No Pasarán! Jewish Collective Memory in the Spanish Civil War

“I am yet again your guest!,” wrote the Soviet Yiddish poet Peretz Markish in his 1936 poem, Spain, “The honor makes me sad!” The Spanish Civil War (1936-1938) united the anti-fascist left around the world. Jewish leftists, in particular, took the rallying cry of “No Pasaran” (The must not pass) to signify not only the necessity of the Spanish struggle against the monarchists, but a united struggle against Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini. The Soviet journalist Melech Epstein went so far as to declare that “No ethnic group in Europe or the United States was so deeply touched by the Spanish civil war as was the Jewish …” Although many antifascists across ethnic groups traveled to Spain to join the war effort, others fought on a literary front.

In this talk, Prof. Amelia Glaser will present and analyze three book-length poetic cycles about Spain by the Soviet poet Peretz Markish, the American poet Aaron Kurtz, and the Mexican poet Jacobo Glantz. Markish, Kurtz, and Glantz merge collective Jewish memory of the Spanish Inquisition with descriptions of the Spanish Civil War to yield visions of a collective future for Spain that Jews were participating in creating. As these works help to demonstrate, the Spanish Civil War can be considered the beginning of a decade-long international struggle against the rising threat of fascism.

Thursday, November 20, 2025

5-7pm PST (Zoom)

Registration is required (by donation, no minimum)

This event is the second part of the 2025 Zhargon Speaker Series, four public, online talks that bring leading figures in Yiddish Studies and contemporary Yiddish arts and culture to share their work. The series extends classroom learning for students in the Peretz Centre's program, Zhargon: A Journey through the Histories of Yiddishkayt, and opens discussion with the broader community. Current Zhargon students do not need to register (you are automatically added).

We acknowledge the support of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation with funding provided by the Government of Canada.

About Our Speaker

Amelia Glaser is Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, where she also holds the Chair in Judaic Studies. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (2020), which received the Jordan Schnitzer Prize in Literature for 2021.

Prof. Glaser is the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (2015) and, with Steven Lee, Comintern Aesthetics (2020). She is the translator of the collection Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets (from the Yiddish, 2005) and Yaryna Chornohuz's dasein: in defence of presence (from the Ukrainian, 2025). With Yuliya Ilchuk, she has co-translated Halyna Kruk’s A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails (2023) and Iya Kiva's Silence Dressed in Cyrillic Letters (forthcoming in 2026), both from Ukrainian. She is currently writing a book about contemporary Ukrainian poetry.

Image credit: Adapted from William Gropper, illustration in Jacobo Glantz, Fonen in blut [Bloodied Flags] (Mexico City: Gezbir, 1936)