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What if this were the story of a post WWII Jewish state:
In 1948, a Jewish State was carved out of Germany as a direct act of retribution for the Holocaust. In 1988, archivist Judit Klemmer pieces together film footage to mark her country’s 40th anniversary, from its liberation by Soviet troops to its current role as a center for global capital, a “bridge between east and west.”

Simone Zelitch's "Judenstaat" establishes this alternate history, and then unfolds a mystery about what a society chooses to know and what it wishes to forget. The reading will be followed by a discussion of the role of alternate histories in social change. As we work for the future, what can we learn by imagining how our pasts might have been?

Read Simone’s essay on how Judenstaat is Orwell fan fiction

“Judenstaat uses the technique of alternate history to offer biting commentary on modern Israel, on the post–Cold War era in which we live, and on religion and nationhood.”
—Cory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing and author of Little Brother

Simone Zelitch has written and published historical fiction for twenty-five years, including The Confession of Jack Straw (set in 14th Century England), Moses in Sinai (set in ancient Egypt) and Louisa (set in Hungary and Palestine, prior to the second world war), and Waveland (Mississippi 1964). Her work has also appeared in The Lost Tribe Anthology and has been featured in the NPR broadcast and the published anthology Hanukah Lights. Recent honors include A 2010 National Endowment for the Arts grant in Fiction, and residences at the Edward Albee Barn and Yaddo. She is faculty in the English Department at Community College of Philadelphia. Her fifth novel, Judenstaat, was published in hardcover by Tor Books in 2016.