While Yiddish theater is best known as popular entertainment, it has been shaped by its creators responses to changing social and political conditions. Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and Show Business showcases the diversity of modern Yiddish theater by focusing on the relentless and far-ranging capacity of its performers, producers, critics, and audiences for self-invention. Editors Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry have assembled essays from leading scholars that trace the roots of modern Yiddish drama and performance in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe...
While Yiddish theater is best known as popular entertainment, it has been shaped by its creators responses to changing social and political conditions...
In "The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz," author Ephraim Kanarfogel challenges the dominant perception that medieval Ashkenazic rabbinic scholarship was lacking in intellectualism or broad scholarly interests. While cultural interaction between Jews and Christians in western Europe was less than that of Sephardic Jews, Kanarfogel's study shows that the intellectual interests of Ashkenazic rabbinic figures were much broader than Talmudic studies alone.
Kanarfogel begins by highlighting several factors that have contributed to relatively narrow perceptions...
In "The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz," author Ephraim Kanarfogel challenges the dominant perception that medieval...
Yiddish Hip Hop, a nineteenth century "Hasidic Slasher," obscure Yiddish writers, and immigrant Jewish newspapers in Buenos Aires, Paris, and New York are just a few of the topics featured in "Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture." Editors Lara Rabinovitch, Shiri Goren, and Hannah S. Pressman have gathered a diverse and richly layered collection of essays that demonstrates the currency of Yiddish scholarship in academia today.
Organized into six thematic rubrics, "Choosing Yiddish" demonstrates that Yiddish, always a border-crossing language, continues to push...
Yiddish Hip Hop, a nineteenth century "Hasidic Slasher," obscure Yiddish writers, and immigrant Jewish newspapers in Buenos Aires, Paris, and New Y...
The year 1978 marked Israel's entry into Lebanon, which led to the long-term military occupation of non-sovereign territory and the long, costly war in Lebanon. In the years that followed, many Israelis found themselves alienated from the idea that their country used force only when there was no alternative, and Israeli society eventually underwent a dramatic change in attitude toward militarization and the infallibility of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces). In "Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture" editors Rachel S. Harris and Ranen Omer-Sherman collect...
The year 1978 marked Israel's entry into Lebanon, which led to the long-term military occupation of non-sovereign territory and the long, costly wa...
"The Dropped Hand" is an attempt to create poetry that lives in the face of loss. The poems in the second and third of the book's four sections respond directly to two major strokes: the stroke that robbed author Terry Blackhawk's father of his ability to read or write and left him with a limited capacity for verbal expression; and the cerebral hemorrhage that killed Blackhawk's mother not long thereafter.
Underlying the poems in "The Dropped Hand" is an unspoken echo of Keats's famous fragment: "This living hand . . ." The book's two central metaphors-the hand (the hand that plays or...
"The Dropped Hand" is an attempt to create poetry that lives in the face of loss. The poems in the second and third of the book's four sections res...
This is a stunning book of risk, movement, and deep feeling. With wild, leaping detail and surprising connections, the author catapults the reader into the visceral world where the whole body lives. This is not poetry of the floating voice or the afternoon tea. This is brave, original, and significant work that requires us to feel. Our humanity is summoned in poem after poem. The book is appropriately titled, for much of the imagery involves depth of feeling juxtaposed against appearance. The author succeeds marvelously in seeing beyond facades and revealing thought that often contradicts...
This is a stunning book of risk, movement, and deep feeling. With wild, leaping detail and surprising connections, the author catapults the reader ...
Born in the 1490s, Anthonius Margaritha was the grandson, son, and brother of noted rabbis and was perhaps the best-known Jew of his generation in Germany to convert to Christianity. When he became a Christian in 1521, he began a series of writings that were built on his Jewish life and learning but were intended to reveal the defects of his former faith. These writings, including a translation of the Hebrew prayer book into German and a refutation of the faith, The Entire Jewish Faith (Der gantz J?disch glaub), are well known to scholars, but Margaritha himself has been studied largely as...
Born in the 1490s, Anthonius Margaritha was the grandson, son, and brother of noted rabbis and was perhaps the best-known Jew of his generation in ...
