Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Jewish

Eric Zakim follows the literary and intellectual career of the powerful Zionist slogan "to build and be built" from its conceptual origin in reaction to the Kishinev pogroms of 1903, when it first served as an expression of settlement aspiration, until the end of pre-state national expansion in Palestine in 1938. "Draining the swamps" and "making the desert bloom," the Jewish settlers imagined themselves as performing "miracles" on the land. By these acts, they were also meant to reinvent the very notion of what it was to be a Jew in the modern world. As Jewish settlers reshaped nature in...

First mentioned in the Book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible, the golem is a character in an astonishing number of post-Holocaust Jewish-American novels and has served as inspiration for such varied figures as Mary Shelley's monster in her novel Frankenstein, a frightening character in the television series The X-Files, and comic book figures such as Superman and the Hulk. In The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction, author Elizabeth R. Baer introduces readers to these varied representations of the golem and traces the history of the golem legend across modern pre- and...

S.Y. Agnon was the greatest Hebrew writer of the twentieth century, and the only Hebrew writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. He devoted the last years of his life to writing a massive cycle of stories about Buczacz, the Galician town (now in Ukraine) in which he grew up. Yet when these stories were collected and published three years after Agnon's death, few took notice. Years passed before the brilliance and audacity of Agnon's late project could be appreciated.

The Parable and Its Lesson is one of the major stories from this work. Set shortly after the...

The gesture by Benjamin, Rosenzweig, and others of detaching messianism from the person of the messiah, understanding it instead as a redemptive potential inherent in all human history, is one facet of a broad move in political theory, philosophy, linguistics, and...

The gesture by Benjamin, Rosenzweig, and others of detaching messianism from the person of the messiah, understanding it instead as a redemptive potential inherent in all human history, is one facet of a broad move in political theory, philosophy, linguistics, and...

This richly suggestive book examines the common bonds of thought and shared manner of expression that unite Jewish writers working in America, Eastern Europe, and Israel. Murray Baumgarten shows how Jewish traditions are reflected in the themes and narrative style of a diverse group of writers, including Saul Bellow, Henry Roth, Sholom Aleichen, Isaac Babel, and S.Y. Agnon.

Baumgarten finds in these writers a distinctive and symbolic use of the urban scene arid style of life--whether the city is Brooklyn, Chicago, Vienna, Warsaw, Odessa, or Jerusalem. He examines the...

Why are words so important to so many Jews? Novelist Amos Oz and historian Fania Oz-Salzberger roam the gamut of Jewish history to explain the integral relationship of Jews and words. Through a blend of storytelling and scholarship, conversation and argument, father and daughter tell the tales behind Judaism's most enduring names, adages, disputes, texts, and quips. These words, they argue, compose the chain connecting Abraham with the Jews of every subsequent generation.

Framing the discussion within such topics as continuity, women, timelessness, and individualism, Oz and...