Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Jewish

Jews have long embraced their identity as "the people of the book." But outside of the Bible, much of the Jewish literary tradition remains little known to nonspecialist readers. The People and the Books shows how central questions and themes of our history and culture are reflected in the Jewish literary canon: the nature of God, the right way to understand the Bible, the relationship of the Jews to their Promised Land, and the challenges of living as a minority in Diaspora. Adam Kirsch explores eighteen classic texts, including the biblical books of Deuteronomy and Esther, the...

Avodah: Ancient Poems for Yom Kippur is the first major translation of one of the most important genres of the lost literature of the ancient synagogue. Known as the Avodah piyyutim, this liturgical poetry was composed by the synagogue poets of fifth- to ninth-century Palestine and sung in the synagogues on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Although it was suppressed by generations of rabbis, its ornamental beauty and deep exploration of sacred stories ensured its popularity for centuries.

Piyyut literature can teach us much about how ancient Jews...

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,...

Salomon Kohn (1825-1904) war im letzten Drittel des 19. Jahrhunderts einer der bekanntesten judischen Schriftsteller deutscher Sprache. Literaturgeschichtlich liegt seine Leistung darin, dass er den historischen Roman in der Nachfolge Walter Scotts zu dem Genre ausbaute, in dem auf der Hohe des literarischen Zeitgeschmacks genuin judische Belange verhandelt werden konnten: anhand von Beispielen, die der Lokalgeschichte der Prager judischen Gemeinde des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts entnommen sind, entfaltet Kohn eine literarische Diskussion des judischen Selbstverstandnisses in der komplexen...

Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study.

This volume:

• examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers
• includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen
• contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing,...

The first collection of critical essays on Maus, the searing account of one Holocaust survivor's experiences rendered in comic book form.

In 1992, Art Spiegelmans two-volume illustrated work Maus: A Survivor's Tale was awarded a special-category Pulitzer Prize. In a comic book form, Spiegelman tells the gripping, heart-rending story of his father's experiences in the Holocaust. The book renders in stark clarity the trials Spiegelman's father endured as a Jewish refugee in the ghettos and concentration camps of Poland during World War II, his American life...

Joseph Rolnik is widely considered one of the most prominent of the New York Yiddish poets associated with Di Yunge, an avant-garde literary group that formed in the early twentieth century. In his moving and evocative memoir, Rolnik recalls his childhood growing up in a small town in Belarus and his exhilarating yet arduous experiences as an impoverished Yiddish poet living in New York. Working in garment factories by day and writing poetry by night, he became one of the most published and influential writers of the Yiddish literary scene. Unfolding in a series of brief sketches, poems,...

Throughout his career A.M. Klein was concerned primarily with his relationship to his community, seeing himself, and all serious artists, as necessarily shaping and being shaped by the community in which they are rooted. Yet Klein's vision of this relationship was profoundly ambivalent, and this ambivalence is reflected most clearly in his troubled attitude to the two dominant strains in his work, Jewishness and modernism.

In this study of A.M. Klein's work, Zailig Pollock focuses on 'the story of the poet, ' which Klein retells again and again at major turning points in his career....

Chaim Potok was a world-class writer and scholar, a Conservative Jew who wrote from and about his tradition and the conflicts between observance and acculturation. With a plain, straightforward style, his novels were set against the moral, spiritual, and intellectual currents of the twentieth century. This collection aims to widen the lens through which we read Chaim Potok and to establish him as an authentic American writer who created unforgettable characters forging American identities for themselves while retaining their Jewish nature. The essays illuminate the central struggle in...

Hava Shapiro is among the nearly forgotten Jewish women writers who sought acceptance in Jewish literary circles of the last century. Born in Slavuta (modern-day Ukraine) in 1878, she published works of fiction, memoir, literary criticism, and journalism, including a volume of short fiction and a scholarly monograph on the Czech leader Masaryk. Her handwritten diary-the first known diary to be kept by a woman in Hebrew-evokes not only the momentous events of her day but also the experiences of women like herself who failed to follow the dictates of Jewish tradition and aspired to roles...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many perceived American Jewry to be in a state of crisis as traditions of faith faced modern sensibilities. Published beginning in 1909, Rabbi and Professor Louis Ginzberg's seven-volume "The Legends of the Jews" appeared at this crucial time and offered a landmark synthesis of aggadah from classical Rabbinic literature and ancient folk legends from a number of cultures. It remains a hugely influential work of scholarship from a man who shaped American Conservative Judaism. In "Louis Ginzberg's" Legends of the Jews: "Ancient Jewish Folk Literature...