The Jewish Persona In The European Imagination

Download or read book The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination written by Leonid Livak and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-10 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes that the idea of the Jews in European cultures has little to do with actual Jews, but rather is derived from the conception of Jews as Christianity's paradigmatic Other, eternally reenacting their morally ambiguous New Testament role as the Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God. Through new readings of canonical Russian literary texts by Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, and others, the author argues that these European writers—Christian, secular, and Jewish—based their representation of Jews on the Christian exegetical tradition of anti-Judaism. Indeed, Livak disputes the classification of some Jewish writers as belonging to "Jewish literature," arguing that such an approach obscures these writers' debt to European literary traditions and their ambivalence about their Jewishness. This work seeks to move the study of Russian literature, and Russian-Jewish literature in particular, down a new path. It will stir up controversy around Christian-Jewish cultural interaction; the representation of otherness in European arts and folklore; modern Jewish experience; and Russian literature and culture.

Download or read book Confessions of the Shtetl written by Ellie R. Schainker and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-16 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the nineteenth century, some 84,500 Jews in imperial Russia converted to Christianity. Confessions of the Shtetl explores the day-to-day world of these people, including the social, geographic, religious, and economic links among converts, Christians, and Jews. The book narrates converts' tales of love, desperation, and fear, tracing the uneasy contest between religious choice and collective Jewish identity in tsarist Russia. Rather than viewing the shtetl as the foundation myth for modern Jewish nationhood, this work reveals the shtetl's history of conversions and communal engagement with converts, which ultimately yielded a cultural hybridity that both challenged and fueled visions of Jewish separatism. Drawing on extensive research with conversion files in imperial Russian archives, in addition to the mass press, novels, and memoirs, Ellie R. Schainker offers a sociocultural history of religious toleration and Jewish life that sees baptism not as the fundamental departure from Jewishness or the Jewish community, but as a conversion that marked the start of a complicated experiment with new forms of identity and belonging. Ultimately, she argues that the Jewish encounter with imperial Russia did not revolve around coercion and ghettoization but was a genuinely religious drama with a diverse, attractive, and aggressive Christianity.

Download or read book Defenses of the Imagination written by Robert Alter and published by Philadelphia : Jewish Publication Society of America. This book was released on 1977 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Ridiculous Jew written by Gary Rosenshield and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study devoted to exploring the use of a Russian version of the Jewish stereotype (the ridiculous Jew) in the works of three of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century. Rosenshield does not attempt to expose the stereotype—which was self-consciously and unashamedly employed. Rather, he examines how stereotypes are used to further the very different artistic, cultural, and ideological agendas of each writer. What distinguishes this book from others is that it explores the problems that arise when an ethnic stereotype is so fully incorporated into a work of art that it takes on a life of its own, often undermining the intentions of its author as well as many of the defining elements of the stereotype itself. With each these writers, the Jewish stereotype precipitates a literary transformation, taking their work into an uncomfortable space for the author and a challenging one for readers.

Download or read book A World Without Jews written by Alon Confino and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking reexamination of the Holocaust and how Germans understood their genocidal project: “Insightful [and] chilling.” —Kirkus Reviews Why exactly did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible everywhere in Germany on November 9, 1938? The perplexing event has not been adequately accounted for by historians in their large-scale assessments of how and why the Holocaust occurred. In this gripping new analysis, Alon Confino draws on an array of archives across three continents to propose a penetrating new assessment of one of the central moral problems of the twentieth century. To a surprising extent, Confino demonstrates, the mass murder of Jews during the war years was powerfully anticipated in the culture of the prewar years. The author shifts his focus away from the debates over what the Germans did or did not know about the Holocaust and explores instead how Germans came to conceive of the idea of a Germany without Jews. He traces the stories the Nazis told themselves—where they came from and where they were heading—and how those stories led to the conclusion that Jews must be eradicated in order for the new Nazi civilization to arise. The creation of this new empire required that Jews and Judaism be erased from Christian history, and this was the inspiration—and justification—for Kristallnacht. As Germans entertained the idea of a future world without Jews, the unimaginable became imaginable, and the unthinkable became real. “At once so disturbing and so hypnotic to read . . . Deserves the widest possible audience.” —Open Letters Monthly

Download or read book The Worlds of S. An-sky written by Gabriella Safran and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of "The Dybbuk," Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, known as An-sky (1863-1920), was a figure of immense versatility and also ambiguity in Russian and Jewish intellectual, literary, and political spheres. Drawing together leading historians, ethnographers, literary scholars, and others, this far-ranging, multi-disciplinary examination of An-sky is the fullest ever produced.

Download or read book The Social Scientific Study of Jewry written by Uzi Rebhun and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-13 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Continuing its distinguished tradition of focusing on central political, sociological, and cultural issues of Jewish life in the last century, this latest volume in the annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry series focuses on how Jewry has been studied in the social science disciplines. Its symposium consists of essays that discuss sources, approaches, and debates in the complementary fields of demography, sociology, economics, and geography. The social sciences are central for the understanding of contemporary Jewish life and have engendered much controversy over the past few decades. To a large extent, the multitude of approaches toward Jewish social science research reflects the nature of population studies in general, and that of religions and ethnic groups in particular. Yet the variation in methodology, definitions, and measures of demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural patterns is even more salient in the study of Jews. Different data sets have different definitions for what is "Jewish" or "who is a Jew." In addition, Jews as a group are characterized by high rates of migration, including repeated migration, which makes it difficult to track any given Jewish population. Finally, the question of identification is complicated by the fact that in most places, especially outside of Israel, it is not clear whether "being Jewish" is primarily a religious or an ethnic matter - or both, or neither. This volume also features an essay on American Jewry and North African Jewry; review essays on rebuilding after the Holocaust, Nazi war crimes trials, and Jewish historiography; and reviews of new titles in Jewish studies.