsh, in Yiddish, 1926). In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (under review)