Book Talk: The Fiction of the State by Ofer Dynes

Join Ofer Dynes (Columbia University) and Larry Wolff (New York University) for a conversation about Dynes’s new book, The Fiction of the State: The Partitions of Poland and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature. The book argues that modern Jewish fiction emerged as a way to imagine new political possibilities and navigate a rapidly changing legal landscape. It places Jewish authors alongside state officials, censors, nobles, Hasidic leaders, and spies, all of whom participated in different ways in producing “the fiction of the state”: bureaucratic prose about Jews for the state, literary fiction about the state for Jews, or literature that sought to expose the state as fiction. Together, Wolff and Dynes will discuss the transformation of Eastern Europe during the age of revolutions, and reflect on how it shaped the relationship between politics and fiction and prompted the rise of Modern Jewish literature.

Ofer Dynes is the Leonard Kaye Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. His research has been supported by the Posen Society of Fellows, the Center for Jewish History, the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, the Austrian Science Fund, and YIVO, among other institutions. His articles have appeared in Prooftexts, Jewish Social Studies, Eastern European Jewish Affairs, and AJS Review. His first book, The Fiction of the State: The Partitions of Poland and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature (Stanford University Press, 2026), received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. In 2027, he will be a research fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

Larry Wolff is the Julius Silver Professor of History at New York University. At NYU he has previously served as executive director of the Remarque Institute and as co-director of NYU Florence at Villa La Pietra. His most recent book is The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy (2023). He is also the author of Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe (2020) and Disunion Within the Union: The Uniate Church and the Partitions of Poland (2019), The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (2016), Paolina’s Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova’s Venice (2012), The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (2010), Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (2001), Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994), The Vatican and Poland in the Age of the Partitions (1988), and Postcards from the End of the World: Child Abuse in Freud’s Vienna (1988). He writes frequently about opera, publishing essays and reviews in The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, the New Yorker, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Hudson Review. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.