Else Lasker-Schüler and Uri Zvi Greenberg in “The Society of Savage Jews”: Art, Politics, and Primitivism

This article examines the shared primitivism of the German poet Else Lasker-Schüler and the Hebrew and Yiddish poet Uri Zvi Greenberg. In her art and poetry, Lasker-Schüler imagined a bohemian utopia ruled by the Bund der wilden Juden, or Society of Savage Jews; Greenberg adopted this figure and turned it into an expression of his radical Zionism. This transformation of aesthetic to political sovereignty reveals one trajectory of Jewish primitivism, with the blurred boundary between Jewish and primitive identities mirroring the blurred boundary between divergent political agendas.