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A re-evaluation of the meaning and function of diaspora in contemporary Israeli culture. This thought-provoking exploration of literature and art examines contemporary Israeli works created in and about diaspora that exemplify new ways of envisioning a Jewish national identity. Diaspora has become a popular mechanism to imagine non-sovereign models of Jewish peoplehood, but these models often valorize powerlessness in sometimes troubling ways. In this book, Melissa Weininger theorizes a new category of "diaspora Israeli culture" that is formed around and through notions of homeland and complicate the binary between diaspora and Israel. The works addressed here inhabit and imagine diaspora fr...
2021 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 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 trends ushered in not only the discovery and recovery of literary works but also a major rethinking of literary history. In Since 1948, scholars consider how recent voices have succeeded older ones and reverberated in concert with them; how linguistic and geographical boundaries have blurred; how genres have shifted; and how canon and competition have shaped Israeli culture. Charting surprising trajectories of a vibrant, challenging, and dynamic literature, the contributors analyze texts composed in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Arabic; by Jews and non-Jews; and by Israelis abroad as well as writers in Israel. What emerges is a portrait of Israeli literature as neither minor nor regional, but rather as transnational, multilingual, and worthy of international attention.
In a groundbreaking book, Neta Stahl examines the attitudes adopted by modern Jewish writers toward the figure of Jesus. Stahl argues that twentieth-century Jewish writers reconsidered Jesus' traditional status as the Christian Other and looked to him instead as a fellow Jew, a "brother," and even as a model for the "New Jew." Other and Brother analyzes the work of a wide array of modern Jewish writers, beginning in the early twentieth century and ending with contemporary Israeli literature. Stahl takes the reader through dramatic changes in Jewish life from the Haskalah (or Jewish Enlightenment) and Emancipation, to Zionism, the Holocaust, and the formation of the state of Israel. She shows...
Applying Jewish Ethics: Beyond the Rabbinic Tradition introduces the reader to applied ethics and examines various social issues from contemporary and largely underrepresented Jewish ethical perspectives. The chapters explain and apply Jewish ethical ideas to contemporary issues connected to racial justice, immigration, gender justice, queer identity, and economic and environmental justice in ways that illustrate their relevance for Jews and non-Jews alike.
Leaving Other People Alone reads contemporary North American Jewish fiction about Israel/Palestine through an anti-Zionist lens. Aaron Kreuter argues that since Jewish diasporic fiction played a major role in establishing the centroperipheral relationship between Israel and the diaspora, it therefore also has the potential to challenge, trouble, and ultimately rework this relationship. Kreuter suggests that any fictional work that concerns itself with Israel/Palestine and Zionism comes with heightened responsibilities, primarily to make narrative space for the Palestinian worldview, the dispossessed Other of the Zionist project. In engaging prose, the book features a wide range of scholarship and new, compelling readings of texts by Theodor Herzl, Leon Uris, Philip Roth, Ayelet Tsabari, and David Bezmozgis. Throughout, Kreuter develops his concept of diasporic heteroglossia, which is fiction's unique ability to contain multiple voices that resist and write back against national centres. This work makes an important and original contribution to Jewish studies, diaspora studies, and world literature.
Highlights how millennial Jewish stars symbolize national politics in US media Jewish stars have longed faced pressure to downplay Jewish identity for fear of alienating wider audiences. But unexpectedly, since the 2000s, many millennial Jewish stars have won stellar success while spotlighting (rather than muting) Jewish identity. In Millennial Jewish Stars, Jonathan Branfman asks: what makes these explicitly Jewish stars so unexpectedly appealing? And what can their surprising success tell us about race, gender, and antisemitism in America? To answer these questions, Branfman offers case studies on six top millennial Jewish stars: the biracial rap superstar Drake, comedic rapper Lil Dicky, ...
In interwar and post-Holocaust New York, Yiddish autobiographers responded to the upheaval of modern Jewish life in ways that combined artistic innovation with commemoration for a world that is no more. Imagining Lives: Autobiographical Fiction of Yiddish Writers is the first comprehensive study of the autobiographical genre in Yiddish literature. Jan Schwarz offers portraits of seven major Yiddish writers, showing the writer's struggles to shape the multiple identities of their ruptured lives in autobiographical fiction. This analysis of Yiddish life-writing includes discussions of literary representation, self and collectivity, and memory in modern Jewish literature. Schwarz shows how Yiddish autobiographical fiction fuses novelistic elements and memoiristic truthfulness in ways that also characterize Jewish life-writing in English and Hebrew. His accessible style, biographical sketches, glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish words, and careful survey of notable texts takes readers on an incomparable journey through modern Yiddish literature.
In 1524, a man named David Reubeni appeared in Venice, claiming to be the ambassador of a powerful Jewish kingdom deep in the heart of Arabia. In this era of fierce rivalry between great powers, voyages of fantastic discovery, and brutal conquest of new lands, people throughout the Mediterranean saw the signs of an impending apocalypse and envisioned a coming war that would end with a decisive Christian or Islamic victory. With his army of hardy desert warriors from lost Israelite tribes, Reubeni pledged to deliver the Jews to the Holy Land by force and restore their pride and autonomy. He would spend a decade shuttling between European rulers in Italy, Portugal, Spain, and France, seeking w...
This book highlights the need for a shift from thinking in terms of memories of traumatic events, to changeable modes of remembrance. The call for a fundamental change in approaches to commemorative remembrance is exemplified in literature written by the internationally acclaimed writer, Etgar Keret. Considered the most influential Israeli voice of his generation, Keret’s storytelling is in congruence with postmodern thinking. Through transferring remembrance of the Holocaust from stagnant Holocaust commemoration—museums and commemorative ceremonies—to unconventional settings, such as youngsters playing soccer or being forced to venture outdoors in a COVID-19 pandemic environment, Keret’s storytelling ushers in a unique approach to coping with remembrance of historical catastrophes. The book is a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in pursuing the subjects of Etgar Keret’s artistry, and literature written in a post modern, post Holocaust milieu about personal and collective traumatic remembrance.