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This volume, the first of its kind, establishes and clarifies the significance of Jewish rhetorics as its own field and as a field within rhetoric studies. Diverse essays illuminate and complicate the editors' definition of a Jewish rhetorical stance as allowing speakers to maintain a "resolute sense of engagement" with their fellows and their community, while also remaining aware of the dislocation from the members of those communities. Topics include the historical and theoretical foundations of Jewish rhetorics; cultural variants and modes of cultural expression; and intersections with Greco-Roman, Christian, Islamic, and contemporary rhetorical theory and practice. In addition, the contributors examine gender and Yiddish, and evaluate the actual and potential effect of Jewish rhetorics on contemporary scholarship and on the ways we understand and teach language and writing. The contributors include some of the world's leading scholars of rhetoric, writing, and Jewish studies.
"The story of the first Jewish public library in Europe"--
Collectively, contributors reframe Jewish American literary history through feminist approaches that have revolutionized the field, from intersectionality and the #MeToo movement to queer theory and disability studies. Examining both canonical and lesser-known texts, this collection asks: what happens to conventional understandings of Jewish American literature when we center women's writing and acknowledge women as dominant players in Jewish cultural production?
This volume allows 13 besieged languages to tell their own stories by way of their consummate battles with languages that dominate their traditional spaces and ways of thinking. It tells of the value of these languages through linkages with the past and present and where continuation of this might further share those values with wider audiences beyond the current language users. As such, the book captures a discourse on the existence of minority languages in countries and states where they are under threat by the ‘Governing’ language.
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L...
"This book provides an introduction to Yiddish, the foundational vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, both as a subject of interest in its own right and for the distinctive issues that Yiddish raises for the study of languages generally, including language diaspora, language fusion, multilingualism, language ideologies, and postvernacularity. By approaching the study of Yiddish through the rubric of a biography, rather than following a more conventional chronological, geographical, or ideological approach, this book examines the story of Yiddish thematically. Each chapter addresses a different "biographical" topic concerning the character of the language and how it has been conceptualized, ranging across time, space, and speech communities. These chapters interrelate discussions of the language's origins, characteristics, and development with the dynamics of its implementation in Ashkenazi culture from the Middle Ages to the present. These thematic chapters also examine the symbolic investments that both Jews and others have made in Yiddish over time, which are key to understanding both general perceptions and scholarly analyses of the language, especially in the modern period"--
This Handbook of Jewish Languages is an introduction to the many languages used by Jews throughout history, including Yiddish, Judezmo (Ladino) , and Jewish varieties of Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Berber, English, French, Georgian, Greek, Hungarian, Iranian, Italian, Latin American Spanish, Malayalam, Occitan (Provençal), Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Syriac, Turkic (Karaim and Krymchak), Turkish, and more. Chapters include historical and linguistic descriptions of each language, an overview of primary and secondary literature, and comprehensive bibliographies to aid further research. Many chapters also contain sample texts and images. This book is an unparalleled resource for anyone interested in Jewish languages, and will also be very useful for historical linguists, dialectologists, and scholars and students of minority or endangered languages. This paperback edition has been updated to include dozens of additional bibliographic references.
A momentous and diverse anthology of the influences and inspirations of Yiddish voices in America—radical, dangerous, and seductive, but also sweet, generous, and full of life—edited by award-winning authors and scholars Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert. Is it possible to conceive of the American diet without bagels? Or Star Trek without Mr. Spock? Are the creatures in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are based on Holocaust survivors? And how has Yiddish, a language without a country, influenced Hollywood? These and other questions are explored in this stunning and rich anthology of the interplay of Yiddish and American culture, edited by award-winning authors and scholars Ilan Stav...
Pairing the two concepts of diaspora and modernism, Allison Schachter formulates a novel approach to modernist studies and diasporic cultural production. Diasporic Modernisms illuminates how the relationships between migrant writers and dispersed readers were registered in the innovative practices of modernist prose fiction. The Jewish writers discussed-including S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, Gabreil Preil, and Kadia Molodowsky--embraced diaspora as a formal literary strategy to reflect on the historical conditions of Jewish language culture. Spanning from 1894 to 1974, the book traces the development of this diasporic aesthetic in the shifting cente...
Homes of the Past tells the powerful story of how immigrant Jewish scholars in 1940s New York sought to build a museum to commemorate their lost worlds and people. Among the Jews who arrived in the United States in the early 1940s were a small number of Polish scholars who had devoted their professional lives to the study of Europe's Yiddish-speaking Jews at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Faced with the devastating knowledge that returning to their former homes and resuming their scholarly work there was no longer viable, they sought to address their profound sense of loss by continuing their work, under radically different circumstances, to document the European Jewish lives, place...