Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond

Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond PDF Author: Mark H. Gelber
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110934191
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This volume contains the lectures delivered at an international conference in Israel devoted to the topic of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Zionism. Kafka's interests in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Jewish Nationalism and his various relationships to his Zionist friends and his participation in Jewish national and Zionist-related activity are explored from a number of different critical vantage points. Likewise, his writings are considered within the specific framework of Jewish nationalism and Zionism.

Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond

Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond PDF Author: Mark H. Gelber
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110934191
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This volume contains the lectures delivered at an international conference in Israel devoted to the topic of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Zionism. Kafka's interests in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Jewish Nationalism and his various relationships to his Zionist friends and his participation in Jewish national and Zionist-related activity are explored from a number of different critical vantage points. Likewise, his writings are considered within the specific framework of Jewish nationalism and Zionism.

Kafka and Cultural Zionism

Kafka and Cultural Zionism PDF Author: Iris Bruce
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299221904
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
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Vultures, Hemorrhages, and Zionism

Vultures, Hemorrhages, and Zionism PDF Author: Martin Wasserman
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 152454373X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
Using a sociohistorical perspective, this work argues that Franz Kafkas parable, The Vulture, specifically depicts the plight of victimized European Jews as they encountered acts of anti-Semitism early in the twentieth century. Kafkas parable demonstrates that it would only be through adhering to a philosophy of cultural Zionism that European Jewry might ultimately survive the brutalities of anti-Semitic behavior.

Burnt Books

Burnt Books PDF Author: Rodger Kamenetz
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0307379337
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
From the acclaimed author of The Jew in the Lotus comes an "engrossing and wonderful book" (The Washington Times) about the unexpected connections between Franz Kafka and Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav—and the significant role played by the imagination in the Jewish spiritual experience. Rodger Kamenetz has long been fascinated by the mystical tales of the Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. And for many years he has taught a course in Prague on Franz Kafka. The more he thought about their lives and writings, the more aware he became of unexpected connections between them. Kafka was a secular artist fascinated by Jewish mysticism, and Rabbi Nachman was a religious mystic who used storytelling to reach out to secular Jews. Both men died close to age forty of tuberculosis. Both invented new forms of storytelling that explore the search for meaning in an illogical, unjust world. Both gained prominence with the posthumous publication of their writing. And both left strict instructions at the end of their lives that their unpublished books be burnt. Kamenetz takes his ideas on the road, traveling to Kafka’s birthplace in Prague and participating in the pilgrimage to Uman, the burial site of Rabbi Nachman visited by thousands of Jews every Jewish new year. He discusses the hallucinatory intensity of their visions and offers a rich analysis of Nachman’s and Kafka’s major works, revealing uncanny similarities in the inner lives of these two troubled and beloved figures, whose creative and religious struggles have much to teach us about the Jewish spiritual experience.

Einstein Before Israel

Einstein Before Israel PDF Author: Ze’ev Rosenkranz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400838371
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Was Einstein a Zionist? Albert Einstein was initially skeptical and even disdainful of the Zionist movement, yet he affiliated himself with this controversial political ideology and today is widely seen as an outspoken advocate for a modern Jewish homeland in Palestine. What enticed this renowned scientist and humanitarian, who repeatedly condemned nationalism of all forms, to radically change his views? Was he in fact a Zionist? Einstein Before Israel traces Einstein's involvement with Zionism from his initial contacts with the movement at the end of World War I to his emigration from Germany in 1933 in the wake of Hitler's rise to power. Drawing on a wealth of rare archival evidence—much of it never before published—this book offers the most nuanced picture yet of Einstein's complex and sometimes stormy relationship with Jewish nationalism. Ze'ev Rosenkranz sheds new light on Einstein's encounters with prominent Zionist leaders, and reveals exactly what Einstein did and didn't like about Zionist beliefs, objectives, and methods. He looks at the personal, cultural, and political factors that led Einstein to support certain goals of Jewish nationalism; his role in the birth of the Hebrew University; his impressions of the emerging Jewish settlements in Palestine; and his reaction to mounting violence in the Arab-Jewish conflict. Rosenkranz explores a host of fascinating questions, such as whether Zionists sought to silence Einstein's criticism of their movement, whether Einstein was the real manipulator, and whether this Zionist icon was indeed a committed believer in Zionism or an iconoclast beholden to no one.

The Animal in the Synagogue

The Animal in the Synagogue PDF Author: Dan Miron
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498595146
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
The Animal in the Synagogue explores Franz Kafka’s sense of being a Jew in the modern world and its literary and linguistic ramifications. It falls into two parts. The first is organized around the theme of Kafka’s complex and often self-derogatory understanding and assessment of his own Jewishness and of the place the modern Jew occupies in “the abyss of the world” (Martin Buber). That part is based on a close reading of Kafka’s correspondence with his Czech lover, Milena Jesenska, and on a meticulous analysis, thematic, stylistic, and structural, of Kafka’s only short story touching openly and directly upon Jewish social and ritual issues, and known as “In Our Synagogue” (the title—not by the author). In both the letters and the short story images of small animals—repulsive, dirty, or otherwise objectionable—are used by Kafka as means of exploring his own manhood and the Jewish tradition at large as he understood it. The second part of the book focuses on Kafka’s place within the complex of Jewish writing of his time in all its three linguistic forms: Hebrew writing (essentially Zionist), Yiddish writing (essentially nationalistic but not committed to Zionism), and the writing, like his, in non-Jewish languages (mainly German) and within the non-Jewish religious and artistic traditions which inhered in them. The essay deals in detail with Kafka’s responses to contemporary Jewish literatures, and his pessimistic evaluation of those literatures’ potential. Essentially, Kafka doubted the sheer possibility of a genuine and culturally tenable compromise (let alone synthesis) between Jewishness and modernity. The book deals with topics and some texts that the flourishing, ever expanding Kafka scholarship has either neglected or misunderstood because most scholars had no real background in either Hebrew or Yiddish studies, and were unable to grasp the nuances and subtle intentions in Kafka’s attitudes toward modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature and their paragons, such as the major Zionist Hebrew poet H.N. Bialik or the Yiddish master Sholem Aleichem.

Kafka After Kafka

Kafka After Kafka PDF Author: Iris Bruce
Publisher: Studies in German Literature L
ISBN: 1571139818
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
New essays providing an up-to-date picture of the engagement of artists, philosophers, and critics with Kafka's work.

Investigating Franz Kafka's “Der Bau”

Investigating Franz Kafka's “Der Bau” PDF Author: Andrea Ebarb
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111058220
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In 2016, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that Max Brod’s posthumous papers which included a collection of Kafka’s manuscripts be transferred to the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. If Kafka’s writings may be seen to belong to Jewish national culture and if they may be considered part of Israel’s heritage, then their analysis within a Jewish framework should be both viable and valuable. This volume is dedicated to the research of Franz Kafka’s late narrative “The Burrow” and its autobiographical and theological significance. Research is extended to incorporate many fields of study (architecture, sound studies, philosophy, cultural studies, Jewish studies, literary studies) to illustrate the dynamics at work within the text which reveal the Jewish aspects implicitly thematicized. Examination of the structure created, the nature of sound perceived, the atmosphere experienced and the acts performed by the protagonist serve as the foundation of this analysis and offer new access to Kafka’s work by presenting an interpretive, space-semantic approach. “Der Bau” is presented as a life concept given the task of constituting identity, highlighting the critical link between the literary and biographical Kafka and demonstrating the necessity of understanding the author as a Jewish writer to understand his late narrative. For her outstanding research project, Andrea Newsom Ebarb was awarded the “Forschungsförderpreis der Vereinigung der Freunde der Universität Mainz e.V.” in 2023.

What Ifs of Jewish History

What Ifs of Jewish History PDF Author: Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110703762X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Counterfactual history of the Jewish past inviting readers to explore how the course of Jewish history might have been different.

Prague Territories

Prague Territories PDF Author: Scott Spector
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520236920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
This cultural history maps the "territories" carved out by German-Jewish artists and intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the 20th century. It explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished.