Chaim Potok
Chaim Potok was a world-class writer and scholar, a Conservative Jew who wrote from and about his tradition and the conflicts between observance and acculturation. With a plain, straightforward style, his novels were set against the moral, spiritual, and intellectual currents of the twentieth century. This collection aims to widen the lens through which we read Chaim Potok and to establish him as an authentic American writer who created unforgettable characters forging American identities for th...
Disseminating Jewish Literatures
The multilingualism and polyphony of Jewish literary writing across the globe demands a collaborative, comparative, and interdisciplinary investigation into questions regarding methods of researching and teaching literatures. Disseminating Jewish Literatures compiles case studies that represent a broad range of epistemological and textual approaches to the curricula and research programs of literature departments in Europe, Israel, and the United States. In doing so, it promotes the integration...
Krone Des Koenigtums / Keter Malkut (Judische Quellen, #3)
by Salomo Ibn Gabriol
Language, Absence, Play (Judaic Traditions in LIterature, Music, and Art)
by Yaniv Hagbi
Nobel Prize - winning author S. Y. Agnon was the foremost Hebrew writer of the twentieth century. His work navigated the world of Jewish tradition and that of secular modernity, capturing the conflict between old and new. In ""Language, Absence, Play"", Yaniv Hagbi explores Agnon's theological and philosophical attitudes toward language, attitudes that to a large extent shaped his poetics and aesthetic values. Drawing on anthologies compiled by Agnon, among others, Hagbi examines his theoretical...
The Return of the Absent Father offers a new reading of a chain of seven stories from tractate Ketubot in the Babylonian Talmud, in which sages abandon their homes, wives, and families and go away to the study house for long periods. Earlier interpretations have emphasized the tension between conjugal and scholarly desire as the key driving force in these stories. Haim Weiss and Shira Stav here reveal an additional layer of meaning to the father figure's role within the family structure. By shif...
Translated from the Italian by Tim Parks, "The Road to San Giovanni" is a posthumously published collection of five autobiographical essays by one of the masters of Italian literature, ranging from a lyrical portrait of the author's relationship with his father to a perceptive essay on his own youthful obsession with the cinema.
Mocking the Age (SUNY series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture)
by Elaine B. Safer
In a series of writing workshops at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, survivors assembled recently to remember the pivotal moments in which their lives were irreparably changed by the Nazis. These "flares of memory" invoke lost childhoods, preserving the voices of over forty Jews from throughout Europe who experienced a history that cannot be forgotten-by them nor us. Including a timeline that chronicles the rise of the Nazis, their devastating campaigns for control of Europe, and the succe...
This compelling and incisive study opens a fascinating window into the key genres of writing that emerged in Israeli writing during the 1980s and 1990s, and provides new understandings about how contemporary Israeli literature evolved to be what it is today.It examines the social and political background of the dramatic and broad transformations that took place in Israeli society during this period of transition-the Yom Kippur War, the election of the Likkud Party, the Lebanon War, the rise of p...
Figuren des Messianischen in Schriften deutsch-judischer Intellektueller 1900-1933 (Conditio Judaica)
by Elke Dubbels
This study investigates the function of the recourse to the messianic tradition of Judaism among German-Jewish intellectuals in the first third of the 20th century. Messianic figures of thought play an important role in the Jewish discourse of identity. Moreover, they are used productively in the creation of general theories in the realm of cultural studies, especially regarding the philosophy of language and history and the theological-political complex. Here, all the considered authors (Benjam...
Parallel Universes of David Shrayer-Petrov
This volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov—poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist and literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin, Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of Shrayer-Petrov's eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the writer's emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume to gather...
Why?... How Long? (The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, #552)
Born out of two years of presentations in the Biblical Hebrew Poetry Section at SBL, this volume discusses 'voice'. This volume is born out of two years of academic presentations on laments in the Biblical Hebrew Poetry Section at the Society of Biblical Literature (2006-2007). The topics of these papers are gathered around the theme of 'voice'. The two parts to this volume: provide fresh readings of familiar texts as they are read through the lens of lamentation, and deepen our understanding of...
In History's Grip concentrates on the literature of Philip Roth, one of America's greatest writers, and in particular on American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. Each of these novels from the 1990s uses Newark, New Jersey, to explore American history and character. Each features a protagonist who grows up in and then leaves Newark, after which he is undone by a historically generated crisis. The city's twentieth-century decline from immigrant metropolis to postindustrial di...
The Book of Delight and Other Papers - Scholar's Choice Edition
by Professor Israel Abrahams
Girgus defines the American idea as the set of values, beliefs, and traditions of democracy, equality, and republicanism and argues that writers of the New Covenant tradition challenged society to live up to its own imperatives for individual and cultural renewal. Abraham Cahan, Anzi Yezierska, Henry Roth, Johanna Kaplan, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and E. L. Doctorow formed a new poetics"" to articulate a modern version of the myth and ideology of America."" Originally published i...
Understanding Paul Auster (Understanding Contemporary American Literature)
by James Peacock
Understanding Paul Auster is a comprehensive companion to the work of a writer who effectively balances a particular combination of Jewish American identity and European sensibility across an impressive breadth of novels, screenplays, essays, and poetry. James Peacock views Auster as chiefly concerned with the individual's problematic relationship with language, a theme present from the enigmatic poetry of Auster's early career to the more inclusive and optimistic imaginings of the films Smoke a...
Nostalgia for a Foreign Land (Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy)
by Roman Katsman
This volume focuses on several Russian authors among many who immigrated to Israel with the ""big wave"" of the 1990s or later, and whose largest part of their works was written in Israel: Dina Rubina, Nekod Singer, Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, and Mikhail Yudson. They are popular and active authors on the Israeli scene, in the printed and electronic media, and some of them are also editors of the renowned journals and authors of literary and cultural reviews and essays. They constit...