Download or read book Studies in American Jewish Literature in Honor of Sarah Blacher Cohen written by Carole Kessner and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholar, teacher, playwright, and editor, Sarah Blacher Cohen was one of the earliest champions of the study of American Jewish literature, a field of academic study that has been in existence for barely thirty-five years. Over the years until her premature death in 2008, she contributed to the discipline in a profusion of genres, from scholarly to popular, from essay to drama, writing or editing seven books of her own. She also wrote and produced several plays with her longtime collaborator, Joanne B. Koch. This special volume (29) of the annual, Studies in American Jewish Literature (ISSN 0271-9274), the journal edited by Daniel Walden, contains a range of tributes from her many friends and colleagues.
Download or read book In Honor of Sarah Blacher Cohen written by Carole S. Kessner and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book In Honor of Sarah Blacher Cohen written by Daniel Walden and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Studies in American Jewish Literature written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 1016 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Jews and Humor written by Leonard Jay Greenspoon and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Proceedings of the twenty-second annual symposium of the Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization - Harris Center for Judaic Studies, October 25-26, 2009" -- P. [i].
Download or read book Unfinalized Moments written by Derek Parker Royal and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-06 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on a diversely rich selection of writers, the pieces featured in Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrative explore the community of Jewish American writers who published their first book after the mid-1980s. It is the first book-length collection of essays on this subject matter with contributions from the leading scholars in the field. The manuscript does not attempt to foreground any one critical agenda, such as Holocaust writing, engagements with Zionism, feminist studies, postmodern influences, or multiculturalism. Instead, it celebrates the presence of a newly robust, diverse, and ever-evolving body of Jewish American fiction. This literature has taken a variety of forms with its negotiations of orthodoxy, its representations of a post-Holocaust world, its reassertion of folkloric tradition, its engagements with postmodernity, its reevaluations of Jewishness, and its alternative delineations of ethnic identity. Discussing the work of authors such as Allegra Goodman, Michael Chabon, Tova Mirvis, Rebecca Goldstein, Pearl Abraham, Jonathan Rosen, Nathan Englander, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Tova Reich, Sarah Schulman, Ruth Knafo Setton, Ben Katchor, and Jonathan Safran Foer, the fifteen contributors in this collection assert the ongoing vitality and ever-growing relevancy of Jewish American fiction.
Download or read book Swimming against the Current written by Shaul Seidler-Feller and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Swimming against the Current comprises a collection of essays celebrating the career and achievements of Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, who served as Executive Director of Hillel at UCLA for forty years and continues to be an influential leader in the Los Angeles and wider American Jewish community. These articles, like the honoree, challenge intellectual convention and accepted wisdom by breaking new ground in how they approach their subjects. They are divided into four categories that hold special interest for Seidler-Feller: Bible and Talmud, Jewish Thought and Theology, Modern Jewish History and Sociology, and Zionism and Jewish Politics. The volume also includes a sketch of Seidler-Feller’s life and work, a bibliography of his publications, and tributes by students and colleagues.
Download or read book Belonging Too Well written by Miriam Sivan and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2009-02-13 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how Ozick’s characters attempt to mediate a complex Jewish identity, one that bridges the differences between traditional Judaism and secular American culture.
Download or read book Modern Jewish Women Writers in America written by E. Avery and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-05-28 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection includes groundbreaking essays, and interviews with scholars and writers which reveal that despite pressures of assimilation, personal goals, and in some cases, anti-Semitism, they have never been able to divorce their lives or literature from their heritage.
Download or read book Exiles on Main Street written by Julian Levinson and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have Jews reshaped their identities as Jews in the face of the radical newness called America? Julian Levinson explores the ways in which exposure to American literary culture -- in particular the visionary tradition identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman -- led American Jewish writers to a new understanding of themselves as Jews. Discussing the lives and work of writers such as Emma Lazarus, Mary Antin, Ludwig Lewisohn, Waldo Frank, Anzia Yezierska, I. J. Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe, Levinson concludes that their interaction with American culture led them to improvise new and meaningful ways of being Jewish. In contrast to the often expressed view that the diaspora experience leads to assimilation, Exiles on Main Street traces an arc of return to Jewish identification and describes a vital and creative Jewish American literary culture.
Download or read book Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature written by Emily Miller Budick and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By creating a dialogue between Israeli and American Jewish authors, scholars, and intellectuals, this book examines how these two literatures, which traditionally do not address one another directly, nevertheless share some commonalities and affinities. The disinclination of Israeli and American Jewish fictional narratives to gravitate toward one another tells us much about the processes of Jewish self-definition as expressed in literary texts over the last fifty years. Through essays by prominent Israeli Americanists, American Hebraists, Israeli critics of Hebrew writing, and American specialists in the field of Jewish writing, the book shows how modern Jewish culture rewrites the Jewish tradition across quite different ideological imperatives, such as Zionist metanarrative, the urge of Jewish immigrants to find Israel in America, and socialism. The contributors also explore how that narrative turn away from religious tradition to secular identity has both enriched and impoverished Jewish modernity.
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 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the temporal function that "the Jew" plays in literature. 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 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 Jewish American Writing and World Literature written by Saul Noam Zaritt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody studies Jewish American writers' relationships with the idea of world literature. Writers such as Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley all responded to a demand to write beyond local Jewish and American audiences and toward the world, as a global market and as a transnational ideal. Beyond fame and global circulation, world literature holds up the promise of legibility, in which a threatened origin becomes the site for redemptive literary creativity. But this promise inevitably remains unfulfilled, as writers struggle to balance potential universal achievements with untranslatable realities, rendering impossible any complete arrival in the US and in the world. The work examined in this study was deeply informed by an intimate connection to Yiddish, a Jewish vernacular with its own global network and institutional ambitions. Jewish American Writing and World Literature tracks the attempts and failures, through translation, to find a home for Jewish vernacularity in the institution of world literature. The exploration of the translational uncertainty of Jewish American writing joins postcolonial critiques of US and world literature and challenges Eurocentric and Anglo-American paradigms of literary study. In bringing into conversation the fields of Yiddish studies, American Studies, and world literature theory, Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody proposes a new approach to the study of modern Jewish literatures and their implication within global empires of culture.
Download or read book The Golem Redux written by Elizabeth R. Baer and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the history of the golem legend and its appropriations in German texts and film as well as in post-Holocaust Jewish-American fiction, comics, graphic novels, and television. First mentioned in the Book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible, the golem is a character in an astonishing number of post-Holocaust Jewish-American novels and has served as inspiration for such varied figures as Mary Shelley’s monster in her novel Frankenstein, a frightening character in the television series The X-Files, and comic book figures such as Superman and the Hulk. In The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction, author Elizabeth R. Baer introduces readers to these varied representations of the golem and traces the history of the golem legend across modern pre- and post-Holocaust culture. In five chapters, The Golem Redux examines the different purposes for which the golem has been used in literature and what makes the golem the ultimate text and intertext for modern Jewish writers. Baer begins by introducing several early manifestations of the golem legend, including texts from the third and fourth centuries and from the medieval period; Prague’s golem legend, which is attributed to the Maharal, Rabbi Judah Loew; the history of the Josefov, the Jewish ghetto in Prague, the site of the golem legend; and versions of the legend by Yudl Rosenberg and Chayim Bloch, which informed and influenced modern intertexts. In the chapters that follow, Baer traces the golem first in pre-Holocaust Austrian and German literature and film and later in post-Holocaust American literature and popular culture, arguing that the golem has been deployed very differently in these two contexts. Where prewar German and Austrian contexts used the golem as a signifier of Jewish otherness to underscore growing anti-Semitic cultural feelings, post-Holocaust American texts use the golem to depict the historical tragedy of the Holocaust and to imagine alternatives to it. In this section, Baer explores traditional retellings by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Elie Wiesel, the considerable legacy of the golem in comics, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and, finally, "Golems to the Rescue" in twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of film and literature, including those by Cynthia Ozick, Thane Rosenbaum, and Daniel Handler. By placing the Holocaust at the center of her discussion, Baer illustrates how the golem works as a self-conscious intertextual character who affirms the value of imagination and story in Jewish tradition. Students and teachers of Jewish literature and cultural history, film studies, and graphic novels will appreciate Baer’s pioneering and thought-provoking volume.
Download or read book Mocking the Age written by Elaine B. Safer and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive assessment of Philip Roth's later novels, Mocking the Age offers rich and insightful readings that explore how these extraordinary works satirize our contemporary culture. From The Ghost Writer to The Plot Against America, Roth uses humor to address deadly serious matters, including social and political issues, psychological problems, postmodern concerns, and the absurd. In her clear and extensive analyses of these works, Elaine B. Safer looks at how Roth's approach to the comic incorporates the self-deprecating humor of Jewish comedians, as well as the humor of nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish storytellers and such twentieth-century writers as Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow. Filling the void on critical examinations of Roth's later work, Safer's book provides a thorough appraisal of Roth's lifetime accomplishment and an essential evaluation of his comic genius.
Download or read book Jewish American Literature written by Jules Chametzky and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001 with total page 1264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of Jewish-American literature written by various authors between 1656 and 1990.
