Using the methods of Frankfurt School theorists, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Suchoff offers new readings of Dickens, Melville and Kafka that underscore the political and social critiques inherent in their novels. He also studies the historical origins of literary theory.

Using the methods of Frankfurt School theorists, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Suchoff offers new readings of Dickens, Melville and Kafka that underscore the political and social critiques inherent in their novels. He also studies the historical origins of literary theory.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Holocaust changed what it means to be a Jew, for Jew and non-Jew alike. Much of the discussion about this new meaning is a storm of contradictions. In The Imaginary Jew, Alain Finkielkraut describes with passion and acuity his own passage through that storm. Finkielkraut decodes the shifts in anti-Semitism at the end of the Cold War, chronicles the impact of Israel's policies on European Jews, opposes arguments both for and against cultural assimilation, reopens questions about Marx and Judaism, and marks the loss of European Jewish culture through catastrophe, ignorance, and cliche. He...

First published in 1957, The Legacy of German Jewry is a comprehensive rethinking of the German-Jewish experience. Goldschmidt challenges the elegiac view of Gershom Scholem, showing us the German-Jewish legacy in literature, philosophy, and critical thought in a new light. Part One re-examines the breakthrough to modernity, tracing the moves of thinkers like Moses Mendelssohn, building on the legacies of religious figures like the Baal Shem Tov and radical philosophers such as Spinoza. This vision of modernity, Goldschmidt shows, rested upon a belief that "remnants" of the radical past could...