Download or read book Jewish Literatures and Cultures written by Anita Norich and published by Society of Biblical Lit. This book was released on 2008 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish literatures and cultures : context and intertext / Anita Norich -- From continuity to contiguity : thoughts on the theory of Jewish literature / Dan Miron -- Beyond influence : toward a new historiographic paradigm / Michael L. Satlow -- Hellenistic Judaism : myth or reality? / Gabriele Boccaccini -- "He was renowned to the ends of the earth" (1 Maccabees 3:9) : Judaism and Hellenism in 1 Maccabees / Martha Himmelfarb -- Roman statues, rabbis, and Greco-Roman culture / Yaron Z. Eliav -- The ghetto and Jewish cultural formation in early modern Europe : towards a new interpretation / David Ruderman -- Hybrid with what? : the variable contexts of Polish Jewish culture : their implications for Jewish cultural history and Jewish studies / Moshe Rosman -- Idols of the cave and theater : a verbal or visual Judaism? / Kalman P. Bland -- "Reverse marranism," translatability, and practice of secular Jewish culture in Russian / Gabriella Safran -- Intertextuality, Rabbinic literature, and the making of Hebrew modernism / Shachar Pinsker -- Brooklyn am Rhein? : the German sources of Jewish-American literature / Julian Levinson -- Diaspora and translation : the migrations of Jewish meaning / Naomi Seidman.
Download or read book The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination written by Leonid Livak and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-10 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes that the idea of the Jews in European cultures has little to do with actual Jews, but rather is derived from the conception of Jews as Christianity's paradigmatic Other, eternally reenacting their morally ambiguous New Testament role as the Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God. Through new readings of canonical Russian literary texts by Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, and others, the author argues that these European writers—Christian, secular, and Jewish—based their representation of Jews on the Christian exegetical tradition of anti-Judaism. Indeed, Livak disputes the classification of some Jewish writers as belonging to "Jewish literature," arguing that such an approach obscures these writers' debt to European literary traditions and their ambivalence about their Jewishness. This work seeks to move the study of Russian literature, and Russian-Jewish literature in particular, down a new path. It will stir up controversy around Christian-Jewish cultural interaction; the representation of otherness in European arts and folklore; modern Jewish experience; and Russian literature and culture.
Download or read book Jewish Literary Cultures written by David Stern and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 1. The ancient period
Download or read book Literary Passports written by Shachar Pinsker and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-13 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Passports is the first book to explore modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century. It not only serves as an introduction to this important body of literature, but also acts as a major revisionist statement, freeing this literature from a Zionist-nationalist narrative and viewing it through the wider lens of new comparative studies in modernism. The book's central claim is that modernist Hebrew prose-fiction, as it emerged from 1900 to 1930, was shaped by the highly charged encounter of traditionally educated Jews with the revolution of European literature and culture known as modernism. The book deals with modernist Hebrew fiction as an urban phenomenon, explores the ways in which the genre dealt with issues of sexuality and gender, and examines its depictions of the complex relations between tradition, modernity, and religion.
Download or read book Jewish Literary Cultures written by David Stern and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays and studies of diverse texts and topics in medieval and early modern Jewish literature, using contemporary critical approaches and textual analysis to explore larger ideas and themes in rabbinic Judaism.
Download or read book American Talmud written by Ezra Cappell and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-16 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In American Talmud, Ezra Cappell redefines the genre of Jewish American fiction and places it squarely within the larger context of American literature. Cappell departs from the conventional approach of defining Jewish American authors solely in terms of their ethnic origins and sociological constructs, and instead contextualizes their fiction within the theological heritage of Jewish culture. By deliberately emphasizing historical and ethnographic links to religions, religious texts, and traditions, Cappell demonstrates that twentieth-century and contemporary Jewish American fiction writers have been codifying a new Talmud, an American Talmud, and argues that the literary production of Jews in America might be seen as one more stage of rabbinic commentary on the scriptural inheritance of the Jewish people.
Download or read book The Anthology in Jewish Literature written by David Stern and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-07 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The anthology is a ubiquitous presence in Jewish literature--arguably its oldest literary genre, going back to the Bible itself, and including nearly all the canonical texts of Judaism: the Mishnah, the Talmud, classical midrash, and the prayerbook. In the Middle Ages, the anthology became the primary medium in Jewish culture for recording stories, poems, and interpretations of classical texts. In modernity, the genre is transformed into a decisive instrument for cultural retrieval and re-creation, especially in works of the Zionist project and in modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature. No less importantly, the anthology has played an indispensable role in the creation of significant fields of research in Jewish studies, including Hebrew poetry, folklore, and popular culture. This volume is the first book to bring together scholarly and critical essays that investigate the anthological character of these works and what might be called the "anthological habit" in Jewish literary culture--the tendency and proclivity for gathering together discrete, sometimes conflicting traditions and stories, and preserving them side by side as though there were no difference, conflict, or ambiguity between them. Indeed, The Anthology in Jewish Literature is the first book to recognize this habit and genre as one of the formative categories in Jewish literature and to investigate its manifold roles. The seventeen essays, each of which focuses on a specific literary work, many of them the great classics of Jewish tradition, consider such questions as: What are the many types of anthologies? How have anthologists, editors, even printers of anthologies been creative shapers of Jewish tradition and culture? What can we learn from their editorial practices? How have politics, gender, and class figured into the making of anthologies? What determinative role has the anthology played in creating the Jewish canon? How has the anthology served, especially in the modern period, to create and recreate Jewish culture. This landmark volume will interest educated laypersons as well as scholars in all areas of Jewish literature and culture, as well as students of world literature and cultural studies.
Download or read book Jewish Primitivism written by Samuel J. Spinner and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-sky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Moï Ver. In Jewish Primitivism, Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. This book offers a new assessment of modern Jewish art and literature and shows how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between observer and observed, cultured and "primitive," colonizer and colonized.
Download or read book Elie Wiesel written by Steven T. Katz and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-17 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Illuminating . . . 24 academic essays covering Wiesel’s interpretations of the Bible, retellings of Talmudic stories . . . his post-Holocaust theology, and more.” —Publishers Weekly Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, best known for his writings on the Holocaust, is also the accomplished author of novels, essays, tales, and plays as well as portraits of seminal figures in Jewish life and experience. In this volume, leading scholars in the fields of Biblical, Rabbinic, Hasidic, Holocaust, and literary studies offer fascinating and innovative analyses of Wiesel’s texts as well as enlightening commentaries on his considerable influence as a teacher and as a moral voice for human rights. By exploring the varied aspects of Wiesel’s multifaceted career—his texts on the Bible, the Talmud, and Hasidism as well as his literary works, his teaching, and his testimony—this thought-provoking volume adds depth to our understanding of the impact of this important man of letters and towering international figure. “This book reveals Elie Wiesel’s towering intellectual capacity, his deeply held spiritual belief system, and the depth of his emotional makeup.” —New York Journal of Books “Close, scholarly readings of a master storyteller’s fiction, memoirs and essays suggest his uncommon breadth and depth . . . Criticism that enhances the appreciation of readers well-versed in the author’s work.” —Kirkus Reviews “Navigating deftly among Wiesel’s varied scholarly and literary works, the authors view his writings from religious, social, political, and literary perspectives in highly accessible prose that will well serve a broad and diverse readership.” —S. Lillian Kremer author of Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination
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 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 217 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 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 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 Qorbanot written by Alisha Kaplan and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award presented by the League of Canadian Poets A collaboration between poet Alisha Kaplan and artist Tobi Aaron Kahn, Qorbanot—the Hebrew word for "sacrificial offerings"—explores the concept of sacrifice, offering a new vision of an ancient practice. A dynamic dialogue of text and image, the book is a poetic and visual exegesis on Leviticus, a visceral and psychological exploration of ritual offerings, and a conversation about how notions of sacrifice continue to resonate in the twenty-first century. Both from Holocaust survivor families, Kaplan and Kahn deal extensively with the Holocaust in their work. Here, the modes of poetry and art express the complexity of belief, the reverberations of trauma, and the significance of ritual. In the poems, the speaker, offspring of burnt offerings, searches for meaning in her grandparents' experiences and in the long tradition of Orthodox Judaism in which she was raised. Kahn's paintings on handmade paper, drawn from decades of his career as an artist, have not previously been exhibited or published. They reflect his quest to distill a legacy of trauma and loss into enduring memory. With a foreword by James E. Young and essays by Ezra Cappell, Lori Hope Lefkovitz, and Sasha Pimentel, the book presents new directions for thinking about what sacrifice means in religious, social, and personal contexts, and harkens back to foundational traditions, challenging them in reimagined and artistic ways.
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 In Search of American Jewish Culture written by Stephen J. Whitfield and published by UPNE. This book was released on 1999 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading cultural historian explores the complex interactions of Jewish and American cultures.
Download or read book Using and Abusing the Holocaust written by Lawrence L. Langer and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-21 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Langer, by the force of scholarship and literary precision rather than dogmatic affirmation and pathos, is one of the few writers, with the exception of significant poets and novelists, who unsettles both our customary language and conceptual instruments. His book is a moral as well as an intellectual act of a very high order." —Geoffrey Hartman, author of The Longest Shadow In this new volume, Langer—one of the most distinguished scholars writing on Holocaust literature and representation—assesses various literary efforts to establish a place in modern consciousness for the ordeal of those victimized by Nazi Germany's crimes against humanity. Essays discuss the film Life Is Beautiful, the uncritical acclaim of Fragments, the fake memoir by Benjamin Wilkomirski, reasons for the exaggerated importance still given to Anne Frank's Diary, and a recent cycle of paintings on the Old Testament by Holocaust artist Samuel Bak.
