Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Jewish

Menasseh ben Israel (1604-1657) war einer der bekanntesten Rabbiner des fruhneuzeitlichen Europa. Beruhmtheit erlangte er vor allem durch die Verhandlungen, die er mit Oliver Cromwell uber die Ruckkehr der Juden nach England fuhrte. Doch die Englandverhandlungen machten nur den letzten Schritt in einer Reihe von Vermittlungsbemuhungen aus. Menasses ganzes Schreiben und Wirken war von dem Programm bestimmt, christlichen Gelehrten Wissen uber das Judentum zukommen zu lassen und den Sefarden so zu Anerkennung und einer Verbesserung ihrer politischen Situation zu verhelfen. Damit reagierte...

The certainty that deep down we are all "schlemiels "is perhaps what makes America love an inept ball team or a Woody Allen who unburdens his neurotic heart in public.

In this unique, revised history of the "schlemiel, "Sanford Pinsker uses psychological, linguistic, and anecdotal approaches, as well as his considerable skills as a spritely storyteller, to trace the "schlemiel "from his beginnings in the Old Testament through his appearance in the nineteenth-century literature of Mendele Mocher Seforim and Sholom Aleichem to his final development as the beautiful loser in the works of...

Beginning in 1172, Judah ibn Tibbon, who was called the father of Hebrew translators, wrote a letter to his son that was full of personal and professional guidance. The detailed letter, described as an ethical will, was revised through the years and offered a vivid picture of intellectual life among Andalusi elites exiled in the south of France after 1148. S. J. Pearce sets this letter into broader context and reads it as a document of literary practice and intellectual values. She reveals how ibn Tibbon, as a translator of philosophical and religious texts, explains how his son should...

Through the poetry of Bouena Sarfatty (1916-1997), An Ode to Salonika sketches the life and demise of the Sephardi Jewish community that once flourished in this Greek crossroads city. A resident of Salonika who survived the Holocaust as a partisan and later settled in Canada, Sarfatty preserved the traditions and memories of this diverse and thriving Sephardi community in some 500 Ladino poems known as coplas. The coplas also describe the traumas the community faced under German occupation before the Nazis deported its Jewish residents to Auschwitz. The coplas in Ladino and in Renee Levine...

Howard Fast's life, from a rough-and-tumble Jewish New York street kid to the rich and famous author of close to 100 books, rivals the Horatio Alger myth. Author of bestsellers such as Citizen Tom Paine, Freedom Road, My Glorious Brothers, and Spartacus, Fast joined the American Communist Party in 1943 and remained a loyal member until 1957, despite being imprisoned for contempt of Congress. Gerald Sorin illuminates the connections among Fast's Jewishness, his writings, and his left-wing politics and explains Fast's attraction to the Party and the reasons he stayed in it as long as he did....

As millions of people around the world who have read her diary attest, Anne Frank, the most familiar victim of the Holocaust, has a remarkable place in contemporary memory. Anne Frank Unbound looks beyond this young girl's words at the numerous ways people have engaged her life and writing. Apart from officially sanctioned works and organizations, there exists a prodigious amount of cultural production, which encompasses literature, art, music, film, television, blogs, pedagogy, scholarship, religious ritual, and comedy. Created by both artists and amateurs, these responses to Anne Frank...

Yiddish Hip Hop, a nineteenth century "Hasidic Slasher," obscure Yiddish writers, and immigrant Jewish newspapers in Buenos Aires, Paris, and New York are just a few of the topics featured in "Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture." Editors Lara Rabinovitch, Shiri Goren, and Hannah S. Pressman have gathered a diverse and richly layered collection of essays that demonstrates the currency of Yiddish scholarship in academia today.

Organized into six thematic rubrics, "Choosing Yiddish" demonstrates that Yiddish, always a border-crossing language, continues to push...

Zionism and Revolution in European-Jewish Literature examines twentieth-century Jewish writing that challenges imperialist ventures and calls for solidarity with the colonized, most notably the Arabs of Palestine and Africans in the Americas. Since Edward Said defined orientalism in 1978 as a Western image of the Islamic world that has justified domination, critics have considered the Jewish people to be complicit with orientalism because of the Zionist movement. However, the Jews of Europe have themselves been caught between East and West -both marginalized as the "Orientals" of...