How the Wise Men Got to Chelm is the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationship to its literary precursors. When God created the world, so it is said, he sent out an angel with a bag of foolish souls with instructions to distribute them equally all over the world-one fool per town. But the angel's bag broke and all the souls spilled out onto the same spot. They built a settlement where they landed: the town is known as Chelm. The collected tales of these fools, or "wise m...
Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel has given hundreds of interviews. Yet his fame as a human rights advocate often directs such conversations toward non-literary issues. Indeed, many of Wiesel's questioners barely address the writer's role that has defined him since the 1950s. Unlike previous volumes in which he speaks with interviewers, Elie Wiesel: Conversations collects interviews which set in relief the writer at work. This book focuses on Wiesel the literary artist instead of Wiesel the Holocaust survivor or the...
With Both Feet on the Clouds: Fantasy in Israeli Literature (Israel: Society, Culture, and History)
Introducing Judeo-Persian writings, this original collection gives parallel samples in Judeo-Persian and Perso-Arabic script and translations in English. Judeo-Persian writings not only reflect the twenty-seven centuries of Jewish life in Iran, but they are also a testament to their intellectual, cultural, and socioeconomic conditions. Such writings, found in the forms of verse or prose, are flavored with Judaic, Iranian and Islamic elements. The significant value of Judeo-Persian writing is fo...
The story of Bar Qamtza is one of the most famous stories in all rabbinic literature. In this tragic tale, a private feud at a Jerusalem banquet triggers a series of events which eventually culminates in the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Until the Holocaust, Jews commonly viewed the razing of the Second Temple as the greatest calamity in all Jewish history, and for many Jews through the ages, the story of Bar Qamtza explained why it had happened. In time, the story also became e...
Tractate Zebahim (Talmud Bavli = Hebrew-English Edition of the Babylonian Talm)
The Works of Lady Caroline Lamb Vol 3
by Leigh Wetherall Dickson and Paul Douglass
Offers the works of Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828), the late Romantic-era novelist most famous for her affair with Lord Byron. Presenting Lamb's works in a scholarly format, this book situates her literary achievements within the context of her Whig allegiances, her sense of noblesse oblige and her promotion of aristocratic reform.
A fascinating look into the life and work of controversial French novelist Irene Nemirovsky Irene Nemirovsky succeeded in creating a brilliant career as a novelist in the 1930s, only to have her life cut short: a "foreign Jew" in France, she was deported in 1942 and died in Auschwitz. But her two young daughters survived, and as adults they brought their mother back to life. In 2004, Suite francaise, Nemirovsky's posthumous novel, became an international best seller; some critics, however, con...
Cosmos and Creation (Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Yearbook, #2019)
This volume contains essays by some of the leading scholars in the study of the Jewish religious ideas in the Second Temple period, that led up to the development of early forms of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. Close attention is paid to the cosmological ideas to be found in the Ancient Near East and in the Hebrew Bible and to the manner in which the translators of the Hebrew Bible into Greek reflected the creativity with which Judaism engaged Hellenistic ideas about the cosmos and the crea...
The Privileged Divine Feminine in Kabbalah (Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts, #10)
by Moshe Idel
This volume addresses the complex topic of the preeminent status of the divine feminine power, to be referred also as Female, within the theosophical structures of many important Kabbalists, Sabbatean believers, and Hasidic masters. This privileged status is part of a much broader vision of the Female as stemming from a very high root within the divine world, then She was emanated and constitutes the tenth, lower divine power, and even in this lower state She is sometime conceived of governing t...
Through narrative analysis of the memoirs of six holocaust survivors from a single extended family, Trauma and Resilience in Holocaust Memoir: Strategies of Self-Preservation and Inter-Generational Encounter with Narrative examines strategies of self-preservation of young people exposed to violence and persecution at different ages and life stages. Through the lens of studying resilience in child development, this book describes the striking diversity of holocaust-era experiences and traces the...
A radical reinterpretation of the biblical prophets by one of America's most provocative critics reveals the eternal beauty of their language and the enduring resonance of their message. Long before Norman Podhoretz became one of the intellectual leaders of American neoconservatism, he was a student of Hebrew literature and a passionate reader of the prophets of the Old Testament. Returning to them after fifty years, he has produced something remarkable: an entirely new perspective on some of t...
Der aus dem deutschen Kulturraum ausgehende Einfluss auf den Jischuw - die jedische Gemeinschaft in Palastina von der ersten organisierten Einwanderung 1882 bis zur Grendung des Staates Israel im Jahr 1948 - war mannigfaltig. Na`ama Sheffi beschaftigt sich mit einer seiner herausragenden Erscheinungen: der UEbersetzung deutschsprachiger Werke ins Hebraische und deren Rezeption sowie der unmittelbaren Wirkung deutscher Vorbilder auf die Schaffung eines modernhebraischen Literaturkorpus.Den Anfang...
Contemporary Jewish Writing in Sweden (Jewish Writing in the Contemporary World)
This book brings together for the first time the works of Jewish authors writing in Swedish, who describe the special circumstances confronting Jews in the twentieth century in Sweden and Scandinavia. During the Second World War, Sweden’s small, long-established, and well-assimilated Jewish community was never subject to the open and ultimately fatal ethnic identification that most European Jews suffered. Older and middle-aged Swedish-born Jewish authors tend to think of themselves only as Swede...
In Der Nister's Soviet Years, author Mikhail Krutikov focuses on the second half of the dramatic writing career of Soviet Yiddish writer Der Nister, pen name of Pinhas Kahanovich (1884–1950). Krutikov follows Der Nister's painful but ultimately successful literary transformation from his symbolist roots to social realism under severe ideological pressure from Soviet critics and authorities. This volume reveals how profoundly Der Nister was affected by the destruction of Jewish life during WWII...
The Evolution of Al-Ḥarizi's Taḥkemoni (Etudes Sur Le Judaisme Medieval, #76)
by Michael Rand
Michael Rand's The Evolution of al-Harizi's Tahkemoni investigates the stages whereby the text of al-Harizi's maqama collection as we currently know it, on the basis of manuscripts (and the editio princeps), came into being during al-Harizi's travels in the East over the course of approximately the last ten years of his life. The discussion is based on a close examination of the textual evidence, the investigation of a number of relevant literary motifs, and a comparison to al-Harizi's model, th...