Download or read book Places and Forms of Encounter in Jewish Literatures written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Places and Forms of Encounter in Jewish Literatures. Transfer, Mediality and Situativity brings together contributions on Jewish literatures with methodologies and theories discussed in Comparative and World Literature Studies. The contributions highlight dynamic literary processes in various historical and cultural contexts.

Download or read book Jewish Literatures and Cultures in Southeastern Europe written by Renate Hansen-Kokoruš and published by Böhlau Wien. This book was released on 2021-10-11 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume offers an overview of the diverse Jewish experiences in Southeastern Europe from the 19th to the 21st centuries, and the various forms and strategies of their representation in literature, the arts, historiography and philosophy. Southeastern Europe is characterized by a high degree of ethnical, religious and cultural diversity. Jews, whether Sephardim, Ashkenazim or Romaniots – settling there in different periods – experienced divergent life worlds which engendered rich cultural production. Though recent scholarly and popular interest in this heterogeneous region has grown impressively, Jewish cultural production is still an under-researched area. The volume offers an overview of the diverse Jewish experiences in Southeastern Europe from the 19th to the 21st centuries, and the various forms and strategies of their representation in literature, the arts, historiography and philosophy, thus creating a dialogue between Jewish studies, Balkan studies, and current literary and cultural theories.

Download or read book Jews and Power written by Ruth R. Wisse and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2008-12-24 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the Jewish Encounter series Taking in everything from the Kingdom of David to the Oslo Accords, Ruth Wisse offers a radical new way to think about the Jewish relationship to power. Traditional Jews believed that upholding the covenant with God constituted a treaty with the most powerful force in the universe; this later transformed itself into a belief that, unburdened by a military, Jews could pursue their religious mission on a purely moral plain. Wisse, an eminent professor of comparative literature at Harvard, demonstrates how Jewish political weakness both increased Jewish vulnerability to scapegoating and violence, and unwittingly goaded power-seeking nations to cast Jews as perpetual targets. Although she sees hope in the State of Israel, Wisse questions the way the strategies of the Diaspora continue to drive the Jewish state, echoing Abba Eban's observation that Israel was the only nation to win a war and then sue for peace. And then she draws a persuasive parallel to the United States today, as it struggles to figure out how a liberal democracy can face off against enemies who view Western morality as weakness. This deeply provocative book is sure to stir debate both inside and outside the Jewish world. Wisse's narrative offers a compelling argument that is rich with history and bristling with contemporary urgency.

Download or read book An Inch or Two of Time written by Jordan D. Finkin and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-19 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In literary modernism, time and space are sometimes transformed from organizational categories into aesthetic objects, a transformation that can open dramatic metaphorical and creative possibilities. In An Inch or Two of Time, Jordan Finkin shows how Jewish modernists of the early twentieth century had a distinct perspective on this innovative metaphorical vocabulary. As members of a national-ethnic-religious community long denied the rights and privileges of self-determination, with a dramatically internalized sense of exile and landlessness, the Jewish writers at the core of this investigation reimagined their spatial and temporal orientation and embeddedness. They set as the fulcrum of their imagery the metaphorical power of time and space. Where non-Jewish writers might tend to view space as a given—an element of their own sense of belonging to a nation at home in a given territory—the Jewish writers discussed here spatialized time: they created an as-if space out of time, out of history. They understood their writing to function as a kind of organ of perception on its own. Jewish literature thus presents a particularly dynamic system for working out the implications of that understanding, and as such, this book argues, it is an indispensable part of the modern library.

Download or read book The Jewish Encounter with Hinduism written by Alon Goshen-Gottstein and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hinduism has become a vital 'other' for Judaism over the past decades. The book surveys the history of the relationship from historical to contemporary times, from travellers to religious leadership. It explores the potential enrichment for Jewish theology and spirituality, as well as the challenges for Jewish identity.

Download or read book Jews and Journeys written by Joshua Levinson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-08-06 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journeys of dislocation and return, of discovery and conquest hold a prominent place in the imagination of many cultures. Wherever an individual or community may be located, it would seem, there is always the dream of being elsewhere. This has been especially true throughout the ages for Jews, for whom the promises and perils of travel have influenced both their own sense of self and their identity in the eyes of others. How does travel writing, as a genre, produce representations of the world of others, against which one's own self can be invented or explored? And what happens when Jewish authors in particular—whether by force or of their own free will, whether in reality or in the imagination—travel from one place to another? How has travel figured in the formation of Jewish identity, and what cultural and ideological work is performed by texts that document or figure specifically Jewish travel? Featuring essays on topics that range from Abraham as a traveler in biblical narrative to the guest book entries at contemporary Israeli museum and memorial sites; from the marvels medieval travelers claim to have encountered to eighteenth-century Jewish critiques of Orientalism; from the Wandering Jew of legend to one mid-twentieth-century Yiddish writer's accounts of his travels through Peru, Jews and Journeys explores what it is about travel writing that enables it to become one of the central mechanisms for exploring the realities and fictions of individual and collective identity.

Download or read book Modern Jewish Literatures written by Sheila E. Jelen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there such a thing as a distinctive Jewish literature? While definitions have been offered, none has been universally accepted. Modern Jewish literature lacks the basic markers of national literatures: it has neither a common geography nor a shared language—though works in Hebrew or Yiddish are almost certainly included—and the field is so diverse that it cannot be contained within the bounds of one literary category. Each of the fifteen essays collected in Modern Jewish Literatures takes on the above question by describing a movement across boundaries—between languages, cultures, genres, or spaces. Works in Hebrew and Yiddish are amply represented, but works in English, French, German, Italian, Ladino, and Russian are also considered. Topics range from the poetry of the Israeli nationalist Natan Alterman to the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam; from turn-of-the-century Ottoman Jewish journalism to wire-recorded Holocaust testimonies; from the intellectual salons of late eighteenth-century Berlin to the shelves of a Jewish bookstore in twentieth-century Los Angeles. The literary world described in Modern Jewish Literatures is demarcated chronologically by the Enlightenment, the Haskalah, and the French Revolution, on one end, and the fiftieth anniversary of the State of Israel on the other. The particular terms of the encounter between a Jewish past and present for modern Jews has varied greatly, by continent, country, or village, by language, and by social standing, among other things. What unites the subjects of these studies is not a common ethnic, religious, or cultural history but rather a shared endeavor to use literary production and writing in general as the laboratory in which to explore and represent Jewish experience in the modern world.

Download or read book The Jewish Christian Encounter in Medieval Preaching written by Jonathan Adams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-03 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the complexity of preaching as a phenomenon in the medieval Jewish-Christian encounter. This was not only an "encounter" as physical meeting or confrontation (such as the forced attendance of Jews at Christian sermons that took place across Europe), but also an "imaginary" or theological encounter in which Jews remained a figure from a distant constructed time and place who served only to underline and verify Christian teachings. Contributors also explore the Jewish response to Christian anti-Jewish preaching in their own preaching and religious instruction.

Download or read book The Jewish Body written by Melvin Konner and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the Jewish people from bris to burial, from “muscle Jews” to nose jobs. Melvin Konner, a renowned doctor and anthropologist, takes the measure of the “Jewish body,” considering sex, circumcision, menstruation, and even those most elusive and controversial of microscopic markers–Jewish genes. But this is not only a book that examines the human body through the prism of Jewish culture. Konner looks as well at the views of Jewish physiology held by non-Jews, and the way those views seeped into Jewish thought. He describes in detail the origins of the first nose job, and he writes about the Nazi ideology that categorized Jews as a public health menace on par with rats or germs. A work of grand historical and philosophical sweep, The Jewish Body discusses the subtle relationship between the Jewish conception of the physical body and the Jewish conception of a bodiless God. It is a book about the relationship between a land–Israel–and the bodily sense not merely of individuals but of a people. As Konner describes, a renewed focus on the value of physical strength helped generate the creation of a Jewish homeland, and continued in the wake of it. With deep insight and great originality, Konner gives us nothing less than an anatomical history of the Jewish people. Part of the Jewish Encounter series

Download or read book Kabbalah in Italy 1280 1510 written by Moshe Idel and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This survey of the history of Kabbalah in Italy represents a major contribution from one of the world's foremost Kabbalah scholars. Idel charts the ways that Kabbalistic thought and literature developed in Italy and how its unique geographical situation facilitated the arrival of both Spanish and Byzantine Kabbalah.

Download or read book Geographies of Encounter written by Marian Burchardt and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-19 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection explores forms of multi-religious cohabitation as well as the spatial arrangements that underpin and shape them through sixteen chapters that range across disciplines, historical periods, and global geographies. Focusing on interactions between different religious groups and traditions, the authors conceptualize three types of spatial arrangements and explore how they operate ad geographies of encounter; i.e., multi-religious places, multi-religious cities, and multi-religious landscapes. With perspectives from anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and geographers, the book demonstrates the multiple ways in which geographies of interreligious encounters and forms of multi-religious cohabitation have changed throughout history due to their embeddedness id different frameworks of political organization, shifting religious ideologies, and changing forms of human mobility.

Download or read book Making German Jewish Literature Anew written by Katja Garloff and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Making German Jewish Literature Anew, Katja Garloff traces the emergence of a new Jewish literature in Germany and Austria from 1990 to the present. The rise of new generations of authors who identify as both German and Jewish, and who often sustain additional affiliations with places such as France, Russia, or Israel, affords a unique opportunity to analyze the foundational moments of diasporic literature. Making German Jewish Literature Anew is structured around a series of founding gestures: performing authorship, remaking memory, and claiming places. Garloff contends that these founding gestures are literary strategies that reestablish the very possibility of a German Jewish literature several decades after the Holocaust. Making German Jewish Literature Anew offers fresh interpretations of second-generation authors such as Maxim Biller, Doron Rabinovici, and Barbara Honigmann as well as of third-generation authors, many of whom come from Eastern European and/or mixed-religion backgrounds. These more recent writers include Benjamin Stein, Lena Gorelik, and Katja Petrowskaja. Throughout the book, Garloff asks what exactly marks a given text as Jewish—the author's identity, intended audience, thematic concerns, or stylistic choices—and reflects on existing definitions of Jewish literature.

Download or read book A Hundred Acres of America written by Michael Hoberman and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-06 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History, Michael Hoberman introduces cultural geography as an alternative approach to the immigrant model. Cultural geography allows Hoberman to restore Jewish American writers to their roles as important, active members of the American literary landscape from the 1850s to the present, and to argue that Jewish history, American literary history, and the inhabitation of American geography are, and always have been, contiguous entities. A Hundred Acres of America makes its case by investigating both canonical and extra-canonical literary depictions of six geographies: the frontier, the small town, the urban, the suburban, America as seen from Europe, and Israel as seen from America. Hoberman reads dozens of representative texts closely, and analyzes a wide range of authors, from frontier-era memoirists and turn-of-the-century native-born reformers to contemporary novelists. He adroitly demonstrates that Jewish American authors are not only present throughout American literary history, but actively shaped this history with writings that often subverted or contradicted the ways their non-Jewish peers depicted these geographies"--

Download or read book Iberian Jewish Literature written by Jonathan P. Decter and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This stimulating and graceful book explores Iberian Jewish attitudes toward cultural transition during the 12th and 13th centuries, when growing intolerance toward Jews in Islamic al-Andalus and the southward expansion of the Christian Reconquista led to the relocation of Jews from Islamic to Christian domains. By engaging literary topics such as imagery, structure, voice, landscape, and geography, Jonathan P. Decter traces attitudes toward transition that range from tenacious longing for the Islamic past to comfort in the Christian environment. Through comparison with Arabic and European vernacular literatures, Decter elucidates a medieval Hebrew poetics of estrangement and nostalgia, poetic responses to catastrophe, and the refraction of social issues in fictional narratives. Published with the generous support of the Koret Foundation.

Download or read book T T Clark Encyclopedia of Second Temple Judaism Volume Two written by Loren T. Stuckenbruck and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-26 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The T&T Clark Encyclopedia of Second Temple Judaism provides a comprehensive reference resource of over 600 scholarly articles aimed at scholars and students interested in Judaism of the Second Temple Period. The two-volume work is split into four parts. Part One offers a prolegomenon for the contemporary study and appreciation of Second Temple Judaism, locating the discipline in relation to other relevant fields (such as Hebrew Bible, Rabbinics, Christian Origins). Beginning with a discussion of terminology, the discussion suggests ways the Second Temple period may be described, and concludes by noting areas of study that challenge our perception of ancient Judaism. Part Two presents an overview of respective contexts of the discipline set within the broad framework of historical chronology corresponding to a set of full-colour, custom-designed maps. With distinct attention to primary sources, the author traces the development of historical, social, political, and religious developments from the time period following the exile in the late 6th century B.C.E. through to the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt (135 C.E.). Part Three focuses specifically on a wide selection of primary-source literature of Second Temple Judaism, summarizing the content of key texts, and examining their similarities and differences with other texts of the period. Essays here include a brief introduction to the work and a summary of its contents, as well as examination of critical issues such as date, provenance, location, language(s), and interpretative matters. The early reception history of texts is also considered, and followed by a bibliography specific to that essay. Numerous high-resolution manuscript images are utilized to illustrate distinct features of the texts. Part Four addresses topics relevant to the Second Temple Period such as places, practices, historical figures, concepts, and subjects of scholarly discussion. These are often supplemented by images, maps, drawings, or diagrams, some of which appear here for the first time. Copiously illustrated, carefully researched and meticulously referenced, this resource provides a reliable, up-to-date and complete guide for those studying early Judaism in its literary and historical settings.

Download or read book Ancient Israelite And Early Jewish Literature written by Th. Theodoor Christiaan Vriezen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2005 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) offers a literary and historical-critical approach, containing some religio-historical or theological explanations where appropriate.

Download or read book This Holy Place written by Steven Fine and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-10-17 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Steven Fine's This Holy Place is a comprehensive treatment of the synagogue as a place of sanctity in Late Antiquity. This book is essential for an understanding of how the synagogue became the central Jewish communal institution and how it served as a substitute for the destroyed Jerusalem Temple during the long period of Jewish exile from the Land of Israel. Fine's mastery of both archaeological evidence and a wide variety of literary sources makes this a major contribution to the field." --Lawrence H. Schiffman, New York University "Fine has mastered an unusually wide range of disciplines--rabbinical sources, archaeology, art and epigraphy. . . . His book is thoroughly researched, well written, and engagingly presented. It should be required reading for anyone interested in how this most central institution of Jewish life was perceived and presented." --Lee I. Levine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem "I read [This Holy Place] with the greatest profit and enjoyment. It is an important contribution to the entire nature of late antique civilization and not only to Jewish studies." --Peter Brown, Princeton University