"Lorraine Hansberry, the Holocaust, and Race in Postwar American Intellectual Life," a Lecture by Allison Schachter

Sometime in the early 1960s, Lorraine Hansberry drafted an essay on the Eichmann trial, one that she
never completed. Writing in the early 1960s, at a moment of anti-communist fervor that silenced both
Black and Jewish radical thinkers, Hansberry understood antisemitism and anti-Black racism as an
intertwined agenda of white supremacy that defined twentieth-century politics. These concerns also
animated her 1964 play, (revived on Broadway this past year), The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,
which linked Nazism to American racism and the exploitation of women. Through readings of her essays
and her play, I examine how Hansberry tackles the vexed legacy Nazism for American intellectual life in
the 1960s from a Black left feminist perspective.

Allison Schachter is Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author
of Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in the Twentieth Century (Oxford 2013)
and Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939 (Northwestern University Press, 2022), which was a
finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. She is the co-translator, with Jordan Finkin of From the Jewish
Provinces, Selected Stories of Fradl Shtok, which was awarded the 2022 MLA Fenia and Yaakov Leviant
Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies. She is currently working on a book about midcentury Jewish and
African American women intellectuals.

Reception following.

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