Reflections on Translating, Curating, and Collaging the Wandering Jew

Abstract

This piece offers a review of the 2024-2025 travelling exhibition ‘The Wandering Jew’, collecting the author’s reflections as translator and curator alongside ethnographic insights. Whilst this special issue considers the agency of minoritised groups as moveable and mobilised subjects, I play with these two characteristics to consider mythical itinerancy as both a punishment and an avenue for creative expansion. For this I draw on the benefactory figures of Georg Simmel’s ‘The Stranger’ and Leonid Livak’s ‘The Helper’. Situated within a dominant narrative of European Christianity, the legend of the Wandering Jew exemplifies fundamental questions related to Jewish cultural heritage and how it may be seen through the immateriality of memory, drawing on the empowering potential of the literary and artistic imagination particularly via methods such as collage and erasure poetry. This article includes reflections on a workshop I hosted at Limmud Festival, a Jewish community event, in 2024. I invited participants to cut up existing textual and visual representations to remake the Wandering Jew, following a tradition of using artistic practices to beautify hateful images. I examine the potential of these reappropriative practices to invoke feelings of identification and ownership.