Download or read book The Hebrew Folktale in Premodern Morality Literature written by Vered Tohar and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recontextualizing early modern Musar folktales to reveal a new reading of premodern Jewish texts.
Download or read book Blurred Boundaries and Deceptive Dichotomies in Pre Modern Texts and Images written by Dafna Nissim and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-12-18 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays focuses on the way blurred boundaries are represented in pre-modern texts and visual art and how they were received and perceived by their audiences: readers, listeners, and viewers. According to the current understanding that opposing cognitive categories that are so common in modern thinking do not apply to pre-modern mentalities, we argue that individuals in medieval and pre-modern societies did not necessarily consider sacred and secular, male and female, real and fictional, and opposing emotions as absolute dichotomies. The contributors to the present collection examine a wide range of cultural artifacts – literary texts, wall paintings, sculptures, jewelry, manuscript illustrations, and various objects as to what they reflect regarding the dominant perceptual system – the network of beliefs, worldviews, presumptions, values, and norms of viewing/reading/hearing different from modern epistemology strongly predicated on the binary nature of things and people. The essays suggest that analyzing pre-modern cultural works of art or literature in light of reception theory can lead to a better understanding of how those cultural products influenced individuals and impacted their thoughts and actions.
Download or read book Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Its Literary Forms written by Aaron W. Hughes and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This well-written, accessible [essay] collection demonstrates a maturation in Jewish studies and medieval philosophy” (Choice). Too often the study of philosophical texts is carried out in ways that do not pay significant attention to how the ideas contained within them are presented, articulated, and developed. This was not always the case. The contributors to this collected work consider Jewish philosophy in the medieval period, when new genres and forms of written expression were flourishing in the wake of renewed interest in ancient philosophy. Many medieval Jewish philosophers were highly accomplished poets, for example, and made conscious efforts to write in a poetic style. This volume turns attention to the connections that medieval Jewish thinkers made between the literary, the exegetical, the philosophical, and the mystical to shed light on the creativity and diversity of medieval thought. As they broaden the scope of what counts as medieval Jewish philosophy, the essays collected here consider questions about how an argument is formed, how text is put into the service of philosophy, and the social and intellectual environment in which philosophical texts were produced.
Download or read book The Hebrew Folktale written by Eli Yassif and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-16 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The most comprehensive account of its subject now available, this impressive study lives up to the encyclopedic promise of its title." -- Choice The Hebrew Folktale seeks to find and define the folk-elements of Jewish culture. Through the use of generic distinctions and definitions developed in folkloristics, Yassif describes the major trends -- structural, thematic, and functional -- of folk narrative in the central periods of Jewish culture.
Download or read book No Place in Time written by Sharon B. Oster and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-12 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines how the Hebraic myth, in which Jewishness became a metaphor for an ancient, pre-Christian past, was reimagined in nineteenth-century American realism. The Hebraic myth, while integral to a Protestant understanding of time, was incapable of addressing modern Jewishness, especially in the context of the growing social and national concern around the "Jewish problem." Sharon B. Oster shows how realist authors consequently cast Jews as caught between a distant past and a promising American future. In either case, whether creating or disrupting temporal continuity, Jewishness existed outside of time. No Place in Time complicates the debates over Eastern European immigration in the 1880s and questions of assimilation to a Protestant American culture. The first chapter begins in the world of periodicals, an interconnected literary culture, out of which Abraham Cahan emerged as a literary voice of Jewish immigrants caught between nostalgia and a messianic future outside of linear progression. Moving from the margins to the center of literary realism, the second chapter revolves around Henry James’s modernization of the "noble Hebrew" as a figure of mediation and reconciliation. The third chapter extends this analysis into the naturalism of Edith Wharton, who takes up questions of intimacy and intermarriage, and places "the Jew" at the nexus of competing futures shaped by uncertainty and risk. A number of Jewish female perspectives are included in the fourth chapter that recasts plots of cultural assimilation through intermarriage in terms of time: if a Jewish past exists in tension with an American future, these writers recuperate the "Hebraic myth" for themselves to imagine a viable Jewish future. No Place in Time ends with a brief look at poet Emma Lazarus, whose understanding of Jewishness was distinctly modern, not nostalgic, mythical, or dead. No Place in Time highlights a significant shift in how Jewishness was represented in American literature, and, as such, raises questions of identity, immigration, and religion. This volume will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century American literature, American Jewish literature, and literature as it intersects with immigration, religion, or temporality, as well as anyone interested in Jewish studies.
Download or read book Happiness in Premodern Judaism written by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and published by Hebrew Union College Press. This book was released on 2003-12-31 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is not common to think that Jews were interested in happiness or that Judaism has anything to say about happiness. On the contrary, the concept of happiness was a central concern of Jewish thinkers. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson shows that rabbinic Judaism regarded itself primarily as a prescription for the attainment of happiness, and that the discourse on happiness captures the evolution of Jewish intellectual history from antiquity to the seventeenth century. These claims make sense if one understands happiness as human flourishing on the basis of Aristotle's thought in the Nichomachean Ethics. Linking virtue, knowledge, and well-being, Aristotle's analysis of happiness can be traced in Jewish understanding of human flourishing as early as the Greco-Roman world, but the fusion of Greek and Judaic perspectives on happiness reached its zenith in in the Middle Ages in the thought of Moses Maimonides and his followers. Even the controversies about Maimonides' ideas could be viewed as discussions about the meaning of happiness and the way to attain it within Judaism. Much of this book, then, concerns the reception of Aristotle's Ethics in medieval Jewish philosophy. This book shows how a certain notion of happiness reflects the intellectual culture of a given period, including cultural exchanges among Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Demonstrating the discourse on happiness as a dramatic interplay between Wisdom and Torah, between philosophy and religion, between reason and faith, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson presents, to specialists and non-specialists alike, a fascinating tour of Jewish intellectual history.
Download or read book Folktales of the Jews V 3 Tales from Arab Lands written by Dan Ben Amos and published by Jewish Publication Society. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 873 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thanks to these generous donors for making the publication of the books in this series possible: Lloyd E. Cotsen; The Maurice Amado Foundation; National Endowment for the Humanities; and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Tales from Arab Lands presents tales from North Africa, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq in the latest volume of the most important collection of Jewish folktales ever published. This is the third book in the multi-volume series in the tradition of Louis Ginzberg?s timeless classic, Legends of the Jews. The tales here and the others in this series have been selected from the Israel Folktale Archives (IFA), named in Honor of Dov Noy, at The University of Haifa, a treasure house of Jewish lore that has remained largely unavailable to the entire world until now. Since the creation of the State of Israel, the IFA has collected more than 20,000 tales from newly arrived immigrants, long-lost stories shared by their families from around the world. The tales come from the major ethno-linguistic communities of the Jewish world and are representative of a wide variety of subjects and motifs, especially rich in Jewish content and context. Each of the tales is accompanied by in-depth commentary that explains the tale's cultural, historical, and literary background and its similarity to other tales in the IFA collection, and extensive scholarly notes. There is also an introduction that describes the culture and its folk narrative tradition, a world map of the areas covered, illustrations, biographies of the collectors and narrators, tale type and motif indexes, a subject index, and a comprehensive bibliography. Until the establishment of the IFA, we had had only limited access to the wide range of Jewish folk narratives. Even in Israel, the gathering place of the most wide-ranging cross-section of world Jewry, these folktales have remained largely unknown. Many of the communities no longer exist as cohesive societies in their representative lands; the Holocaust, migration, and changes in living styles have made the continuation of these tales impossible. This series is a monument to a rich but vanishing oral tradition. This series is a monument to a rich but vanishing oral tradition.
Download or read book Whitechapel Noise written by Vivi Lachs and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-14 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archive material from the London Yiddish press, songbooks, and satirical writing offers a window into an untold cultural life of the Yiddish East End. Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London 1884–1914 by Vivi Lachs positions London’s Yiddish popular culture in historical perspective within Anglo-Jewish history, English socialist aesthetics, and music-hall culture, and shows its relationship to the transnational Yiddish-speaking world. Layers of cultural references in the Yiddish texts are closely analyzed and quoted to draw out the complex yet intimate histories they contain, offering new perspectives on Anglo-Jewish historiography in three main areas: politics, sex, and religion. The acculturation of Jewish immigrants to English life is an important part of the development of their social culture, as well as to the history of London. In part one of the book, Lachs presents an overview of daily immigrant life in London, its relationship to the Anglo-Jewish establishment, and the development of a popular Yiddish theatre and press, establishing a context from which these popular came. The author then analyzes the poems and songs, revealing the hidden social histories of the people writing and performing them. For example, how Morris Winchevsky’s London poetry shows various attempts to engage the Jewish immigrant worker in specific London activism and political debate. Lachs explores themes of marriage, relationships, and sexual exploitation appear regularly in music-hall songs, alluding to the changing nature of sexual roles in the immigrant London community influenced by the cultural mores of their new location. On the theme of religion, Lachs examines how ideas from Jewish texts and practice were used and manipulated by the socialist poets to advance ideas about class, equality, and revolution, and satirical writings offer glimpses into how the practice of religion and growing secularization was changing immigrants’ daily lives in the encounter with modernity. The detailed and nuanced analysis found in Whitechapel Noise offers a new reading of Anglo-Jewish, London, and immigrant history. It is a must-read for Jewish and Anglo-Jewish historians and those interested in Yiddish, London, and migration studies.
Download or read book The Hungry Clothes and Other Jewish Folktales written by and published by Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of classic Jewish folktales which emphasize values and moral lessons, each with an introduction that places it in context with other Jewish teachings.
Download or read book Work Hard and You Shall be Rewarded written by Alan Dundes and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anyone who has ever filled in a form in triplicate, taken an aptitude test, or been rebuffed by a form letter will appreciate the urban folklore found in this collection. Urban people as a folk are bound together by their unhappy experiences in battling "the system," whether that system is the machinery of government or the office where one works. The wonderfully expressive materials in this book--chain letters, memoranda, notices, and cartoons--touch upon every major controversy of urban America: racism, sex, politics, automation, alienation, welfare, the women's movement, military mentality, and office bureaucracy. The humor of the materials pinpoints the ills and frustrations of modern society and becomes, in turn, an escape from them.
Download or read book Queer Enchantments written by Anne E. Duggan and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To the uninitiated, the films of French New Wave director Jacques Demy can seem strange and even laughable, with their gaudy color schemes and sung dialogue. Yet since the late 1990s, a generation of queer filmmakers in France have found new inspiration in Demy's cinema. In this volume, author Anne E. Duggan examines Jacques Demy's queer sensibility in connection with another understudied characteristic of his oeuvre: his recurrent use of the fairy tale. In Queer Enchantments: Gender, Sexuality, and Class in the Fairy-Tale Cinema of Jacques Demy, Duggan demonstrates that Demy uses fairy-tale devices to explore and expand the identity categories of his characters, while he broadens the possibilities of the genre of the fairy tale through his cinematic revisions. In each chapter, Duggan examines how Demy strategically unfolds, challenges, and teases out the subversive qualities of fairy-tale paradigms. In chapter 1, Duggan reads Demy's Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg through the lens of "Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty," while in chapter 2, she explores Demy's revision of Charles Perrault's "Donkey Skin" from the particular angle of gay aesthetics. In chapter 3, Duggan situates Demy's rendition of The Pied Piper in relation to a specifically Franco-American tradition of the legend, which thus far has not received critical attention. Finally, in Chapter 4, she examines the ways in which Demy's Lady Oscar represents the undoing of the figure of the maiden warrior. An epilogue reads Demy's fairy-tale cinema as exemplary of the postmodern tale. Duggan shows that Demy's cinema heightens the inherent tensions and troubles that were already present in fairy-tale texts and uses them to illustrate both the constraints and utopian possibilities of the fairy tale. Both film and fairy-tale studies scholars will enjoy Duggan's fresh look at the distinctive cinema of Jacques Demy.
Download or read book Bialik the Hebrew Bible and the Literature of Nationalism written by David Aberbach and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-25 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the life and poetry of Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934) in the context of European national literature between the French Revolution and World War I, showing how he helped create a modern Hebrew national culture, spurring the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. The author begins with Bialik’s background in the Tsarist Empire, contextualizing Jewish powerlessness in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. As European anti-Semitism grew, Bialik emerged at the vanguard of a modern Hebrew national movement, building on ancient biblical and rabbinic tradition and speaking to Jewish concerns in neo-prophetic poems, love poems, poems for children, and folk poems. This book makes accessible a broad but representative selection of Bialik’s poetry in translation. Alongside this, a variety of national poets are considered from across Europe, including Solomos in Greece, Mickiewicz in Poland, Shevchenko in Ukraine, Njegoš in Serbia, Petőfi in Hungary, and Yeats in Ireland. Aberbach argues that Bialik as Jewish national poet cannot be understood except in the dual context of ancient Jewish nationalism and modern European nationalism, both political and cultural. Written in clear and accessible prose, this book will interest those studying modern European nationalism, Hebrew literature, Jewish history, and anti-Semitism.
Download or read book Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts written by Arthur F. Marotti and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts: Catholic, Judaic, Feminist, and Secular Dimensions, editors Arthur F. Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt present thirteen essays that examine the complex religious culture of early modern England. Emphasizing particularly the marginalized discourses of Catholicism and Judaism in mainstream English Protestant culture, the authors highlight the instability of an official religious order that was troubled not only by religious heterodoxy but also by feminist and secular challenges. North American and Israeli scholars present essays on a wide range of subjects all assumed to be "marginal" but which in a real sense were central to the religious and cultural life of the Protestant English nation. Using critical methods ranging from historical analysis, deconstruction, feminist inquiry, and intertextual interpretation to pedagogical experimentation, contributors offer analyses in five sections: Minority Catholic Culture, Figuring the Jew, Hebraism and the Bible, Women and Religion, and Religion and Secularization. Essays reveal new aspects of familiar texts such as Shakespeare's King Lear and The Merchant of Venice, the psalm translations by Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, Christopher Marlowe's dramas, George Herbert's poetry, Aemelia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, and John Milton's Samson Agonistes. They also call attention to works such as the mid-sixteenth-century play The Historie of Jacob and Esau, William Blundell's Catholic antiquarian writing, the series of paintings portraying the religious institute of Mary Ward, and funeral sermons for religiously active women. Contributors show that we cannot understand a culture without attending to its repressed, marginalized, and unacknowledged elements. Scholars of religious, literary, and cultural history will enjoy this illuminating collection.
Download or read book A Judeo Arabic Parody of the Life of Jesus written by Miriam Goldstein and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2023-04-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cinderella across Cultures written by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cinderella story is retold continuously in literature, illustration, music, theatre, ballet, opera, film, and other media, and folklorists have recognized hundreds of distinct forms of Cinderella plots worldwide. The focus of this volume, however, is neither Cinderella as an item of folklore nor its alleged universal meaning. In Cinderella across Cultures, editors Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Wozniak analyze the Cinderella tale as a fascinating, multilayered, and ever-changing story constantly reinvented in different media and traditions. The collection highlights the tale’s reception and adaptation in cultural and national contexts across the globe, including those of Italy, France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland, and Russia. Contributors shed new light on classic versions of Cinderella by examining the material contexts that shaped them (such as the development of glass artifacts and print techniques), or by analyzing their reception in popular culture (through cheap print and mass media). The first section, “Contextualizing Cinderella,” investigates the historical and cultural contexts of literary versions of the tale and their diachronic transformations. The second section, “Regendering Cinderella,” tackles innovative and daring literary rewritings of the tale in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in particular modern feminist and queer takes on the classic plot. Finally, the third section, “Visualising Cinderella,” concerns symbolic transformations of the tale, especially the interaction between text and image and the renewal of the tale’s iconographic tradition. The volume offers an invaluable contribution to the study of this particular tale and also to fairy-tale studies overall. Readers interested in the visual arts, in translation studies, or in popular culture, as well as a wider audience wishing to discover the tale anew will delight in this collection.
Download or read book Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends written by Aunt Naomi and published by . This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a new release of the original 1929 edition.
Download or read book Stories from the Hebrew 1903 written by Josephine Woodbury Heermans and published by Kessinger Publishing. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
