Mysticism in Twentieth-Century Hebrew Literature (Israel: Society, Culture, and History)
by Hamutal Bar-Yosef
Challenging the notion that Jewish mysticism ceased to exist in the Hassidic enclaves of early nineteenth century Europe, Hamutal Bar-Yosef delves into the mystical elements of 20th century Israeli literature. Exploring themes such as unity, death, and sex, Bar-Yosef traces the influence and the trends towards secular mysticism found in Russian, Yiddish, and early Hebrew writers, and examines the impact of Zionism in creating a modern, living mystical literature. This is an exciting new text for...
In History's Grip (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture)
by Michael Kimmage
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...
Yiddish Theatre (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization)
This volume of essays is the first collection of scholarly studies on the Yiddish theatre to appear in English. Drawing on a variety of academic disciplines, it considers the dramatic and musical repertoire of Yiddish theatre and their historical development, popular and critical reception of productions, and the practice and consequences of state censorship. The time-span covered is broad—from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century—as is the geographical range: Cracow, London, Moscow, New Yor...
Originally published in Hebrew 50 years ago, this is the not-so-simple story of a bygone time and place, about passion and the wisdom of community. The author asserts his values of community in a story rich in biblical allusion and redolent of the society in which he was raised.
The Metamorphosis (Critical Insights)
The Metamorphosis is certainly Franz Kafka's most famous novella. Essays include a new, lengthy biography of the author. Other essays include a discussion of the cultural and historical context of the work, the structure and function of self-alienation, Kafka's metaphor for extreme alienation, and a selective survey of the critical reception of The Metamorphosis.
Unclean Lips (Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History)
by Josh Lambert
Winner of the 2014 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award presented by the Association for Jewish Studies Jews have played an integral role in the history of obscenity in America. For most of the 20th century, Jewish entrepreneurs and editors led the charge against obscenity laws. Jewish lawyers battled literary censorship even when their non-Jewish counterparts refused to do so, and they won court decisions in favor of texts including Ulysses, A Howl, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Tropic of Cancer. Jewish...
Denying Her Voice (Journal of Ancient Judaism. Supplements, #23)
by Hanna K Tervanotko
Hanna Tervanotko first analyzes the treatment and development of Miriam as a literary character in ancient Jewish texts, taking into account all the references to this figure preserved in ancient Jewish literature from the exilic period to the early second century C.E.: Exodus 15:20-21; Deuteronomy 24:8-9; Numbers 12:1-15; 20:1; 26:59; 1 Chronicles 5:29; Micah 6:4, the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q365 6 II, 1-7; 4Q377 2 I, 9; 4Q543 1 I, 6 = 4Q545 1 I, 5; 4Q546 12, 4; 4Q547 4 I, 10; 4Q549...
A study of the history of Jewish exiles and genocide, and the literary expressions that attempt to make sense of these catastrophes. In this book Alan Mintz devotes a chapter each to selected catastrophic events and the literary response to them: for example, the destruction of the First Temple in 587 B.B.E. and the resulting biblical literature; the massacre of the Rhineland Jewish community by the Crusades in 1096 and synagogue poetry; and the pogroms in Russia and modern Hebrew poetry. These...
An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature examines literary challenges to Israel's national narratives. The centrality of the army, the mythology of the New Jew, the vision of the first Israeli city, Tel Aviv, and the very process by which a nation's history is constructed are confronted in fiction by many prominent Israeli writers. Using the image of suicide, A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, Etgar Keret, Yehudit Katzir, Alon Hilu, Yaakov Shabtai, Benjamin Tammuz, and Yehoshua Kenaz each enga...
This anthology presents a rich but little-known body of American Yiddish poetry from the 1920s to the early 1950s by thirty-nine poets who wrote from the perspective of the proletarian left. Presented on facing pages in Yiddish and English translation, these one hundred poems are organized thematically under such headings as Songs of the Shop, United in Struggle, Matters of the Heart, The Poet on Poetry, and Wars to End All Wars. One section is devoted to verse depicting the struggles of African...
The Boom in Contemporary Israeli Fiction (Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, #24)
A critical introduction to contemporary Israeli literature that places works and writers in their cultural and social context. Five essays explore facets of what Mintz calls the complexity of cultural reverberations in Israeli fiction of the past two decades, a period during which literature and the institutions of literary culture became the principal mode of encountering and mediating modernity. Among the major concerns addressed are the emergence of female writers, characterization of redefin...
Through a symptomatic reading of Freud’s corpus, from his letters to Fliess through the case of Little Hans to Moses and Montheism, this book demonstrates how “circumcision”—the fetishized signifier of Jewish difference and source of knowledge about Jewish identity—is central to Freud’s construction of psychoanalysis. Jay Geller depicts Freud as an ordinary Viennese Jew making extraordinary attempts to mitigate the trauma of everyday antisemitism. He situates Freud at the nexus of antisemitic, m...
Jewish in America
Jewish culture in America is creating a genuinely new archive---a powerful admixture of texts old and new, Jewish and gentile, sacred and secular, on which our writers and critics offer creative commentary and to which they make compelling response. Shaped in the American crucible of race and ethnicity, pushed and pulled by the American traditions of ahistorical and individualist thinking, empowered by a powerful sacramental and hermeneutic tradition yet challenged by that tradition's stunning v...
This bracing and vivid collection of essays gives voice to what many American Jews feel but don't express about their uneasy state of mind. In confrontation with this self-consciousness characteristic of Jewish culture, S.L. Wisenberg is both engaged and urgent. These essays creatively, and sometimes audaciously, address the question of what it means to be an American Jew trying to negotiate overlapping identities - woman, writer, and urban intellectual in search of a moral way. Whether she's wr...
As the best-selling author of Exodus, Mila 18, QB VII, and Trinity, Leon Uris blazed a path to celebrity with books that readers could not put down. Uris's thirteen novels sold millions of copies, spent months on the best-seller lists, appeared in fifty languages, and have been adapted into equally popular movies and TV miniseries. Few other writers equaled Uris's fame in the mid-twentieth century. His success fueled the rise of mass-market paperbacks, movie tie-ins, and celebrity author tours....
Lisa Hiton’s Afterfeast begins by considering philosophical questions arising from the experience of desire and intimacy: What does love reveal about — and make possible within — the individual? Can we ever truly understand another person’s experience of the world around them? To what extent is the other ultimately inaccessible, a world unto herself? Pillared by massive, ambitious poems in the tradition of Modernism, these lyrics imbue landscapes as varied as Greece and America with new tension...
Eric Zakim follows the literary and intellectual career of the powerful Zionist slogan "to build and be built" from its conceptual origin in reaction to the Kishinev pogroms of 1903, when it first served as an expression of settlement aspiration, until the end of pre-state national expansion in Palestine in 1938. "Draining the swamps" and "making the desert bloom," the Jewish settlers imagined themselves as performing "miracles" on the land. By these acts, they were also meant to reinvent the ve...
Members of the Tribe
This is a history of representations of American Indians in Jewish literature and popular media. In ""Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination"", author Rachel Rubinstein examines interventions by Jewish writers into an ongoing American fascination with the 'imaginary Indian'. Rubinstein argues that Jewish writers represented and identified with the figure of the American Indian differently than their white counterparts, as they found in this figure a mirror for their own a...