Download or read book Jewish Cultural Studies written by Simon J. Bronner and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defines the distinctive field of Jewish cultural studies and its basis in folkloristic, psychological, and ethnological approaches. Jewish Cultural Studiescharts the contours and boundaries of Jewish cultural studies and the issues of Jewish culture that make it so intriguing—and necessary—not only for Jews but also for students of identity, ethnicity, and diversity generally. In addition to framing the distinguishing features of Jewish culture and the ways it has been studied, and often misrepresented and maligned, Simon J. Bronner presents several case studies using ethnography, folkloristic interpretation, and rhetorical analysis. Bronner, building on many years of global cultural exploration, locates patterns, processes, frames, and themes of events and actions identified as Jewish to discern what makes them appear Jewish and why. Jewish Cultural Studiesis divided into three parts. Part 1 deals with the conceptualization of how Jews in complex, heterogenous societies identify themselves as a cultural group to non-Jews and vice versa—such as how the Jewish home is socially and materially constructed. Part 2 delves into ritualization as a strategic Jewish practice for perpetuating peoplehood and the values that it suggests—for example, the rising popularity of naming ceremonies for newborn girls, simhat bat or zeved habat, in the twenty-first century. Part 3 explores narration, including the global transformation of Jewish joking in online settings and the role of Jews in American political culture. Bronner reflects that a reason to separate Jewish cultural studies from the fields of Jewish studies and cultural studies is the distinctiveness of Jewish culture among other ethnic experiences. As a diasporic group with religious ties and varying local customs, Jews present difficulties of categorization. He encourages a multiperspectival approach that considers the Jewish double consciousness as being aware of both insider and outsider perspectives, participation in ancient tradition and recent modernization, and the great variety and stigmatization of Jewish experience and cultural expression. Students and scholars in Jewish studies, cultural studies, ethnic-religious studies, folklore, sociology, psychology, and ethnology are the intended audience for this book.
Download or read book Jews and Other Differences written by Jonathan Boyarin and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination written by Marjorie Lehman and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most Jews will feel intimately familiar with and attached to the figure of the ‘Jewish mother’, yet few have questioned representations of mothers and motherhood in Jewish culture. This volume aims to fill this gap by bringing to the fore the vast network of symbols and images which Jews have associated with mothers from the Bible to the modern period. It demonstrates the complex ways in which the Jewish mother has been used to construct and frame Jewish religion and culture.
Download or read book Jewish Cultural Studies written by Simon J. Bronner and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Jewish Cultural Studies written by Simon J. Bronner and published by . This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defines the distinctive field of Jewish cultural studies and its basis in folkloristic, psychological, and ethnological approaches.
Download or read book Jewish Bodylore written by Amy K. Milligan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish Bodylore: Feminist and Queer Ethnographies of Folk Practices explores the Jewish body and its symbology as a space for identity communication, applying the tools of bodylore (the folkloric study of the body) to the Jewish body in ways that are in line both with feminist and queer theory. The text centers a feminist folkloric approach to embodiment while simultaneously recognizing its overlaps with the study of Jewish bodies and symbols. It investigates Jewish embodiment with a keen eye to that which breaks from tradition. Consideration is given to the ways in which bodies intersect with time and space in the synagogue, within religious movements, in secular culture, and in childhood ritual. Representing a unique approach to contemporary Jewish Studies, this book argues that Jewish bodies and the intersections they represent are at the core of understanding the contemporary Jewish experience. Rather than abandoning or dismissing Judaism, many contemporary Jews use their bodies as a canvas, claiming space for themselves, demonstrating a deliberate and calculated navigation of Jewish law, and engaging a traditionally patriarchal symbol set which, in its feminist use, amplifies their voices in a context which might otherwise silence them. Through these actions and choices, contemporary Jews demonstrate a nuanced understanding of their public identities as gendered and sexed bodies and a commitment to working towards increased inclusivity within the larger Jewish and secular communities. In the end, this book is a foray into the world of Jewish bodies, how they can be conceptualized using folkloristics, and how feminist methodologies of the body can be applied fairly to Jewish bodies, celebrating the multitude of ways in which the body can be conceptualized and experienced.
Download or read book New Perspectives on Jewish Cultural History written by Maja Gildin Zuckerman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-19 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents original studies of how a cultural concept of Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history came to make sense in the experiences of people entangled in different historical situations. Instead of searching for the inconsistencies, discontinuities, or ruptures of dominant grand historical narratives of Jewish cultural history, this book unfolds situations and events, where Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history became useful, meaningful, and acted upon as a site of causal explanations. Inspired by classical American pragmatism and more recent French pragmatism, we present a new perspective on Jewish cultural history in which the experiences, problems, and actions of people are at the center of reconstructions of historical causalities and projections of future horizons. The book shows how boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish are not a priori given but are instead repeatedly experienced in a variety of situations and then acted upon as matters of facts. In different ways and on different scales, these studies show how people's experiences of Jewishness perpetually probe, test, and shape the boundaries between what is Jewish and non-Jewish, and that these boundaries shape the spatiotemporal linkages that we call history.
Download or read book Space and Place in Jewish Studies written by Barbara E. Mann and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-10 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars in the humanities have become increasingly interested in questions of how space is produced and perceived—and they have found that this consideration of human geography greatly enriches our understanding of cultural history. This “spatial turn” equally has the potential to revolutionize Jewish Studies, complicating familiar notions of Jews as “people of the Book,” displaced persons with only a common religious tradition and history to unite them. Space and Place in Jewish Studies embraces these exciting critical developments by investigating what “space” has meant within Jewish culture and tradition—and how notions of “Jewish space,” diaspora, and home continue to resonate within contemporary discourse, bringing space to the foreground as a practical and analytical category. Barbara Mann takes us on a journey from medieval Levantine trade routes to the Eastern European shtetl to the streets of contemporary New York, introducing readers to the variety of ways in which Jews have historically formed communities and created a sense of place for themselves. Combining cutting-edge theory with rabbinics, anthropology, and literary analysis, Mann offers a fresh take on the Jewish experience.
Download or read book Jewish Studies in the Digital Age written by Gerben Zaagsma and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-10-03 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As in all fields and disciplines of the humanities, Jewish Studies scholars find themselves confronted with the rapidly increasing availability of digital resources (data), new technologies to interrogate and analyze them (tools), and the question of how to critically engage with these developments. This volume discusses how the digital turn has affected the field of Jewish Studies. It explores the current state of the art and probes how digital developments can be harnessed to address the specific questions, challenges and problems that Jewish Studies scholars confront. In a field characterised by dispersed sources, and heterogeneous scripts and languages that speak to a multitude of cultures and histories, of abundance as well as loss, what is the promise of Digital Humanities methods--and what are the challenges and pitfalls? The articles in this volume were originally presented at the international conference #DHJewish - Jewish Studies in the Digital Age, which was organised at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) at University of Luxembourg in January 2021. The first big international conference of its kind, it brought together more than sixty scholars and heritage practitioners to discuss how the digital turn affects the field of Jewish Studies.
Download or read book Jewish Studies as Counterlife written by Adam Zachary Newton and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to harness the possibilities offered by the evolving collection of forces by which Jewish Studies is constituted and practiced in order to open, refashion, and exemplify possibilities for a humanities to come.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature written by Benjamin Schreier and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2020-10-16 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Benjamin Schreier argues that Jewish American literature's dominant cliché of "breakthrough"—that is, the irruption into the heart of the American cultural scene during the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley—must also be seen as the critically originary moment of Jewish American literary study. According to Schreier, this is the primal scene of the Jewish American literary field, the point that the field cannot avoid repeating and replaying in instantiating itself as the more or less formalized academic study of Jewish American literature. More than sixty years later, the field's legibility, the very condition of its possibility, remains overwhelmingly grounded in a reliance on this single ethnological narrative. In a polemic against what he sees as the unexamined foundations and stagnant state of the field, Schreier interrogates a series of professionally powerful assumptions about Jewish American literary history—how they came into being and how they hardened into cliché. He offers a critical genealogy of breakthrough and other narratives through which Jewish Studies has asserted its compelling self-evidence, not simply under the banner of the historical realities Jewish Studies claims to represent but more fundamentally for the intellectual and institutional structures through which it produces these representations. He shows how a historicist scholarly narrative quickly consolidated and became hegemonic, in part because of its double articulation of a particular American subject and of a transnational historiography that categorically identified that subject as Jewish. The ethnological grounding of the Jewish American literary field is no longer tenable, Schreier asserts, in an argument with broad implications for the reconceptualization of Jewish and other identity-based ethnic studies.
Download or read book Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination written by Marjorie Suzan Lehman and published by Littman Library of Jewish. This book was released on 2017 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an effort to disentangle motherhood from idealized notions of the Jewish family, Motherhood in the Jewish Cultural Imagination presents new perspectives on Jewish mothers by examining them in an array of time periods and social, religious, literary and historical contexts. This collection of articles also grants mothers a more prominent analytical place in the narration of Jewishness by exploring the ways that Jews have used motherhood to construct and sustain Jewish culture. Each contribution exposes the complexities of the place that mothers occupy in our understanding of Jewish culture and identity. Utilizing methodologies from literature, folklore, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and religion, the essays in this volume locate mothers, motherhood, and mothering in a societal context organized by gender and show how these images interact with, support, and contest prevailing gender belief systems. The book include examinations of childless women warriors of the Bible; childrearing and custodial care in ancient Israel; analyses of the power of God in relationship to the power of mothers in rabbinic literature; depictions of pregnant mothers; descriptions of rabbinic mothers in mourning; images of motherhood in the Zohar; constructions of mothers in medieval piyut; analyses of medieval stories about mothers; perspectives on biblical mothers in modern Jewish literature; mothers in the Hebrew revival movement; mothers in Jewish women's prayer books; mothers in Jewish children's literature; Ottoman Jewish mothers; Afghani Jewish mothers; mothers in Israeli film; and the impact of mothering on American Jewish women activists.
Download or read book French and Jewish written by Nadia Malinovich and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2007-11-29 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of Jewish cultural innovation in early twentieth-century France highlights the complexity and ambivalence of Jewish identity and self-definition in the modern world. This stimulating and original book makes a major contribution to our understanding of modern Jewish history as well as to the history of the Jews in France and to the larger discourse about modern Jewish identities.
Download or read book The Polyphony of Jewish Culture written by Benjamin Harshav and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of seminal essays on major aspects of Jewish culture: Yiddish and Hebrew literature, Europe, America and Israel, transformations of Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the formal traditions of Hebrew verse.
Download or read book Jewish Experiences across the Americas written by Katalin Franciska Rac and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2023-08-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin American Jewish Studies Association Best Edited Volume This volume explores the local specificities and global forces that shaped Jewish experiences in the Americas across five centuries. Featuring a range of case studies by scholars from the United States, Brazil, Europe, and Israel, it explores the culturally, religiously, and politically diverse lives of Jewish minorities in the Western Hemisphere. The chapters are organized chronologically and trace four global forces: the western expansion of early modern European empires, Jewish networks across and beyond empires, migration, and Jewish activism and participation in international ideological movements. The volume weaves together into one narrative the histories of communities and individuals separated by time and space, such as the descendants of Portuguese converts, Moroccan immigrants to Brazil, and U.S.-based creators of Yiddish movies. Through its transnational focus and close attention paid to local circumstances, this volume offers new insights into the multicultural pasts of the Americas’ Jewish populations and of the different regions that make up North, Central, and South America. Contributors: Lenny A. Ureña Valerio | Elisa Kriza | Raanan Rein | Adriana M. Brodsky | Lucas de Mattos Moura Fernandes | Katalin Franciska Rac | Zachary M Baker | Neil Weijer | Hilit Surowitz-Israel | Isabel Rosa Gritti | Tamar Herzog | Jose C Moya | Sandra McGee Deutsch | Dana Rabin Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Download or read book A Mortuary of Books written by Elisabeth Gallas and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2020 JDC-Herbert Katzki Award for Writing Based on Archival Material, given by the Jewish Book Council The astonishing story of the efforts of scholars and activists to rescue Jewish cultural treasures after the Holocaust In March 1946 the American Military Government for Germany established the Offenbach Archival Depot near Frankfurt to store, identify, and restore the huge quantities of Nazi-looted books, archival material, and ritual objects that Army members had found hidden in German caches. These items bore testimony to the cultural genocide that accompanied the Nazis’ systematic acts of mass murder. The depot built a short-lived lieu de memoire—a “mortuary of books,” as the later renowned historian Lucy Dawidowicz called it—with over three million books of Jewish origin coming from nineteen different European countries awaiting restitution. A Mortuary of Books tells the miraculous story of the many Jewish organizations and individuals who, after the war, sought to recover this looted cultural property and return the millions of treasured objects to their rightful owners. Some of the most outstanding Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Dawidowicz, Hannah Arendt, Salo W. Baron, and Gershom Scholem, were involved in this herculean effort. This led to the creation of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc., an international body that acted as the Jewish trustee for heirless property in the American Zone and transferred hundreds of thousands of objects from the Depot to the new centers of Jewish life after the Holocaust. The commitment of these individuals to the restitution of cultural property revealed the importance of cultural objects as symbols of the enduring legacy of those who could not be saved. It also fostered Jewish culture and scholarly life in the postwar world.
Download or read book Framing Jewish Culture written by Simon J. Bronner and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernity offers people choices about who they want to be and how they want to appear to others. The way in which Jews choose to frame their identity establishes the dynamic of their social relations with other Jews and non-Jews - a dynamic complicated by how non-Jews position the boundaries around what and who they define as Jewish. This book uncovers these processes, historically, as well as in contemporary behavior, and finds explanations for the various manifestations, in feeling and action, of 'being Jewish.' Boundaries and borders raise fundamental questions about the difference between Jews and non-Jews. At root, the question is how 'Jewish' is understood in social situations where people recognize or construct boundaries between their own identity and those of others. The question is important because this is by definition the point at which the lines of demarcation between Jews and non-Jews, and between different groupings of Jews, are negotiated. Collectively, the contributors to the book expand our understanding of the social dynamics of framing Jewish identity. The book opens with an introduction that locates the issues raised by the contributors in terms of the scholarly traditions from which they have evolved. Part I presents four essays dealing with the construction and maintenance of boundaries - two by scholars showing how boundaries come to be etched on an ethnic landscape and two by activists who question and adjust distinctions among neighbors. Part II focuses on expressive means of conveying identity and memory, while, in Part III, the discussion turns to museum exhibitions and festive performances as locations for the negotiation of identity in the public sphere. A lively discussion forum concludes the book with a consideration of the paradoxes of Jewish heritage revival in Poland, and the perception of that revival by Jews and non-Jews. *** ..".these essays help us understand the social dynamics of Jewish identity and how identity is constructed in modern life." -- AJL Reviews, February/March 2015 (Series: Jewish Cultural Studies - Vol. 4) [Subject: Jewish Studies, Cultural Studies]
