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Who is a Jew? What is a Jew? In this all-encompassing study, Dr. Schiff probes these questions to help explain the prominence of Jewish characters in drama since World War II. The Jew has evolved into one of the most popular personages on the contemporary stage.Dramatists, both Jew and Gentile, in the United States and Europe, have been mining recently introduced concepts of the Jew to create a highly diversified and unfamiliar breed of dramatis personae. From Stereotype to Metaphor tracks the evolution of the Jewish persona on the stage. From the debut of the Jew on the Western stage in the Middle Ages to the present century, Dr. Schiff investigates how the Jew has evolved from the stereotypical figures of biblical patriarchs, moneymen and villains into latter-day everyman. This book traces the line of descent of the stage Jew from church drama, Shakespeare, Milton, and Racine to modern playwrights, including Miller, Gibson, Pinter, Wesker, Anouilh, Grumberg, and Woody Allen, concentrating on the development of the stage Jew since 1945.
The past few decades have seen a remarkable surge in Jewish influences on American culture. Entertainers and artists such as Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler, Allegra Goodman, and Tony Kushner have heralded new waves of television, film, literature, and theater; a major klezmer revival is under way; bagels are now as commonplace as pizza; and kabbalah has become as cool as crystals. Does this broad range of cultural expression accurately reflect what it means to be Jewish in America today? Bringing together fourteen new essays by leading scholars, You Should See Yourself examines the fluctuating representations of Jewishness in a variety of areas of popular culture and high art, including litera...
While a frequently used term, Jewish Theatre has become a contested concept that defies precise definition. Is it theatre by Jews? For Jews? About Jews? Though there are no easy answers for these questions, "Jewish Theatre: A Global View," contributes greatly to the conversation by offering an impressive collection of original essays written by an international cadre of noted scholars from Europe, the United States, and Israel. The essays discuss historical and current texts and performance practices, covering a wide gamut of genres and traditions.
The Holocaust - the systematic attempted destruction of European Jewry and other 'threats' to the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945 - has been portrayed in fiction, film, memoirs, and poetry. Gene Plunka's study will add to this chronicle with an examination of the theatre of the Holocaust. Including thorough critical analyses of more than thirty plays, this book explores the seminal twentieth-century Holocaust dramas from the United States, Europe, and Israel. Biographical information about the playwrights, production histories of the plays, and pertinent historical information are provided, placing the plays in their historical and cultural contexts.
While most gender-based analyses of rabbinic Judaism concentrate on the status of women in the halakhah (the rabbinic legal tradition), Judith R. Baskin turns her attention to the construction of women in the aggadic midrash, a collection of expansions of the biblical text, rabbinic ruminations, and homiletical discourses that constitutes the non-legal component of rabbinic literature. Examining rabbinic convictions of female alterity, competing narratives of creation, and justifications of female disadvantages, as well as aggadic understandings of the ideal wife, the dilemma of infertility, and women among women and as individuals, she shows that rabbinic Judaism, a tradition formed by men ...
Offering an informed critical approach, Skloot discusses more than two dozen plays and one film that confront the issues and stories of the Holocaust.
A leading cultural historian explores the complex interactions of Jewish and American cultures.
Nostalgia, a bittersweet yearning for the past, is an important element in Jewish-American performances of the late twentieth century. Numerous plays and films of this time use nostalgia to engage Jewish, including Yiddish, cultural themes and images. Nostalgia offers audiences a window through which to examine past and current social changes. These include American Jews' departure from Europe to America, the city for the suburbs, Yiddish for English, as well as the civil rights, women's, peace, and gay and lesbian movements, and other transformations. These performances illustrate how theatre and film transmit culture from generation to generation and between one ethnic community and the wider American scene.
More than ten years in the making, this comprehensive single-volume literary survey is for the student, scholar, and general reader. The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature represents a collaborative effort, involving 300 contributors from across the US and Canada. Composed of more than 1,100 signed biographical-critical entries, this Encyclopedia serves as both guide and companion to the study and appreciation of American literature. A special feature is the topical article, of which there are 70.
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.