Joshua Shelly was one of our fellows at the 2021-2022 academic year.

As part of the Carolina-Duke program in German Studies, Shelly's doctoral project, entitled "Writing a Future State: Spatial Imaginaries of German Jewish Literature, 1847-1932", explores German-language Zionist utopias and related literary texts written at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

For those who missed his talk at the center last week, here is a glimpse to his fascinating research:

Although not well known, the name for the city Tel Aviv was first born in the pages of a German novel written by the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl. What may seem like a trivial fact actually planted the seed for what has become my dissertation. My project interrogates the role that German Jewish literature played in the early Zionist movement. It begins with a look at proto-Zionist utopias and Theodor Herzl's aforementioned novel, The Old-New Land, a book later translated into Hebrew with the title Tel Aviv. In my work, I show how the power these utopias had and the things they accomplished can only be fully appreciated if we understand them in literary terms.

My dissertation doesn't stop there, however. I then pivot to look at Franz Kafka's first novel, The Man Who Disappeared, and Arnold Zweig's De Vriendt Returns Home. In both novels, I detect how their respective authors pick up the tropes and structures of earlier Zionist utopian novels to critique and express skepticism about the emerging Zionist movement in the early part of the twentieth century.

My hope is that this work will help us appreciate how literature didn't just serve as a handmaiden to early Zionism. Instead, I hope to show how it was part of a structuring principle that informed major streams of the early movement to found a Jewish State.