Justin Cammy

Justin Cammy is associate dean of the faculty and professor of Jewish studies and of comparative literature. He oversees curricular operations, academic support centers, graduate and special programs, and faculty development. He also maintains long-standing affiliations with our programs in Middle Eastern studies and Russian and East European studies.

Cammy is a literary and cultural historian with broad teaching and research interests in Yiddish studies, Eastern European Jewish history, modern Jewish literatures, and the political history of Israel.

Cammy is the recipient of grants or fellowships from the Lithuanian Research Council (2024–27), Aresty visiting scholar-in-residence at the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University (spring 2024), visiting fellow-in-residence at Clare Hall–University of Cambridge (fall 2023), resident research fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan (winter 2020), translation fellow at the Yiddish Book Center (2018), and resident research fellow at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (2014). He has held visiting professor positions at Harvard University, UCLA, Oberlin, and within the Five College Consortium, and visiting researcher positions at Harvard, the Harman Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Goldrich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at Tel Aviv University.

Cammy’s critical edition and translation of Abraham Sutzkever’s From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg (McGill-Queen’s UP) received the 2022 Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies from the Modern Language Association. He is now at work as co-editor of The Cambridge History of Yiddish Literature, while also writing accessible scholarly introductions to translations of Yiddish fiction and memoir.

Cammy is the recipient of the Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching (2006), the Honored Professor Award (2023, awarded by the President for “distinction in teaching, research, scholarly work, and service to Smith College”), and the Charis Medal (2026) for members of the faculty who have completed twenty-five years of service to the College.

Books (Edited and/or Translated)

Justin Cammy and Rachel Rubinstein, eds., The Cambridge History of Yiddish Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2028 (in progress).

Yung-Vilne/Young Vilna, co-edited by Justin Cammy and Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, multilingual scholarly edition. Vilnius: Vilnius UP, 2027.

Shmerke Kaczerginski, The Destruction of Vilna, co-edited by Justin Cammy and Saule Valiunaite, introduction by Justin Cammy, translated by Maurice Wolfthal. Wayne State UP, 2027.

Translator and editor, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony by Abraham Sutzkever, Montreal McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021. Winner of the 2022 MLA Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies. As Nuo Vilniaus Geto Iki Niurnbergo, ed. Cammy and Valiunaite with a new introduction for Lithuanian readers by Cammy. Vilnius: Hubris, 2024. 

Justin Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint, Rachel Rubinstein, Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Jewish Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Harvard Center for Jewish Studies, 2008 (721 pages). Includes Cammy, “Judging the Judgment of Shomer: Jewish Literature versus Jewish Reading” (article) and “The Judgment of Shomer, by Sholem Aleichem” (annotated translation from Yiddish), pp. 85-185.

Translator and editor, On Long Winter Nights: Memoirs of a Jewish Family in a Galician Township 1870-1890, by Hinde Bergner. Cambridge: Harvard Center for Jewish Studies, 2005.

Articles or Book Chapters

“Introduction.” In Chaim Grade, The Yeshiva. Knopf, 2027.

“The Rise and Fall of Yiddishist Scouting,” Shofar: A Journal of Jewish Studies, 44:2, 2026.

Review essay on Isaac Bashevis Singer, trans. David Stromberg, special issue on “Beyond Canonization: The Contested Legacy of I.B. Singer” in Studies in American Jewish Literature 44:2 (2025), 260–270.

“Sutzkever in Africa.” In Abraham Sutzkever, Elephants by Night, trans. Mel Konner. Cincinnati: Naydus Press, 2024, 125-155.

“Afterword.” In Levi Shalit, So We Died: A Memoir of Life and Death in the Ghetto of Siauliai, Lithuania. Trans. Veronica Belling, Ellen Cassedy, Andrew Cassel. University of Alabama Press, 2024.

“The Poetics of Landkentenish: Elkhonen Vogler, Forgotten Poet of Yung-Vilne.” In Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery, ed. Nancy Sinkoff and Halina Goldberg. Rutgers University Press, 2023.

“The Prose of Everyday Life: Moyshe Levin’s Vilna Peoplescapes” (journal article with 3 original translations). Colloquia: Journal of the Lithuanian Institute of Literature and Folklore (2021).

Thinking Through Yiddish, ed. Julian Levinson and Justin Cammy (University of Michigan Library, 2020), including Cammy, "Oysdakhtungen: The Yiddish Trace in Contemporary Jewish Fiction."

“Introduction.” In The Canvas and Other Stories, trans. Ruth Murphy. Teaneck: Ben Yehuda Press, 2020, xiii-xxiii.

“Unsettling the Linguistic and Geographical Borders of Jewish American Literature: Régine Robin’s La Québécoite.” In Teaching Jewish American Literature, ed. Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein. MLA, 2020.

Introduction to The Full Pomegranate: Poems of Avrom Sutzkever, selected and translated by Richard Fein. SUNY Press, January 2019.

“The Untold Story of Yungvald,” Catalog of the Leyzer Ran Collection. Cambridge: Harvard College Library, 2017, 23-42.

Avrom Novershtern and Justin Cammy, “Written in Moscow, Summer 1944,” Hebrew introduction to Avrom Sutzkever, Geto Vilna. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2016, 9-49.

“Foreword,” Vilna, My Vilna: Stories by Abraham Karpinowitz, trans. Helen Mintz. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015, ix-xxiii.

Chaim Grade and His World. New York: Yivo Encyclopedia Extracts No. 3 - Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, 2010, 22 pages.

Cammy and Marta Fliglerowicz, “Translating History Into Art: The Influences of Cyprian Kamil Norwid in Avrom Sutzkever’s Poetry,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 27:3 (2007), 427-473.

“Vision and Redemption: Abraham Sutzkever’s Poems of Zion(ism),” Yiddish After the Holocaust, ed. Joseph Sherman. Oxford: Boulevard Books, 2004, 240-265.

“The Politics of Home, the Culture of Place: ‘Yung Vilne’: A Journal of Literature and Art (1934-1936),” Judische Kultur(en) im Neuen Europa: Wilna 1918-1939, edited by Marina Dmitrieva and Heidemarie Petersen. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004, 117-133.

“Jung Wilnie i kultura jidysz w miedzywojennym Wilne,” Poezja i poeci w Wilnie lat 1920-1940, edited by Tadeusz Bujnicki and Krzysztof Biedrzycki. (Krakow: Taiwpn Universitas, 2003), 257-286. Translation into Polish and expansion of “Tsevorfenebleter: The Emergence of Yung-Vilne,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Vol. 14, edited by Antony Polonsky. London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001, 170-191.

Public Discourse

Theresienstadt Archive: A Woman's Micro-History of the Holocaust (2018)