Download or read book The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague written by Yehudah Yudl Rozenberg and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of interrelated stories about a sixteenth-century Prague rabbi and the golem he created became an immediate bestseller upon its publication in 1909. So widely popular and influential was Yudl Rosenberg's book, it is no exaggeration to claim that the author transformed the centuries-old understanding of the creature of clay and single-handedly created the myth of the golem as protector of the Jewish people during times of persecution. In addition to translating Rosenberg's classic golem story into English for the first time, Curt Leviant also offers an introduction in which he sets Rosenberg's writing in historical context and discusses the golem legend before and after Rosenberg's contributions. Generous annotations are provided for the curious reader. The book is full of adventures, surprises, romance, suspense, mysticism, Jewish pride, and storytelling at its best. The Chief Rabbi of Prague, known as the Maharal, brings the golem Yossele to life to help the Jews fight false accusations of ritual murder-the infamous blood libel. More human, more capable, and more reliable as a protector than any golem imagined before, Rosenberg's Golem irrevocably changed one of the most widely influential icons of Jewish folklore.
Download or read book Advances in Artificial Systems for Medicine and Education II written by Zhengbing Hu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-05-16 with total page 766 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book includes the proceedings of the Second International Conference of Artificial Intelligence, Medical Engineering, Education (AIMEE2018), held in Moscow, Russia, on 6–8 October 2018. The conference covered advances in the development of artificial intelligence systems and their applications in various fields, from medicine and technology to education. The papers presented in the book discuss topics in mathematics and biomathematics; medical approaches; and technological and educational approaches. Given the rapid development of artificial intelligence systems, the book highlights the need for more intensive training for a growing number of specialists, particularly in medical engineering, to increase the effectiveness of medical diagnosis and treatment. The book is intended for specialists, students and other readers who would like to know where artificial intelligence systems can beneficially be applied in the future.
Download or read book History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe written by Marcel Cornis-Pope and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010-09-29 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Types and stereotypes is the fourth and last volume of a path-breaking multinational literary history that incorporates innovative features relevant to the writing of literary history in general. Instead of offering a traditional chronological narrative of the period 1800-1989, the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe approaches the region’s literatures from five complementary angles, focusing on literature’s participation in and reaction to key political events, literary periods and genres, the literatures of cities and sub-regions, literary institutions, and figures of representation. The main objective of the project is to challenge the self-enclosure of national literatures in traditional literary histories, to contextualize them in a regional perspective, and to recover individual works, writers, and minority literatures that national histories have marginalized or ignored. Types and stereotypes brings together articles that rethink the figures of National Poets, figurations of the Family, Women, Outlaws, and Others, as well as figures of Trauma and Mediation. As in the previous three volumes, the historical and imaginary figures discussed here constantly change and readjust to new political and social conditions. An Epilogue complements the basic history, focusing on the contradictory transformations of East-Central European literary cultures after 1989. This volume will be of interest to the region’s literary historians, to students and teachers of comparative literature, to cultural historians, and to the general public interested in exploring the literatures of a rich and resourceful cultural region.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions written by Raphael Patai and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-26 with total page 677 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multicultural reference work on Jewish folklore, legends, customs, and other elements of folklife is the first of its kind.
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 Motherless Creations written by Wendy C. Nielsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-30 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains the elimination of maternal characters in American, British, French, and German literature before 1890 by examining motherless creations: Pygmalion’s statue, Frankenstein’s creature, homunculi, automata, androids, golems, and steam men. These beings typify what is now called artificial life, living systems made through manufactured means. Fantasies about creating life ex-utero were built upon misconceptions about how life began, sustaining pseudoscientific beliefs about the birthing body. Physicians, inventors, and authors of literature imagined generating life without women to control the process of reproduction and generate perfect progeny. Thus, some speculative fiction before 1890 belongs to the literary genealogy of transhumanism, the belief that technology will someday transform some humans into superior, immortal beings. Female motherless creations tend to operate as sexual companions. Male ones often emerge as subaltern figures analogous to enslaved beings, illustrating that reproductive rights inform readers’ sense of who counts as human in fictions of artificial life.
Download or read book Symbolism 12 13 written by Rüdiger Ahrens and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic realism has become a significant mode of expression in Jewish cultural production. This special focus of Symbolism for the first time explores in a comparative and transnational approach the magic realist engagement of Jewish writers, artists, and filmmakers from the Diaspora and from Israel with issues of identity, oppression and persecution as well as the Holocaust.
Download or read book Jews and Urban Life written by Leonard J. Greenspoon and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jews and Urban Life recognizes that throughout their long history, Jews have often inhabited cities. The reality of this urban experience ranged from ghetto restrictions to robust participation in a range of civic and social activities. Essays in this collection present relevant examples from within the Jewish community itself, moving historically from the biblical period to the modern-day State of Israel. Taking a comparative approach while recognizing the particulars of individual instances, authors examine these phenomena from a wide variety of approaches, genres, and media. Interdisciplinary and accessibly written, the articles display a multitude of instances throughout history showing the range of Jewish life in urban settings.
Download or read book The Uncanny in Language Literature and Culture written by Sarah Stollman and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2024-09-09 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his attempts to define the uncanny, Sigmund Freud asserted that the concept is undoubtedly related to what is frightening, to what arouses dread and horror. Yet the sensation is prompted, simultaneously, by something familiar, establishing a sense of insecurity within the domestic, even within the walls of one’s own home. This disturbance of the familiar further unsettles the sense of oneself. A resultant perturbed relationship between a person and their familiar world — the troubled sense of home and self-certainty — can be the result of a traumatic experience of loss, and of unresolved pasts resurfacing in the present. Memory traces are revised and interwoven with fresh experiences producing an uncanny effect. As “an externalization of consciousness”, the uncanny becomes a meta-concept for modernity with its disintegration of time, space, and self. The papers in this book seek to explore the representations of the uncanny in language, literature, and culture, applying the origins of the concept to a range of ideas and works.
Download or read book Golem written by Maya Barzilai and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2017 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Jewish Literature and Linguistics Honorable Mention, 2016 Baron Book Prize presented by AAJR A monster tour of the Golem narrative across various cultural and historical landscapes In the 1910s and 1920s, a “golem cult” swept across Europe and the U.S., later surfacing in Israel. Why did this story of a powerful clay monster molded and animated by a rabbi to protect his community become so popular and pervasive? The golem has appeared in a remarkable range of popular media: from the Yiddish theater to American comic books, from German silent film to Quentin Tarantino movies. This book showcases how the golem was remolded, throughout the war-torn twentieth century, as a muscular protector, injured combatant, and even murderous avenger. This evolution of the golem narrative is made comprehensible by, and also helps us to better understand, one of the defining aspects of the last one hundred years: mass warfare and its ancillary technologies. In the twentieth century the golem became a figure of war. It represented the chaos of warfare, the automation of war technologies, and the devastation wrought upon soldiers’ bodies and psyches. Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters draws on some of the most popular and significant renditions of this story in order to unravel the paradoxical coincidence of wartime destruction and the fantasy of artificial creation. Due to its aggressive and rebellious sides, the golem became a means for reflection about how technological progress has altered human lives, as well as an avenue for experimentation with the media and art forms capable of expressing the monstrosity of war.
Download or read book Robots that Talk and Listen written by Judith Markowitz and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-12-12 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robots That Talk and Listen provides a forward-looking examination of speech and language in robots from technical, functional, and social perspectives. Contributors address cultural foundations as well as the linguistic skills and technologies that robots need to function effectively in real-world settings. Among the most difficult and complex is the ability to understand and use language. Speech-enabled automata are already serving as interactive toys, teacher’s aides, and research assistants. These robots will soon be joined by personal companions, industrial co-workers, and military support automata. The social impact of these and other robots extends well beyond the specific tasks they perform. Contributors tackle the most knotty of those issues, notably acceptance of advanced, speech-enabled robots and developing ethical and moral controls for robots. Topics in this book include: • Language and Beyond: The True Meaning of “Speech Enabled” • Robots in Myth and Media • Enabling Robots to Converse • Language Learning by Automata • Handling Noisy Settings • Empirical Studies of Robots in Real-World Environments • Acceptance of Intelligent Robots • Managing Robots that Can Lie and Deceive • Envisioning a World Shared with Intelligent Robots
Download or read book The White Guard written by Mikhail Bulgakov and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-09-16 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: See? All we need is... a map and...some kind of plan. This overcoat is neutral darling, neither Bolshevik nor Menshevik. Just essence of Prole. In Kiev during the Russian Civil War, the Turbin household is sanctuary to a ragtag, close-knit crowd presided over by the beautiful Lena. As her brothers prepare to fight for the White Guard, friends charge in from the riotous streets amidst an atmosphere of heady chaos, quaffing vodka, keeling over, declaiming, taking baths, playing guitar, falling in love. But the new regime is poised and in its brutal triumph lies destruction for the Turbins and their world. And those are the real enemies we face, deep in the shadows. This modern man with no name, no past, no love. This desperate hate-filled man born of loneliness and frustration. This man with nothing to be proud of, nothing he is part of. . .
Download or read book Mordecai written by Charles Foran and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-07-05 with total page 802 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foran's book is the first major biography with access to family letters and archives: the definitive, detailed, intimate portrait of Mordecai Richler, the lion of Canadian literature, and the turbulent, changing times that nurtured him. It is also an extraordinary love story that lasted half a century. Mordecai Richler won multiple Governor General's Literary Awards, the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, among others, as well as many awards for his children's books. He also wrote Oscar-nominated screenplays. His influence was larger than life in Canada and abroad. In Mordecai, award-winning novelist and journalist Charles Foran brings to the page the richness of Mordecai's life as young bohemian, irreverent writer, passionate and controversial Canadian, loyal friend and deeply romantic lover. He explores Mordecai's distraught childhood, and gives us the "portrait of a marriage"—the lifelong love affair with Florence, with Mordecai as beloved father of five. The portrait is alive and intimate—warts and all.
Download or read book Abraham Among Golems written by Andrei A. Orlov and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2024-10-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Structures of Law and Literature written by Jeffrey Miller and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ground-breaking study of the gap between law and justice, establishing - at last - a truly substantive connection between law and literature.
Download or read book Rabbinic Theology and Jewish Intellectual History written by Meir Seidler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the thought and legacy of Rabbi Loew (the Maharal), one of the most important Jewish thinkers. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, the book encompasses organized perspectives that range from East European cultural and intellectual history, to Medieval Jewish intellectual history and its legacies, to Rabbinic theology, to Italian Jewish history, to Early Modern Jewish intellectual history, to Maharal Studies, to Postmodernism and Judaism, to Jewish political theory, Comparative Religion, and Cinematic Studies.
Download or read book Prague Palimpsest written by Alfred Thomas and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten—from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city’s foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde—Alfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia. Considering a wide range of writers, including the city’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, Prague Palimpsest reassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vítĕzslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who “wrote” Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that helps to explain why Prague—more than any other major European city—has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.
