“We Are All Endangered Species”: Jerome Rothenberg’s Jewish Primitivism

Abstract Jerome Rothenberg’s poetry brings together a group of major—seemingly disparate—topics: the Holocaust; ecological crisis; Yiddish culture; and what he terms ethnopoetics, a poetic primitivism centered largely on the culture of Indigenous Americans. This article shows how genocide, both of Native Americans and of European Jews, becomes in Rothenberg’s poetry the catalyst for a new purpose for primitivism—resisting ecological and cultural devastation. Rothenberg’s reactivation of Jewish primitivism follows two paths: first, an insistence on understanding the destruction of Jewish culture in conjunction with the destruction of Indigenous peoples and cultures globally. Second, he links these genocides to the scope and consequences of environmental destruction, which he recognizes as an integral part of the threat to minority cultures and to humanity in general. Rothenberg’s primitivist poetry seeks to resist extinction. This is a striking attempt to negate the association of primitivism with colonial domination and violence and create a poetry of survival in the face of genocide and environmental destruction.