Oren Yirmiya, “An Intertextual Alterity: North African Piyyut and Modern Mizrahi Hebrew Poetry,” April 6 at 6 PM EST, register at: http://tiny.utk.edu/yirmiya27

Oren Yirmiya is an Assistant Professor of Hebrew Literature in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His research asks what it means to be a person in and through poetry, focusing on Mizrahi Hebrew poetry and piyyut as sites where devotional practice, political critique, and lyric form converge around questions of personhood and shared language. He is currently completing the book manuscript The Other('s) Lyric: Piyyut, Identity, and Alterity in Modern Mizrahi Hebrew Poetry and is co-editing, with Iris Rachamimov, a volume on trans history and culture in Israel

This lecture examines the rich world of piyyut, liturgical Hebrew poetry composed for synagogue performance, communal worship, and life cycle events. It asks how we should think about modern Hebrew literature's so-called "revival" when piyyut never died out but continued to be written and sung among Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa throughout the medieval and modern periods. In doing so, the lecture challenges conventional narratives of Hebrew literary and religious history, which overlook continuous living devotional traditions in the region while overstating the creative ingenuity of the rupture caused by European Jewish secularization during the nineteenth century. Tracing piyyut's enduring legacy and its influence on the emergence of Mizrahi poetry in 1970s Israel, the lecture argues that attending to liturgical and devotional composition offers a fuller picture of Jewish textual modernity. Through comparative readings of early modern piyyut and mid-twentieth-century Mizrahi poetry, the lecture introduces the concept of "polyphonic supplementary intertextuality" to show how both poetic corpora weave multiple voices through citation and allusion, drawing on biblical, Talmudic, and Midrashic sources to critique social marginalization, represent transgressive desire, and articulate a model of selfhood constituted through heteronomous communal religious commitment rather than individual autonomy. This framework ultimately challenges dominant paradigms in modern Hebrew studies and the study of Jewish religious practice, suggesting that the boundary between devotional and secular writing in modern Jewish life is far more porous than has been assumed, and that this porosity carries its own liberatory political power.