Focusing on Errors of Youth (1876), a book that has acquired paradigmatic status in the history of Jewish individualism, Cornell University's Olga Litvak will discuss the difficulties of celebrating Jewish first-person narratives as exponents of confessional authenticity and personal autonomy and address the problematic connection between subjection and subjectivity.

Olga Litvak holds the Laurie B. and Eric M. Roth Chair in Modern European Jewish History at Cornell University.  The author of Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Indiana UP, 2006) and Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism (Rutgers UP, 2012), she is currently working on a study called Antibiography: The Jewish Lives of M. L. Lilienblum.