Author: Michael Stanislawski
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295803797
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Autobiographical Jews examines the nature of autobiographical writing by Jews from antiquity to the present, and the ways in which such writings can legitimately be used as sources for Jewish history. Drawing on current literary theory, which questions the very nature of autobiographical writing and its relationship to what we normally designate as the truth, and, to a lesser extent, the new cognitive neurosciences, Michael Stanislawski analyzes a number of crucial and complex autobiographical texts written by Jews through the ages. Stanislawski considers The Life by first-century historian Josephus; compares the early modern autobiographies of Asher of Reichshofen (Book of Memories) and Glikl of Hameln (Memoirs); analyzes the radically different autobiographies of two Russian Jewish writers, the Hebrew Enlightenment author Moshe Leib Lilienblum and the famous Russian poet Osip Mandelstam; and looks at two autobiographies written out of utter despair in the midst and in the wake of World War II, Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday and Sarah Kofman’s Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. These writers’ attempts to portray their private and public struggles, anxieties, successes, and failures are expressions of a basic drive for selfhood which is both timeless and time-bound, universal and culturally specific. The challenge is to attempt to unravel the conscious from the unconscious distortions in these texts and to regard them as artifacts of individuals’ quests to make sense of their lives, first and foremost for themselves and then, if possible, for their readers.
Author: Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299150143
Category : Jewish college teachers
Languages : en
Pages : 524
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Book Description
The contributors are highly productive and respected Jewish-American scholars, critics, and teachers from departments of English, history, American studies, Romance literature, Slavic studies, art, women's studies, comparative literature, anthropology, Judaic studies, and philosophy.
Author:
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804786208
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 517
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Book Description
This remarkable memoir by Menachem Mendel Frieden illuminates Jewish experience in all three of the most significant centers of Jewish life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It chronicles Frieden's early years in Eastern Europe, his subsequent migration to the United States, and, finally, his settlement in Palestine in 1921. The memoir appears here translated from its original Hebrew, edited and annotated by Frieden's grandson, the historian Lee Shai Weissbach. Frieden's story provides a window onto Jewish life in an era that saw the encroachment of modern ideas into a traditional society, great streams of migration, and the project of Jewish nation building in Palestine. The memoir follows Frieden's student life in the yeshivas of Eastern Europe, the practices of peddlers in the American South, and the complexities of British policy in Palestine between the two World Wars. This first-hand account calls attention to some often ignored aspects of the modern Jewish experience and provides invaluable insight into the history of the time.
Author: Marcus Moseley
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804763974
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 682
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Book Description
This is a work of unprecedented scope, tracing the origins of Jewish autobiographical writing from the early modern period to the early twentieth century. Drawing on a multitude of Hebrew and Yiddish texts, very few of which have been translated into English, and on contemporary autobiographical theory, this book provides a literary/historical explanatory paradigm for the emergence of the Jewish autobiographical voice. The book also provides the English reader with an introduction to the works of central figures in the history of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and it includes discussion of material that has never been submitted to literary critical analysis in English.
Author: Maria Diemling
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004167188
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 501
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Book Description
This volume explores perceptions of the "Jewish body" in variety of early modern Jewish sources. It discusses, among other topics, ideas of the ideal body in normative sources, the influence of Kabbalistic ideas on Jewish-Christian discourse and the link between melancholy and exile.
Author: Ronnie Perelis
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253024099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
Identity, family, and community unite three autobiographical texts by New World crypto-Jews, or descendants of Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity in 17th-century Iberia and Spanish America. Ronnie Perelis presents the fascinating stories of three men who were caught within the matrix of inquisitorial persecution, expanding global trade, and the network of crypto-Jewish activity. Each text, reflects the unique experiences of the author and illuminates their shared, deeply rooted attachment to Iberian culture, their Atlantic peregrinations, and their hunger for spiritual enlightenment. Through these writings, Perelis focuses on the social history of transatlantic travel, the economies of trade that linked Europe to the Americas, and the physical and spiritual journeys that injected broader religious and cultural concerns into this complex historical moment.
Author: Nancy Sinkoff
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814349692
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 481
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Book Description
These investigations illuminate the entangled experiences of Jews who sought to balance the pull of communal, religious, and linguistic traditions with the demands and allure of full participation in European life.
Author: Albert I. Baumgarten
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161501715
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
"Albert Baumgarten presents the biography of one of the most distinguished historians of the Jews in antiquity that demonstrates the important connections between his scholarship, life and times. The events of the twentieth century provide the context for the analysis of Bickerman's scholarly production." --Back cover.
Author: Alisa Lebow
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816643547
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Examining more than a dozen films from Jewish artists, this book reveals how the postmodern impulse to turn the lens inward intersects provocatively with historical tropes and stereotypes of the Jew. It focuses on Jewish filmmakers working on the margins and examines the work of Jonathan Caouette, Chantal Akerman and many more.
Author: Steven E. Aschheim
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110393328
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
In the past decades the “German-Jewish phenomenon” (Derrida) has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars from various fields: Jewish studies, intellectual history, philosophy, literary and cultural studies, critical theory. In all its complex dimensions, the post-enlightenment German-Jewish experience is overwhelmingly regarded as the most quintessential and charged meeting of Jews with the project of modernity. Perhaps for this reason, from the eighteenth century through to our own time it has been the object of intense reflection, of clashing interpretations and appropriations. In both micro and macro case-studies, this volume engages the multiple perspectives as advocated by manifold interested actors, and analyzes their uses, biases and ideological functions over time in different cultural, disciplinary and national contexts. This volume includes both historical treatments of differing German-Jewish understandings of their experience – their relations to their Judaism, general culture and to other Jews – and contemporary reflections and competing interpretations as to how to understand the overall experience of German Jewry.
