Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer?

Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer? PDF Author: Adam Kirsch
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300245130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
From one of today’s keenest critics comes a collection of essays on poetry, religion, and the connection between the two Adam Kirsch is one of today’s finest literary critics. This collection brings together his essays on poetry, religion, and the intersections between them, with a particular focus on Jewish literature. He explores the definition of Jewish literature, the relationship between poetry and politics, and the future of literary reputation in the age of the internet. Several essays look at the way Jewish writers such as Stefan Zweig and Isaac Deutscher, who coined the phrase “the non-Jewish Jew,” have dealt with politics. Kirsch also examines questions of spirituality and morality in the writings of contemporary poets, including Christian Wiman, Kay Ryan, and Seamus Heaney. He closes by asking why so many American Jewish writers have resisted that category, inviting us to consider “Is there such a thing as Jewish literature?”

Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer?

Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer? PDF Author: Adam Kirsch
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300245130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
From one of today’s keenest critics comes a collection of essays on poetry, religion, and the connection between the two Adam Kirsch is one of today’s finest literary critics. This collection brings together his essays on poetry, religion, and the intersections between them, with a particular focus on Jewish literature. He explores the definition of Jewish literature, the relationship between poetry and politics, and the future of literary reputation in the age of the internet. Several essays look at the way Jewish writers such as Stefan Zweig and Isaac Deutscher, who coined the phrase “the non-Jewish Jew,” have dealt with politics. Kirsch also examines questions of spirituality and morality in the writings of contemporary poets, including Christian Wiman, Kay Ryan, and Seamus Heaney. He closes by asking why so many American Jewish writers have resisted that category, inviting us to consider “Is there such a thing as Jewish literature?”

The Non-Jewish Jew

The Non-Jewish Jew PDF Author: Isaac Deutscher
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786630842
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Essays on Judaism in the modern world, from philosophy and history to art and politics In these essays Deutscher speaks of the emotional heritage of the European Jew with a calm clear-sightedness. As a historian he writes without religious belief, but with a generous breadth of understanding; as a philosopher he writes of some of the great Jews of Europe: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Freud. He explores the Jewish imagination through the painter Chagall. He writes of the Jews under Stalin and of the “remnants of a race“ after Hitler, as well as of the Zionist ideal, of the establishment of the state of Israel, of the Six-Day War, and of the perils ahead.

Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays

Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays PDF Author: Chava Rosenfarb
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773558314
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Chava Rosenfarb (1923–2011) was one of the most prominent Yiddish novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Poland in 1923, she survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, immigrating to Canada in 1950 and settling in Montreal. There she wrote novels, poetry, short stories, plays, and essays, including The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto, a seminal novel on the Holocaust. Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays comprises thirteen personal and literary essays by Rosenfarb, ranging from autobiographical accounts of her childhood and experiences before and during the Holocaust to literary criticism that discusses the work of other Jewish writers. The collection also includes two travelogues, which recount a trip to Australia and another to Prague in 1993, the year it became the capital of the Czech Republic. While several of these essays appeared in the prestigious Yiddish literary journal Di goldene keyt, most were never translated. This book marks the first time that Rosenfarb's non-fiction writings have been presented together in English. A compilation of the memoir and diary excerpts that formed the basis of Rosenfarb's widely acclaimed fiction, Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays deepens the reader's understanding of an incredible Yiddish woman and her experiences as a survivor in the post-Holocaust world.

The Anthology in Jewish Literature

The Anthology in Jewish Literature PDF Author: David Stern
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195350243
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
The anthology is a ubiquitous presence in Jewish literature--arguably its oldest literary genre, going back to the Bible itself, and including nearly all the canonical texts of Judaism: the Mishnah, the Talmud, classical midrash, and the prayerbook. In the Middle Ages, the anthology became the primary medium in Jewish culture for recording stories, poems, and interpretations of classical texts. In modernity, the genre is transformed into a decisive instrument for cultural retrieval and re-creation, especially in works of the Zionist project and in modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature. No less importantly, the anthology has played an indispensable role in the creation of significant fields of research in Jewish studies, including Hebrew poetry, folklore, and popular culture. This volume is the first book to bring together scholarly and critical essays that investigate the anthological character of these works and what might be called the "anthological habit" in Jewish literary culture--the tendency and proclivity for gathering together discrete, sometimes conflicting traditions and stories, and preserving them side by side as though there were no difference, conflict, or ambiguity between them. Indeed, The Anthology in Jewish Literature is the first book to recognize this habit and genre as one of the formative categories in Jewish literature and to investigate its manifold roles. The seventeen essays, each of which focuses on a specific literary work, many of them the great classics of Jewish tradition, consider such questions as: What are the many types of anthologies? How have anthologists, editors, even printers of anthologies been creative shapers of Jewish tradition and culture? What can we learn from their editorial practices? How have politics, gender, and class figured into the making of anthologies? What determinative role has the anthology played in creating the Jewish canon? How has the anthology served, especially in the modern period, to create and recreate Jewish culture. This landmark volume will interest educated laypersons as well as scholars in all areas of Jewish literature and culture, as well as students of world literature and cultural studies.

The Significance of Yavneh and Other Essays in Jewish Hellenism

The Significance of Yavneh and Other Essays in Jewish Hellenism PDF Author: Shaye J. D. Cohen
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161503757
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 644

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Book Description
This volume collects thirty essays by Shaye J.D. Cohen. First published between 1980 and 2006, these essays deal with a wide variety of themes and texts: Jewish Hellenism; Josephus; the Synagogue; Conversion to Judaism; Blood and Impurity; the boundary between Judaism and Christianity. What unites them is their philological orientation. Many of these essays are close studies of obscure passages in Jewish and Christian texts. The essays are united too by their common assumption that the ancient world was a single cultural continuum; that ancient Judaism, in all its expressions and varieties, was a Hellenism; and that texts written in Hebrew share a world of discourse with those written in Greek. Many of these essays are well-known and have been much discussed in contemporary scholarship. Among these are: The Significance of Yavneh (the title essay), Patriarchs and Scholarchs, Masada: Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains, and the Credibility of Josephus, Epigraphical Rabbis, The Conversion of Antoninus, Menstruants and the Sacred in Judaism and Christianity, and A Brief History of Jewish Circumcision Blood.

Jewish Literary Cultures

Jewish Literary Cultures PDF Author: David Stern
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271067537
Category : Jewish literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A collection of essays and studies of diverse texts and topics in ancient Jewish literature, using contemporary critical approaches and textual analysis to explore larger ideas and themes in rabbinic Judaism.

Essential Essays on Judaism

Essential Essays on Judaism PDF Author: Eliezer Berkovits
Publisher: Shalem Press
ISBN: 9789657052037
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
The essay "Faith after the Holocaust" (pp. 315-332) is an excerpt from his book "Faith after the Holocaust" (New York: Ktav, 1973).

Judaism in Music and Other Essays

Judaism in Music and Other Essays PDF Author: Richard Wagner
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803297661
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Musical genius, polemicist, explosive personality-that was the nineteenth-century German composer Richard Wagner, who paid as much attention to his reputation as to his genius. Often maddening, and sometimes called mad, Wagner wrote with the same intensity that characterized his music. The letters and essays collected in Judaism in Music and Other Essays were published during the 1850s and 1860s, the period when he was chiefly occupied with the creation of The Ring of the Nibelung. Highlighting this collection is the notorious 1850 article "Judaism in Music, " which caused such a firestorm that nearly twenty years later Wagner published an unapologetic appendix. Other prose pieces include "On the Performing of Tannhauser, " written while he was in political exile; "On Musical Criticism, " an appeal for a more vital approach to art undivorced from life; and "Music of the Future." This volume concludes with letters to friends about the intent and performance of his great operas; estimations of Liszt, Beethoven, Mozart, Gluck, Berlioz, and others; and suggestions for the reform of opera houses in Vienna, Paris, and Zurich. The Bison Book edition includes the full text of volume 3 of William Ashton Ellis's 1894 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society.

The "Other" in Second Temple Judaism

The Author: Daniel C. Harlow
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802866255
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 543

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Book Description
Based on a conference held Apr. 4-5, 2008 at Amherst College.

Essays on the Book of Enoch and Other Early Jewish Texts and Traditions

Essays on the Book of Enoch and Other Early Jewish Texts and Traditions PDF Author: Michael Anthony Knibb
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004167250
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
This volume brings together twenty-one essays by Michael Knibb on the Book of Enoch and on other Early Jewish texts and traditions, which were originally published in a wide range of journals, Festschriften, conference proceedings and thematic collections. A number of the essays are concerned with the issues raised by the complex textual history and literary genesis of 1 Enoch, but the majority are concerned with the interpretation of specific texts or with themes such as messianism. The essays illustrate some of the dominant concerns of Michael Knibb's work, particularly the importance of the idea of exile; the way in which older texts regarded as authoritative were reinterpreted in later writings; and the connections between the apocalyptic writings and the sapiential literature.