Eli Rosenblatt, “Creole Ambivalence: The Politics of Jewishness in Caribbean Suriname, 1890-1959”

Black Studies and Jewish Studies in Conversation
Eli Rosenblatt
“Creole Ambivalence: The Politics of Jewishness in Caribbean Suriname, 1890-1959”
In conversation with Belinda Edmondson

Suriname, a small Caribbean country on the northeast coast of South America, is home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere, having been established in the mid-1600s by settlers of Iberian Jewish origin and the scores of African people they enslaved. By the turn of the twentieth century, the colony’s Jewish community had transformed in two fundamental ways: The Jews had long shifted their geographic center from a series of interior plantations to the coastal capital of Paramaribo, and native-born, Creole (Eurafrican) Jews of mixed Iberian, Ashkenazic, and African origin now dominated communal and synagogue life as free people of color. This presentation will illuminate their lives by examining how the Surinamese-Jewish press interpreted and represented Jewish cultural autonomy in a climate of rising Christian, anti-colonial sentiment supported by the growth of the colonial mission. Beginning in 1890 with the advent of anti-Jewish violence in Paramaribo and concluding at the beginning stages of independence in the 1950s, this presentation will trace the politics of being Jewish in Paramaribo while giving special attention to how racial and religious antagonism came to bear on individuals forced by regimes of colonial and Christian power to distinguish between their Jewish and Creole selves.

Eli Rosenblatt received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and is teaching at Northwestern University. Eli is a scholar of Yiddish culture and Ashkenazi Jews, his scholarship is marked by imaginative approach to Yiddish and Ashkenazi culture. He has written about Yiddish translation of Harlem Renaissance poetry in the Soviet Union and about Yiddish culture in the Black Atlantic world. In 2018-2019 Eli was a postdoctoral fellow at the Frankel Institute at the University of Michigan. In 2021-2022, he has been a “virtual fellow” in Jewish Studies at Fordham.

Belinda Edmondson is Professor of English and African American and African Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. Her scholarship explores Caribbean literature, African diaspora cultural studies, and gender studies. She is the author of Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women’s Writing in Caribbean Narrative (Duke, 1998), Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class (Cornell, 2008), and Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance, which is forthcoming in a few months from Oxford University Press. Professor Edmondson is also the editor of Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation, a volume of essays focusing on postcolonial Caribbean culture. She is an elected member of the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars and has been the recipient of several fellowships including, the Schomburg Fellowship; the Society for the Humanities Fellowship; the Mellon Fellowship; a National Endowment for the Humanities Stipend, and a Ford Foundation Summer Fellowship, among others.

This event and other public events have been made possible thanks to the support from The Knapp Family Foundation, The Picket Family Foundation, Eugene Shvidler.

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