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Argues that first- and second-generation Jewish American writers had an ambivalent relationship with educational success.
Jewish American immigrants and their children have been stereotyped as exceptional educational achievers, with attendance at prestigious universities leading directly to professional success. In College Bound, Dan Shiffman uses literary accounts to show that American Jews' relationship with education was in fact far more complex....
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Argues that Jewish writers used depictions of Jews as animals to question prevalent notions of Jewish identity.
The Infrahuman explores a little-known aspect in major works of Jewish literature from the period preceding World War II, in which Jewish writers in German, Hebrew, and Yiddish employed figures of animals in pejorative depictions of Jews and Jewish identity. Such depictions are disturbing because they sometimes rival common anti-Semitic...
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Examines how Jewish women have used poetry to challenge their historical limitations while rewriting their potential futures.
Jewish women have had a fraught relationship with history, struggling for inclusion while resisting their limited role as (re)producers of the future. In Queer Expectations, Zohar Weiman-Kelman shows how Jewish women writers turned to poetry to write new histories, developing "queer expectancy" as a conceptual tool for understanding...
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A Marxist history of Israeli literature, tracing the relations between economic, social, and aesthetic transformations.
Signatures of Struggle offers a unique perspective on Israeli literature, bringing Marxist cultural critique to bear on a field from which it has hitherto been absent. Oded Nir moves beyond the dominant interpretive horizon of Israeli literary criticism: the relation of literature to national ideology. Rather than reproducing the...
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A comprehensive survey of the most important writing to come out of the Holocaust.
Finalist for the 2019 National Jewish Book Award in the Anthologies and Collections Category presented by the Jewish Book Council
Silver Winner for Anthologies, 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards
Writing in Witness is a broad survey of the most important writing about the Holocaust produced by eyewitnesses at the time and soon after. Whether they intended...
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Comprehensive analysis of 220 hours of outtakes that impels us to reexamine our assumptions about a crucial Holocaust documentary.
Claude Lanzmann's 1985 magnum opus, Shoah, is a canonical documentary on the Holocaust-and in film history. Over the course of twelve years, Lanzmann gathered 230 hours of location filming and interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, which he condensed into a 9½-hour film. The unused footage was scattered...
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Surveys the current state of Jewish American and Holocaust literatures as well as approaches to teaching them.
What does it mean to read, and to teach, Jewish American and Holocaust literatures in the early decades of the twenty-first century? New directions and new forms of expression have emerged, both in the invention of narratives and in the methodologies and discursive approaches taken toward these texts. The premise of this book is that despite...
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Analyzes audio recordings of interwar Hebrew plays, providing a new model for the use of sound in theater studies.
Possessed Voices tells the intriguing story of a largely unknown collection of audio recordings, which preserve performances of modernist interwar Hebrew plays. Ruthie Abeliovich focuses on four recordings: a 1931 recording of The Eternal Jew (1919/1923), a 1965 recording of The Dybbuk (1922), a 1961 radio play of The Golem (1925), and...
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An in-depth look at Elie Wiesel's writings, from his earliest works to his final novels.
Elie Wiesel (1928—2016) was one of the most important literary voices to emerge from the Holocaust. The Nazis took the lives of most of his family, destroyed the community in which he was raised, and subjected him to ghettoization, imprisonment in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and a death march. It is remarkable not only that Wiesel survived and found a way to...
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An authoritative biography of the dean of American proletarian writers during the interwar years.
Jewish American Communist writer and cultural figure Michael Gold (1893—1967) was a key progressive author of his generation, yet today his work is too often forgotten. A novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, journalist, and editor, Gold was the leading advocate of leftist, proletarian literature in the United States between the two world wars. His...
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Combines powerful first-person accounts with incisive scholarly analysis to understand the phenomenon of ultra-Orthodox Jews who leave their insular communities and venture into the wider world.
In recent years, many formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews have documented leaving their communities in published stories, films, and memoirs. This movement is often identified as "off the derech" (OTD), or off the path, with the idea that the "path" is paved by...
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A portrait of Israeli literature in its full transnational and multilingual complexity.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, an unprecedented surge of writing altered the Israeli literary scene in profound ways. As fresh creative voices and multiple languages vied for recognition, diversity replaced consensus. Genres once accorded lower status-such as the graphic novel and science fiction-gained readership and positive critical notice. These...
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A dynamic dialogue of poetry and art that reimagines the ancient, biblical concept of sacrifice.
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,...
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Examines the place of Paris in French Jewish literary memory, a memory that, of necessity, grapples with the aftermath of the Holocaust.
The essays in Shadows in the City of Light explore the significance of Paris in the writing of five influential French writers-Sarah Kofman, Patrick Modiano, George Perec, Henri Raczymow, and Irene Nemirovsky-whose novels and memoirs capture and probe the absences of deported Paris Jews. These writers move their...
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Three stageworthy plays and nine individual scenes that offer an introduction to Yiddish theater at its liveliest.
Yiddish theater was first and foremost fine theater, with varied repertory and actors of high quality. The three stage-ready plays and nine individual scenes collected here, most of them well-known in Yiddish repertory but never before translated, offer an introduction to the full range of Yiddish theater. Fresh, lively, and accurate,...
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The veteran contributors to this volume take as their central drama, and their essential task for analysis, the enduring literary and political legacy of Israel Prize laureate Amos Oz (1939—2019). Born a decade prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, in what was then Palestine under British rule, Oz's life spanned the country's entire history, and both his fiction and nonfiction restlessly probe and illuminate its fraught conflicts, contradictions,...
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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....
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Jewcy: Lesbian Queer Jewish Feminisms for the Twenty-First Century presents the rich diversity of Jewish life from perspectives that center lesbian and queer Jewish feminist people and issues. Blending scholarship with poetry, memoir, and other genres, it reopens the field of Jewish lesbian writing that has been largely dormant since the early 2000s. The contributors illustrate the diversity of Jewish lesbian experience through a range of topics,...
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