Download or read book Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon written by Justin Daniel Cammy and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 744 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wisse is a leading scholar of Yiddish and Jewish literary studies and a fearless public intellectual on issues relating to Jewish society and culture. In this celebratory volume, her colleagues pay tribute with a collection of critical essays whose subjects break new ground in Yiddish, Hebrew, Israeli, American, European, and Holocaust literature.

Download or read book The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater written by Alyssa Quint and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish Book Award Finalist: “Turns the fascinating life of Avrom Goldfaden into a multi-dimensional history of the Yiddish theater’s formative years.” —Jeffery Veidinger, author of Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire In this book, Alyssa Quint focuses on the early years of the modern Yiddish theater, from roughly 1876 to 1883, through the works of one of its best-known and most colorful figures, Avrom Goldfaden. Goldfaden (né Goldenfaden, 1840-1908) was one of the first playwrights to stage a commercially viable Yiddish-language theater, first in Romania and then in Russia. Goldfaden’s work was rapidly disseminated in print and his plays were performed frequently for Jewish audiences. Sholem Aleichem considered him as a forger of a new language that “breathed the European spirit into our old jargon.” Quint uses Goldfaden’s theatrical works as a way to understand the social life of Jewish theater in Imperial Russia. Through a study of his libretti, she looks at the experiences of Russian Jewish actors, male and female, to explore connections between culture as artistic production and culture in the sense of broader social structures. Quint explores how Jewish actors who played Goldfaden’s work on stage absorbed the theater into their everyday lives. Goldfaden’s theater gives a rich view into the conduct, ideology, religion, and politics of Jews during an important moment in the history of late Imperial Russia.

Download or read book 18 written by Nora Gold and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2023-10-17 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Finalist in the Anthologies Category This anthology, the first of this kind in twenty-five years, collects eighteen astounding works of Jewish fiction. This is the first anthology of translated multilingual Jewish fiction in 25 years: a collection of 18 splendid stories, each translated into English from a different language: Albanian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Ladino, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Yiddish. These compelling, humorous, and moving stories, written by eminent authors that include Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Isaac Babel, and Lili Berger, reflect both the diversities and the commonalities within Jewish culture, and will make you laugh, cry, and think. This beautiful book is easily accessible and enjoyable not only for Jewish readers, but for story-lovers of all backgrounds. Authors (in the order they appear in the book) include: Elie Wiesel, Varda Fiszbein, S. Y. Agnon, Gábor T. Szántó, Jasminka Domaš, Augusto Segre, Lili Berger, Peter Sichrovsky, Maciej Płaza, Entela Kasi, Norman Manea, Luize Valente, Eliya Karmona, Birte Kont, Michel Fais, Irena Dousková, Mario Levi, and Isaac Babel.

Download or read book The Formation of the Jewish Canon written by Timothy H. Lim and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVThe discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls provides unprecedented insight into the nature of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament before its fixation. Timothy Lim here presents a complete account of the formation of the canon in Ancient Judaism from the emergence of the Torah in the Persian period to the final acceptance of the list of twenty-two/twenty-four books in the Rabbinic period./divDIV /divDIVUsing the Hebrew Bible, the Scrolls, the Apocrypha, the Letter of Aristeas, the writings of Philo, Josephus, the New Testament, and Rabbinic literature as primary evidence he argues that throughout the post-exilic period up to around 100 CE there was not one official “canon” accepted by all Jews; rather, there existed a plurality of collections of scriptures that were authoritative for different communities. Examining the literary sources and historical circumstances that led to the emergence of authoritative scriptures in ancient Judaism, Lim proposes a theory of the majority canon that posits that the Pharisaic canon became the canon of Rabbinic Judaism in the centuries after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple./div

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 The Impossible Jew written by Benjamin Schreier and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-06-12 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He destroys in order to create. In a sweeping critique of the field, Benjamin Schreier resituates Jewish Studies in order to make room for a critical study of identity and identification. Displacing the assumption that Jewish Studies is necessarily the study of Jews, this book aims to break down the walls of the academic ghetto in which the study of Jewish American literature often seems to be contained: alienated from fields like comparative ethnicity studies, American studies, and multicultural studies; suffering from the unwillingness of Jewish Studies to accept critical literary studies as a legitimate part of its project; and so often refusing itself to engage in self-critique. The Impossible Jew interrogates how the concept of identity is critically put to work by identity-based literary study. Through readings of key authors from across the canon of Jewish American literature and culture—including Abraham Cahan, the New York Intellectuals, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Safran Foer—Benjamin Schreier shows how texts resist the historicist expectation that self-evident Jewish populations are represented in and recoverable from them. Through ornate, scabrous, funny polemics, Schreier draws the lines of relation between Jewish American literary study and American studies, multiethnic studies, critical theory, and Jewish Studies formations. He maintains that a Jewish Studies beyond ethnicity is essential for a viable future of Jewish literary study.

Download or read book Black Jews in Africa and the Americas written by Tudor Parfitt and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-04 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Jews in Africa and the Americas tells the fascinating story of how the Ashanti, Tutsi, Igbo, Zulu, Beta Israel, Maasai, and many other African peoples came to think of themselves as descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel. Pursuing medieval and modern European race narratives over a millennium in which not only were Jews cast as black but black Africans were cast as Jews, Tudor Parfitt reveals a complex history of the interaction between religious and racial labels and their political uses. For centuries, colonialists, travelers, and missionaries, in an attempt to explain and understand the strange people they encountered on the colonial frontier, labeled an astonishing array of African tribes, languages, and cultures as Hebrew, Jewish, or Israelite. Africans themselves came to adopt these identities as their own, invoking their shared histories of oppression, imagined blood-lines, and common traditional practices as proof of a racial relationship to Jews. Beginning in the post-slavery era, contacts between black Jews in America and their counterparts in Africa created powerful and ever-growing networks of black Jews who struggled against racism and colonialism. A community whose claims are denied by many, black Jews have developed a strong sense of who they are as a unique people. In Parfitt’s telling, forces of prejudice and the desire for new racial, redemptive identities converge, illuminating Jewish and black history alike in novel and unexplored ways.

Download or read book Our American Israel written by Amy Kaplan and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential account of America’s most controversial alliance that reveals how the United States came to see Israel as an extension of itself, and how that strong and divisive partnership plays out in our own time. Our American Israel tells the story of how a Jewish state in the Middle East came to resonate profoundly with a broad range of Americans in the twentieth century. Beginning with debates about Zionism after World War II, Israel’s identity has been entangled with America’s belief in its own exceptional nature. Now, in the twenty-first century, Amy Kaplan challenges the associations underlying this special alliance. Through popular narratives expressed in news media, fiction, and film, a shared sense of identity emerged from the two nations’ histories as settler societies. Americans projected their own origin myths onto Israel: the biblical promised land, the open frontier, the refuge for immigrants, the revolt against colonialism. Israel assumed a mantle of moral authority, based on its image as an “invincible victim,” a nation of intrepid warriors and concentration camp survivors. This paradox persisted long after the Six-Day War, when the United States rallied behind a story of the Israeli David subduing the Arab Goliath. The image of the underdog shattered when Israel invaded Lebanon and Palestinians rose up against the occupation. Israel’s military was strongly censured around the world, including notes of dissent in the United States. Rather than a symbol of justice, Israel became a model of military strength and technological ingenuity. In America today, Israel’s political realities pose difficult challenges. Turning a critical eye on the turbulent history that bound the two nations together, Kaplan unearths the roots of present controversies that may well divide them in the future.

Download or read book Creativity and Tradition written by Israel M. Ta-Shma and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together 16 of Ta-Shma's outstanding studies (4 published here for the first time). These essays focus on leading rabbinic scholars and their writings as well as important issues of Jewish intellectual history, such as the nature of halakhah and aggadah; kabbalah and spirituality; childhood; and popular religion.

Download or read book From Continuity to Contiguity written by Dan Miron and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-19 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dan Miron—widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on modern Jewish literatures—begins this study by surveying and critiquing previous attempts to define a common denominator unifying the various modern Jewish literatures. He argues that these prior efforts have all been trapped by the need to see these literatures as a continuum. Miron seeks to break through this impasse by acknowledging discontinuity as the staple characteristic of modern Jewish writing. These literatures instead form a complex of independent, yet touching, components related through contiguity. From Continuity to Contiguity offers original insights into modern Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish literatures, including a new interpretation of Franz Kafka's place within them and discussions of Sholem Aleichem, Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, Akhad ha'am, M. Y. Berditshevsky, Kh. N. Bialik, and Y. L. Peretz.

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 Building a City written by Sheila E. Jelen and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fiction of Nobel Laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon is the foundation of the array of scholarly essays as seen through the career of Alan Mintz, visionary scholar and professor of Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Mintz introduced Agnon's posthumously published Ir Umeloah (A City in Its Fullness)—a series of linked stories set in the 17th century and focused on Agnon's hometown, Buczacz, a town in what is currently western Ukraine—to an English reading audience, and argued that Agnon's unique treatment of Buczacz in A City in its Fullness, navigating the sometimes tenuous boundary of the modernist and the mythical, was a full-throated, self-conscious literary response to the Holocaust. This volume is an extension of a memorial dedicated to Mintz's memory (who died suddenly in 2017) which combines selections of Alan's work from the beginning, middle and end of his career, with autobiographical tributes from older and younger scholars alike. The essays dealing with Agnon and Buczacz remember the career of Alan Mintz and his contribution to the world of Jewish studies and within the world of Jewish communal life.

Download or read book How Strange the Change written by Marc Caplan and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-14 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Marc Caplan argues that the literatures of ostensibly marginal modern cultures are key to understanding modernism. Caplan undertakes an unprecedented comparison of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature and twentieth-century Anglophone and Francophone African literature and reveals unexpected similarities between them. These literatures were created under imperial regimes that brought with them processes of modernization that were already well advanced elsewhere. Yiddish and African writers reacted to the liberating potential of modernity and the burdens of imperial authority by choosing similar narrative genres, typically reminiscent of early-modern European literatures: the picaresque, the pseudo-autobiography, satire, and the Bildungsroman. Both display analogous anxieties toward language, caught as they were between imperial, "global" languages and stigmatized native vernaculars, and between traditions of writing and orality. Through comparative readings of narratives by Reb Nakhman of Breslov, Amos Tutuola, Yisroel Aksenfeld, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Isaac Meyer Dik, Camara Laye, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Wole Soyinka, Y. Y. Linetski, and Ahmadou Karouma, Caplan demonstrates that these literatures' "belated" relationship to modernization suggests their potential to anticipate subsequent crises in the modernity and post-modernity of metropolitan cultures. This, in turn, leads him to propose a new theoretical model, peripheral modernism, which incorporates both a new understanding of "periphery" and "center" in modernity and a new methodology for comparative literary criticism and theory.

Download or read book Yiddish written by Jeffrey Shandler and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book provides an introduction to Yiddish, the foundational vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, both as a subject of interest in its own right and for the distinctive issues that Yiddish raises for the study of languages generally, including language diaspora, language fusion, multilingualism, language ideologies, and postvernacularity. By approaching the study of Yiddish through the rubric of a biography, rather than following a more conventional chronological, geographical, or ideological approach, this book examines the story of Yiddish thematically. Each chapter addresses a different "biographical" topic concerning the character of the language and how it has been conceptualized, ranging across time, space, and speech communities. These chapters interrelate discussions of the language's origins, characteristics, and development with the dynamics of its implementation in Ashkenazi culture from the Middle Ages to the present. These thematic chapters also examine the symbolic investments that both Jews and others have made in Yiddish over time, which are key to understanding both general perceptions and scholarly analyses of the language, especially in the modern period"--

Download or read book A Taytsh Manifesto written by Saul Noam Zaritt and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2024-10-01 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Taytsh Manifesto calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish studies and for the study of modern Jewish culture. Saul Noam Zaritt calls for a shift in vocabulary, from Yiddish to taytsh, in order to promote reading strategies that account for the ways texts named as Jewish move between languages and cultures. Yiddish, a moniker that became dominant only in the early twentieth century, means “Jewish” and thus marks the language with a single identity: of and for a Jewish collective. In contrast, this book calls attention to an earlier and, at one time, more common name for the language: taytsh, which initially means “German.” By using the term taytsh, speakers indicated that they were indeed speaking a Germanic language, a language that was not entirely their own. In time, when the word shifted to a verb, taytshn, it came to mean the act of translation. To write or speak in Yiddish is thus to render into taytsh and inhabit the gap between languages. A Taytsh Manifesto highlights the cultural porousness that inheres in taytsh and deploys the term as a paradigm that can be applied to a host of modern Jewish cultural formations. The book reads three corpora in modern Yiddish culture through the lens of translation: Yiddish pulp fiction, also known as shund (trash); the genre of the Yiddish monologue as authored by Sholem Aleichem and other prominent Yiddish writers; and the persistence of Yiddish as a language of vulgarity in contemporary U.S. culture. Together these examples help revise current histories of Yiddish while demonstrating the need for new vocabularies to account for the multidirectionality of Jewish culture. A Taytsh Manifesto develops a model for identifying, in Yiddish and beyond, how cultures intertwine, how they become implicated in world systems and empire, and how they might escape such limiting and oppressive structures.

Download or read book Jews and Ukrainians in Russia s Literary Borderlands written by Amelia Glaser and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-22 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of Eastern European literature have largely confined themselves to a single language, culture, or nationality. In this highly original book, Glaser shows how writers working in Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish during much of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century were in intense conversation with one another. The marketplace was both the literal locale at which members of these different societies and cultures interacted with one another and a rich subject for representation in their art. It is commonplace to note the influence of Gogol on Russian literature, but Glaser shows him to have been a profound influence on Ukrainian and Yiddish literature as well. And she shows how Gogol must be understood not only within the context of his adopted city of St. Petersburg but also that of his native Ukraine. As Ukrainian and Yiddish literatures developed over this period, they were shaped by their geographical and cultural position on the margins of the Russian Empire. As distinctive as these writers may seem from one another, they are further illuminated by an appreciation of their common relationship to Russia. Glaser’s book paints a far more complicated portrait than scholars have traditionally allowed of Jewish (particularly Yiddish) literature in the context of Eastern European and Russian culture.

Download or read book Multiculturalism in Israel written by Adia Mendelson-Maoz and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By analyzing its position within the struggles for recognition and reception of different national and ethnic cultural groups, this book offers a bold new picture of Israeli literature. Through comparative discussion of the literatures of Palestinian citizens of Israel, of Mizrahim, of migrants from the former Soviet Union, and of Ethiopian-Israelis, the author demonstrates an unexpected richness and diversity in the Israeli literary scene, a reality very different from the monocultural image that Zionism aspired to create. Drawing on a wide body of social and literary theory, Mendelson-Maoz compares and contrasts the literatures of the four communities she profiles. In her discussion of the literature of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, she presents the question of language and translation, and she provides three case studies of particular authors and their reception. Her study of Mizrahi literature adopts a chronological approach, starting in the 1950s and proceeding toward contemporary Mizrahi writing, while discussing questions of authenticity and self-determination. The discussion of Israeli literature written by immigrants from the former Soviet Union focuses both on authors who write Israeli literature in Russian and of Russian immigrants writing in Hebrew. The final section of the book provides a valuable new discussion of the work of Ethiopian-Israeli writers, a group whose contributions have seldom been previously acknowledged. The picture that emerges from this groundbreaking book replaces the traditional, homogeneous historical narrative of Israeli literature with a diversity of voices, a multiplicity of origins, and a wide range of different perspectives. In doing so, it will provoke researchers in a wide range of cultural fields to look at the rich traditions that underlie it in new and fresh ways.