Anna Elena Torres

Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Jewish Studies
Anna Elena Torres headshot

Home Institution

University of Chicago

WSRP Project

A Bear Flew By: Animality in Jewish Arts and Literature 

This book-length project advances new readings of ecology, gender, and kinship in Ashkenazi culture.

Profile

Anna Elena Torres is a scholar of Comparative Literature specializing in Jewish Studies. Her current work examines how Yiddish literature was informed by mass migration and movements for human rights beyond the frames of statism and nationalism.

Prof. Torres’ first monograph, Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature (2024), historicizes how Yiddish literary aesthetics from romanticism to modernism were shaped by mass migration, deportation, and detention. 

Her current book project is A Bear Flew By: Animality in Yiddish Arts and Literature (Rutgers University Press), which advances new readings of animality, disability, gender, and racialization within Ashkenazi literature, folk song, and visual art.  The bear, long considered humans’ closest ‘next of kin,’ is a shapeshifting figure in Yiddish arts and literature, appearing as a metaphor for creativity, philosophical encounter with the nonhuman, political allegory for otherness, and emblem of the sublime.