A Knight at the Opera examines the remarkable and unknown role that the medieval legend (and Wagner opera) TannhAuser played in Jewish cultural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book analyzes how three of the greatest Jewish thinkers of that era, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, and I. L. Peretz, used this central myth of Germany to strengthen Jewish culture and to attack anti-Semitism. Readers will see how TannhAuser evolves from a medieval knight to Peretz's pious Jewish scholar in the Land of Israel. The book also discusses how the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl,...
A Knight at the Opera examines the remarkable and unknown role that the medieval legend (and Wagner opera) TannhAuser played in Jewish cultural life i...
Finalist, 2015 National Jewish Book Awards in the American Jewish Studies category "Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel "shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for the first time became the popular literary representatives of what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American. Revisiting best-selling works ranging from Norman Mailer s "The Naked and the Dead "to Joseph Heller s "Catch-22," and uncovering a range of unknown archival material, Leah Garrett shows how Jewish writers used the theme of World War II to...
Finalist, 2015 National Jewish Book Awards in the American Jewish Studies category "Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War...