Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Jewish

Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, New York, number more than forty thousand and constitute the largest single group of Jews from Syria in the world. Their thriving community includes fifteen synagogues in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where the practice of singing Arab melodies is a cornerstone of their religious services. In Maqam and Liturgy, author Mark L. Kligman investigates the multidimensional interaction of music and text in Sabbath prayers of the Syrian Jews to trace how Arab and Jewish traditions have merged in this particular culture, helping to illuminate a little-known dimension of...

In Viennese Jewish Modernism, Abigail Gillman challenges the conventional understanding of modernism as simply a break from tradition. Until recently, the study of Jewish modernism has centered on questions of Jewish and non-Jewish identity, generally ignoring the role Judaism played in the formulation of European modernism as a whole. By focusing on the works of major Viennese authors and thinkers--Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann, and Schnitzler--both within and outside the contexts of Jewish identity, Abigail Gillman provides a profound new perspective on modernism....

A lively and accessible introduction to the key issues in contemporary British-Jewish fiction, memoirs and journalism, and explores how Jewishness exists alongside a range of other different identities in Britain today.

A lively and accessible introduction to the key issues in contemporary British-Jewish fiction, memoirs and journalism, and explores how Jewishness exists alongside a range of other different identities in Britain today.

Taking as its starting point Franz Kafka's complex relationship to Jews and to communities in general, When Kafka Says We explores the ambivalent responses of major German-Jewish writers to self-enclosed social, religious, ethnic, and ideological groups. Vivian Liska shows that, for Kafka and others, this ambivalence inspired innovative modes of writing which, while unmasking the oppressive cohesion of communal groupings, also configured original and uncommon communities. Interlinked close readings of works by German-Jewish writers such as Kafka, Else Lasker-Schuler, Nelly Sachs, Paul...

"For we rather forget that the Christian God was a Jew," Patrick Braybrooke facetiously claimed, "though no doubt this was a Divine mistake and the 'nationality' of Christ should have been English." Taking Braybrooke's lead, Heidi Kaufman argues that the proliferation of Jewish discourse in nineteenth-century British novels was linked to the construction of English character and English origins. The period of the eighteenth century marks a turning point in definitions of English national identity, not only because of a rise in modern racial thinking, but also because of the contradictory...

Der Midrasch Wajoscha gehort zur rabbinischen mittelalterlichen Literatur und kommentiert die Bibelstellen Genesis 22 (Bindung Isaaks) und Exodus 15 (Lied am Schilfmeer). Hierbei werden auch folkloristische Traditionen sowie geschichtliche Ereignisse berucksichtigt. Die verschiedenen Textvarianten wurden auf Basis mehrerer Handschriften zusammengestellt und verglichen. Als Resultat ergibt sich ein Bild mittelalterlichen Lebens in Mitteleuropa, dessen Wurzeln sich auch auerhalb der Welt der Synagoge erstrecken.

Das Buch stellt die Kurzprosa des judischen Schriftstellers Ernst Wei (1882‒1940) in den Mittelpunkt, indem sie diesen spezifischen Werkausschnitt des Romanciers typologisiert, seine Thematik bestimmt und in sechs Interpretationsskizzen einen Erzahltypus herausarbeitet, der als parabolisch bezeichnet wird. Die Studie erlautert Wei' Position zur Existenz- und Erkenntnisproblematik, den Begriff der parabolischen Erzahlkonzeption und zeigt die narrativen Merkmale dieser Konzeption auf.

The study is concerned with research into 20th century Jewish autobiography written in German. After an overview illuminating the tradition of autobiographical writing in the 19th and 20th centuries, the study develops the specific conditions of Jewish autobiography, which has been in existence since the end of the 18th century. The main section of the work is given over to individual studies of autobiographical texts by Jakob Wassermann, Werner Kraft, Gershom Scholem, Max Furst, Ernst Toller, Ludwig Greve, Ruth Kluger and Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt.

This book-series, initiated in 1992, has an interdisciplinary orientation; it is published in English and German and comprises research monographs, collections of essays and editions of source texts dealing with German-Jewish literary and cultural history, in particular from the period covering the 18th to 20th centuries.

The closer definition of the term German-Jewish applied to literature and culture is an integral part of its historical development. Primarily, the decisive factor is that from the middle of the 18th century German gradually became the language of choice for Jews,...