Since the late eighteenth century, the feuilleton has been one of the most popular and most controversial forms of writing in newspapers throughout the world. First published in France, feuilletons spread across Europe and beyond, becoming a distinctive genre of urban writing well-suited for the new mass-oriented press and wildly popular with the emerging educated bourgeoisie. A novel form of urban literature and journalism, the feuilleton was a critical public space for political debate, social commentary, and literary innovation that supplemented the news in a time of increased literacy, growing newspaper circulation, and the rise of mass media in the public sphere. Feuilletons appeared in French, German, Russian, Polish, as well as Jewish languages like Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino and Judeo-Arabic.

By the early 20th century, the feuilleton was a key site for discussions of national character, transnational Jewish culture, portraits of urban life, and aesthetic innovation. Jewish writers, journalists, editors, and political figures such as Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Theodor Herzl, David Frishman, Isaac Babel, Walter Benjamin, and Leah Goldberg wrote feuilletons, often side by side with poems, novels, short stories, or philosophical and political works. The feuilleton became associated—both in Jewish and antisemitic discourses—with Jews and Jewishness. 

This seminar will explore the multilingual and transnational nature of the feuilleton and its connections to Jews and Jewishness.  We invite papers that address questions such as: 

• What were the transnational, multilingual, and transmedial forms of Jewish feuilletons as a modern and modernist genre? 


• How did the feuilleton function as a literary form, and how did it relate to other genres, forms, and modes of literary expression?


• What were the relationships of Jewish feuilletons to other, new and old media technologies, such as radio, film, and photography? 


• Given that the feuilleton was often perceived as a distinctly “Jewish” cultural form, what is the relationship of the feuilleton–and other forms of modern mass media–to the self-conception and development of modern Jewish cultures and different conceptions of Jewishness? 


• How can authors leverage digital technologies to help readers grasp the original depth and breadth of the feuilleton and modern Jewish culture more broadly?

This seminar emerges from and seeks to expand the collaborative digital project Below the Line: The Feuilleton and Modern Jewish Culture, which brings together scholars working in different disciplines and institutions to interrogate the multilingual, transnational, and cross-cultural significance of the feuilleton in modern Jewish history and culture.