You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book examines the relationship between Jewish literature and the historical setting in which it was written. The types of literature analyzed in this study include ghost stories; Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian Jewish literature; plays; letters; poetry; even obituaries.
In the fully revised and expanded edition. Nickelsburg introduces the reader to the broad range of Jewish literature that is not part of either the Bible or the standard rabbinic works. This includes especially the Apocrypha (such as 1 Maccabees), teh Pseudepigrapha (such as 1 Enoch), the Dead Sea Scrolls, the works of Josephus, and works of Philo.
The book explores long-standing questions: What are the criteria for identifying Jewish literature? Are they language, religious affiliation of the author, religious sensibility, a distinctive Jewish imagination, or literary tradition? If the writer is the criterion, do Sholem Aleichem and Nathanael West really inhabit a shared universe? Is a text by S.Y. Agnon part of the same literary tradition as a play by Arthur Miller?
British-Jewish writers are increasingly addressing challenging questions about what it means to be both British and Jewish in the twenty-first century. Writing Jewish provides a lively and accessible introduction to the key issues in contemporary British-Jewish fiction, memoirs and journalism, and explores how Jewishness exists alongside a range of other different identities in Britain today. By interrogating myths and stereotypes and looking at themes of remembering and forgetting, belonging and alienation, location and dislocation, Ruth Gilbert examines how these writers identify the particularity of their difference – while acknowledging that this difference is neither fixed nor final, but always open to re-interpretation.
Reproduction of the original: Jewish Literature by Israel Abrahams
Publisher's description: The volume assembles twenty previously published studies by Devorah Dimant, which have been re-edited, updated, and furnished with an introductory essay written especially for this collection. The studies survey and analyze Jewish works composed in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek during the Second Temple period, and discuss their contents, ideas, and connections to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Particular attention is paid to central issues, such as the apocalyptic worldview and literature and its relationship to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Among others, specific themes related to the Aramaic Tobit and 1 Enoch are analyzed as well as the links detected between the Hebrew Qumran writings Pseudo-Ezekiel and the Apocryphon of Jeremiah and the later apocalyptic works 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch. The introductory essay provides a general framework and pertinent terminology for discussing the literature in question. Together these essays offer a broad and fresh perspective of the Jewish literary scene in antiquity, with special attention to the one nurtured in the land of Israel.
Gershon Shaked's history of modern Hebrew fiction traces the emergence and development of a literature "against all odds"--from its European roots in the 1880s, when it had neither a country nor a spoken language, to the flowering of a literary culture on Israeli soil from the founding of the State through the 1990s. The product of more than 20 years of research, it is unique in its scope, profiling four generations of Hebrew writers from Mendele Mokher Seforim, I. L. Peretz, and Haim Nahman Bialik through Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Aharon Appelfeld, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, Amos Oz, and A. B. Yehoshua, to the recent writings of David Grossman, Meir Shalev, and Orly Castel-Bloom. Through detailed discussions of themes and style in specific texts, Shaked conveys the richness of the Hebrew literary tradition. At the same time, through biographical surveys, historical observations, and socio-cultural and political analyses, he illuminates the relationship of these writings to the context in which they were produced, revealing the complex intertextual play between Hebrew literature and life.