Download or read book From Kabbalah to Class Struggle written by Mikhail Krutikov and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-09 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Kabbalah to Class Struggle is an intellectual biography of Meir Wiener (1893–1941), an Austrian Jewish intellectual and a student of Jewish mysticism who emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1926 and reinvented himself as a Marxist scholar and Yiddish writer. His dramatic life story offers a fascinating glimpse into the complexities and controversies of Jewish intellectual and cultural history of pre-war Europe. Wiener made a remarkable career as a Yiddish scholar and writer in the Stalinist Soviet Union and left an unfinished novel about Jewish intellectual bohemia of Weimar Berlin. He was a brilliant intellectual, a controversial thinker, a committed communist, and a great Yiddish scholar—who personally knew Lenin and Rabbi Kook, corresponded with Martin Buber and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and argued with Gershom Scholem and Georg Lukács. His intellectual biography brings Yiddish to the forefront of the intellectual discourse of interwar Europe.
Download or read book Der Nister s Soviet Years written by Mikhail Krutikov and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-24 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical look at the later work of the Russian Jewish author in the Soviet Union and its significance to Russian and Jewish history. 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 and his own personal misfortunes. While Der Nister was writing a history of his generation, he was arrested for anti-government activities and died tragically from a botched surgery in the Gulag. Krutikov illustrates why Der Nister’s work is so important to understandings of Soviet literature, the Russian Revolution, and the catastrophic demise of the Jewish community under Stalin. “Krutikov’s book on Der Nister will serve an important function, offering a strong, well-researched, and well-organized analysis of six significant periods in Der Nister’s writing. I expect it to inspire a great many new readers of Der Nister, inside and outside of academia.” —Amelia M. Glaser, author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands: From the Shtetl Fair to the Petersburg Bookshop “Among Soviet Yiddish writers, Der Nister occupies a unique place in literary history. Mikhail Krutikov’s meticulous analysis follows the transformation of the writer under the pressure of the Soviet ideological environment.” —Gennady Estraikh, author of Yiddish in the Cold War
Download or read book Unacknowledged Kinships written by Stefan Vogt and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-24 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A ground-breaking collection of essays regarding the history, implementation and challenges of using "antisemitism" and related terms as tools for both historical analysis and public debate. A unique, sophisticated contribution to current debates in both the academic and the public realms regarding the nature and study of antisemitism today"--
Download or read book Uncovering the Hidden written by Gennady Estraikh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Der Nister (Pinkhes Kahanovitsh, 1884-1950) is widely regarded as the most enigmatic author in modern Yiddish literature. His pseudonym, which translates as 'The Hidden One', is as puzzling as his diverse body of works, which range from mystical symbolist poetry and dark expressionist tales to realist historical epic. Although part of the Kiev Group of Yiddish writers, which also included David Bergelson and Peretz Markish, Der Nister remained at the margins of the Yiddish literary world throughout his life, mainstream success eluding him both in- and outside the Soviet Union. Yet, to judge from the quantity of recent research and translation work, der Nister is today one of the best remembered Yiddish modernists. The present collection of twelve original articles by international scholars re-examines Der Nister's cultural and literary legacy, bringing to light new aspects of his life and creative output.
Download or read book Yiddish in Weimar Berlin written by Gennady Estraikh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Berlin emerged from the First World War as a multicultural European capital of immigration from the former Russian Empire, and while many Russian emigres moved to France and other countries in the 1920s, a thriving east European Jewish community remained. Yiddish-speaking intellectuals and activists participated vigorously in German cultural and political debate. Multilingual Jewish journalists, writers, actors and artists, invigorated by the creative atmosphere of the city, formed an environment which facilitated exchange between the main centres of Yiddish culture: eastern Europe, North America and Soviet Russia. All this came to an end with the Nazi rise to power in 1933, but Berlin remained a vital presence in Jewish cultural memory, as is testified by the works of Sholem Asch, Israel Joshua Singer, Zalman Shneour, Moyshe Kulbak, Uri Zvi Grinberg and Meir Wiener. This volume includes contributions by an international team of leading scholars dealing with various aspects of history, arts and literature, which tell the dramatic story of Yiddish cultural life in Weimar Berlin as a case study in the modern European culture."
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Judaism Volume 8 The Modern World 1815 2000 written by Mitchell B. Hart and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-28 with total page 1901 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighth and final volume of The Cambridge History of Judaism covers the period from roughly 1815–2000. Exploring the breadth and depth of Jewish societies and their manifold engagements with aspects of the modern world, it offers overviews of modern Jewish history, as well as more focused essays on political, social, economic, intellectual and cultural developments. The first part presents a series of interlocking surveys that address the history of diverse areas of Jewish settlement. The second part is organized around the emancipation. Here, chapter themes are grouped around the challenges posed by and to this elemental feature of Jewish life in the modern period. The third part adopts a thematic approach organized around the category 'culture', with the goal of casting a wide net in terms of perspectives, concepts and topics. The final part then focuses on the twentieth century, offering readers a sense of the dynamic nature of Judaism and Jewish identities and affiliations.
Download or read book The Pseudoscience Wars written by Michael D. Gordin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Pseudoscience Wars "simultaneously reveals the surprising Cold War roots of our contemporary dilemma and points readers to a different approach to drawing the line between knowledge and nonsense.
Download or read book Jewish American Writing and World Literature written by Saul Noam Zaritt and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how Jewish American writers like Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley think of themselves as world writers, and the successes and failures that come with this role.
Download or read book Yiddish Literature Under Surveillance written by Gennady Estraikh and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-09-11 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yiddish Literature Under Surveillance: The Case of Soviet Ukraine gives a broad view on Soviet Jewish literary life, and on the repression suffered by Yiddish writers under Stalinist rule. It moves from the paradigm of writing almost exclusively about the most prominent authors, whose execution in Moscow on August 12, 1952 is tragically known as "The Night of Murdered Poets." Instead, the narrative is built as a group biography of five writers whose literary home was in Kyiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine from 1934 to 1991. Those authors are as follows: Avrom Abchuk (arrested and executed in 1937), Chaim Gildin (arrested in 1940; died in a camp in 1943), Itsik Kipnis (arrested in 1949; released in 1955), Rive Balyasne (arrested in 1952; released in 1955), and Hirsh Bloshteyn, an enthusiastic agent of the secret police. In addition, this book is populated by other Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian literati. Kyiv was the primary fountainhead for Yiddish literary creativity in the early postrevolutionary period for seven decades and remained a leading Soviet Yiddish literary center, second in importance only to Moscow. Attention is paid to the victims’ rehabilitation, posthumous or otherwise, in the mid-1950s and onwards.
Download or read book Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity written by Karen Underhill and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the 1930s, through the prose of Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), the Polish language became the linguistic raw material for a profound exploration of the modern Jewish experience. Rather than turning away from the language like many of his Galician Jewish colleagues who would choose to write in Yiddish, Schulz used the Polish language to explore his own and his generation's relationship to East European Jewish exegetical tradition, and to deepen his reflection on golus or exile as a condition not only of the individual and of the Jewish community, but of language itself, and of matter. Drawing on new archival discoveries, this study explores Schulz's diasporic Jewish modernism as an example of the creative and also transient poetic forms that emerged on formerly Habsburg territory, at the historical juncture between empire and nation-state"--
Download or read book When Sonia Met Boris written by Anna Shternshis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-16 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soviet Jews lived through a record number of traumatic events: the Great Terror, World War II, the Holocaust, the Famine of 1947, the Doctors' Plot, the antisemitic policies of the postwar period, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But like millions of other Soviet citizens, they married, raised children, and built careers, pursuing life as best as they could in a profoundly hostile environment. One of the first scholars to record and analyze oral testimonies of Soviet Jews, Anna Shternshis unearths their everyday life and the difficult choices that they were forced to make as a repressed minority living in a totalitarian regime. Drawing on nearly 500 interviews with Soviet citizens who were adults by the 1940s, When Sonia Met Boris describes both indirect Soviet control mechanisms?such as housing policies and unwritten quotas in educational institutions?and personal strategies to overcome, ignore, or even take advantage of those limitations. The interviews reveal how ethnicity was rapidly transformed into a negative characteristic, almost a disability, for Soviet Jewry in the postwar period. Ultimately, Shternshis shows, after decades living in a repressive, nominally atheistic state, these Jews did manage to retain a complex sense of Jewish identity, but one that fully disassociates Jewishness from Judaism and instead associates it with secular society, prioritizing chess over Talmud, classical music over Hasidic tunes. Gracefully weaving together poignant stories, intimate reflections, and witty anecdotes, When Sonia Met Boris traces the unusual contours of contemporary Russian Jewish identity back to its roots.
Download or read book The Radical Isaac written by Adi Mahalel and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2023-04-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yiddish and Hebrew writer I. L. Peretz (1852–1915) was a major leader of Eastern European Jewry in the years prior to World War I, and was deeply involved in Jewish politics and communal life throughout his lifetime. In The Radical Isaac, Adi Mahalel examines a central part of his life and art that has often been neglected, namely, his close alignment with the needs of the Jewish working-class and his deep devotion to progressive politics. Although there have been numerous studies of Peretz and his work, this very central component of his life nonetheless remains severely understudied. By offering close readings of the "radical" Peretz, Mahalel recasts the way political activism is understood in scholarly evaluations of the writer's work. Employing a partly chronological, partly thematic scheme, Mahalel follows Peretz's radicalism from its inception and then through the various ways in which it was synchronically expressed during this intense period of history.
Download or read book Judgment written by David Bergelson and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Never before available in English, Judgment is a work of startling power by David Bergelson, the most celebrated Yiddish prose writer of his era. Originally published in 1929 and set in 1920 during the Russian civil war, Judgment traces the death of the shtetl and the birth of the “new, harsher world” created by the 1917 revolution. Jews and non-Jews smuggle people, goods, and anti-Bolshevik literature back and forth across the new political border. Filipov acts as the arbiter of "judgment" to prisoners in a Bolshevik outpost, who include Spivak, a counterrevolutionary; Lemberger, a pious and wealthy Jew; a seductive woman referred to as "the blonde"; and a memorable cast of smugglers and criminals. Ordinary people, depicted in a grotesque and modernist style—comparable to Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry—confront the overwhelming forces of history, whose ultimate outcome remains unknown.
Download or read book Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures written by Anita Norich and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays brings to Jewish Language Studies the conceptual frameworks that have become increasingly important to Jewish Studies more generally: transnationalism, multiculturalism, globalization, hybrid cultures, multilingualism, and interlingual contexts. Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures collects work from prominent scholars in the field, bringing world literary and linguistic perspectives to generate distinctively new historical, cultural, theoretical, and scientific approaches to this topic of ongoing interest. Chapters of this edited volume consider from multiple angles the cultural politics of myths, fantasies, and anxieties of linguistic multiplicity in the history, cultures, folkways, and politics of global Jewry. Methodological range is as important to this project as linguistic range. Thus, in addition to approaches that highlight influence, borrowings, or acculturation, the volume represents those that highlight syncretism, the material conditions of Jewish life, and comparatist perspectives.
Download or read book Yiddish Paris written by Nick Underwood and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yiddish Paris explores how Yiddish-speaking emigrants from Eastern Europe in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s created a Yiddish diaspora nation in Western Europe and how they presented that nation to themselves and to others in France. In this meticulously researched and first full-length study of interwar Yiddish culture in France, author Nicholas Underwood argues that the emergence of a Yiddish Paris was depended on "culture makers," mostly left-wing Jews from Socialist and Communist backgrounds who created cultural and scholarly organizations and institutions, including the French branch of YIVO (a research institution focused on East European Jews), theater troupes, choruses, and a pavilion at the Paris World's Fair of 1937. Yiddish Paris examines how these left-wing Yiddish-speaking Jews insisted that even in France, a country known for demanding the assimilation of immigrant and minority groups, they could remain a distinct group, part of a transnational Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation. Yet, in the process, they in fact created a French-inflected version of Jewish diaspora nationalism, finding allies among French intellectuals, largely on the left.
Download or read book David Bergelson s Strange New World written by Harriet Murav and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Bergelson (1884–1952) emerged as a major literary figure who wrote in Yiddish before WWI. He was one of the founders of the Kiev Kultur-Lige and his work was at the center of the Yiddish-speaking world of the time. He was well known for creating characters who often felt the painful after-effects of the past and the clumsiness of bodies stumbling through the actions of daily life as their familiar worlds crumbled around them. In this contemporary assessment of Bergelson and his fiction, Harriet Murav focuses on untimeliness, anachronism, and warped temporality as an emotional, sensory, existential, and historical background to Bergleson's work and world. Murav grapples with the great modern theorists of time and memory, especially Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin, to present Bergelson as an integral part of the philosophical and artistic experiments, political and technological changes, and cultural context of Russian and Yiddish modernism that marked his age. As a comparative and interdisciplinary study of Yiddish literature and Jewish culture, this work adds a new, ethnic dimension to understandings of the turbulent birth of modernism.
Download or read book East European Jews in Switzerland written by Tamar Lewinsky and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-10-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the era of Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe (from the 1880s until the First World War), Switzerland played an important role in absorbing immigrants. Though located at the periphery of the main migration routes, the federal state with its liberal policies on foreigners became a key destination for students, revolutionaries, and travelers. The micro-studies and more general papers of this volume approach the topic in its transnational, local, linguistic, gendered, and ideological dimensions and from various disciplinary angles. They interweave and facilitate a novel take on the transitory spatial history and the Lebenswelt of East European Jews in Switzerland. Topics of this volume range – among others – from the location of Switzerland on the map of East European Jewish politics (Bundism, Socialism, Yiddishism, Zionism), conflicting performative cultures of Jewish and Russian revolutionaries, the Swiss Lehr- and Wanderjahre of the Jewish public intellectual Meir Wiener, the impact of Geneva on the Zionist Hebrew writer Ben Ami, the Russian-Jewish students’ colonies in Berne and Zurich and questions of individuals' integration and acculturation.
