Samuel J. Spinner is Assistant Professor and holds the Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Professorship in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Johns Hopkins University.

Introduction
1. The Beginnings of Jewish Primitivism: Folklorism and Peretz
2. The Plausibility of Jewish Primitivism
3. The Possibility of Jewish Primitivism: Kafka
4. The Politics of Jewish Primitivism: Else Lasker-Schüler and Uri Zvi Grinberg
5. The Aesthetics of Jewish Primitivism I: Der Nister's Literary Abstraction
6. The Aesthetics of Jewish Primitivism II: Avant-Garde Photography and the Shtetl
Conclusion