Author: Barbara Hahn
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400826586
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
"The Jewess Pallas Athena"--a line from a poem by Paul Celan. It is a provocative phrase, cutting across cultures and traditions. But it poses questions: How to reconstruct a culture that has been destroyed? How to conceive of history after the catastrophes of the twentieth century? This book begins in the mid-eighteenth century with the first Jewish women to raise their voices in German. It ends two hundred years later, with another group of Jewish women looking back at a country from which they had been expelled and to which they would never want to return. Among the many prominent female intellectuals and literary figures Barbara Hahn discusses are Hannah Arendt, Gertrud Kantorowicz, Rosa Luxemburg, Else Lasker-Schüler, Margarete Susman, and Rahel Levin Varnhagen. In examining their writing, she reflects upon the question of how German culture was constructed--with its inherent patterns of exclusion. This is a book about hope and despair, possibilities and preventions. We see attempts at dialogue between Christians and Jews, men and women, "Germans" and "Jews," attempts initiated by these women that, for the most part, remained unanswered. Finally, the book reconstructs the changing notions of the "Jewess," a key word in modern German history with its connotations of "salons," "beauty," and "esprit." And yet a word that is also disastrous, in which there culminated everything the dominant culture condemned as dangerous.
Author: Ulrike Brunotte
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110339102
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
Originating in the collaboration of the international Research Network “Gender in Antisemitism, Orientalism and Occidentalism” (RENGOO), this collection of essays proposes to intervene in current debates about historical constructions of Jewish identity in relation to colonialism and Orientalism. The network’s collaborative research addresses imaginative and aesthetic rather than sociological questions with particular focus on the function of gender and sexuality in literary, scholarly and artistic transformations of Orientalist images. RENGOO’s first publication explores the ways in which stereotypes of the external and internal Other intertwine. With its interrogation of the roles assumed in this interplay by gender, processes of sexualization, and aesthetic formations, the volume suggests new directions to the interdisciplinary study of gender, antisemitism, and Orientalism.
Author: Efraim Sicher
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498527795
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
A new approach to thinking about the representation of the Other in Western society, The Jew’s Daughter: A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative offers an insight into the gendered difference of the Jew. Focusing on a popular narrative of “The Jew’s Daughter,” which has been overlooked in conventional studies of European anti-Semitism, this innovative study looks at canonical and neglected texts which have constructed racialized and sexualized images that persist today in the media and popular culture. The book goes back before Shylock and Jessica in TheMerchant of Venice and Isaac and Rebecca in Ivanhoe to seek the answers to why the Jewish father is always wicked and ugly, while his daughter is invariably desirable and open to conversion. The story unfolds in fascinating transformations, reflecting changing ideological and social discourses about gender, sexuality, religion, and nation that expose shifting perceptions of inclusion and exclusion of the Other. Unlike previous studies of the theme of the Jewess in separate literatures, Sicher provides a comparative perspective on the transnational circulation of texts in the historical context of the perception of both Jews and women as marginal or outcasts in society. The book draws on examples from the arts, history, literature, folklore, and theology to draw a complex picture of the dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations in England, France, Germany, and Eastern Europe from 1100 to 2017. In addition, the responses of Jewish authors illustrate a dialogue that has not always led to mutual understanding. This ground-breaking work will provoke questions about the history and present state of prejudiced attitudes in our society.
Author: Natalie Naimark-Goldberg
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1789624789
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359
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Book Description
The encounter of Jews with the Enlightenment movement has so far been considered almost entirely from a masculine perspective. This highly original study, based on analysis of the correspondence and literary works of a group of educated Jewish women, demonstrates their intellectual proclivities, feminine awareness, and social activities, as well as their attitudes to marriage, traditional family frameworks, and religion. In doing so it makes a significant contribution to German Jewish history as well as to gender studies.
Author: Deborah Hertz
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300150032
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440
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Book Description
A “very readable” history of Jewish conversions to Christianity over two centuries that “tracks the many fascinating twists and turns to this story” (Library Journal). When the Nazis came to power and created a racial state in the 1930s, they considered it an urgent priority to identify Jews who had converted to Christianity over the preceding centuries. With the help of church officials, a vast system of conversion and intermarriage records was created in Berlin, the country’s premier Jewish city. Deborah Hertz’s discovery of these records, the Judenkartei, was the first step on a long research journey that led to this compelling book. Hertz begins the book in 1645, when the records begin, and traces generations of German Jewish families for the next two centuries. The book analyzes the statistics and explores letters, diaries, and other materials to understand in a far more nuanced way than ever before why Jews did or did not convert to Protestantism. Focusing on the stories of individual Jews in Berlin, particularly the charismatic salon woman Rahel Levin Varnhagen and her husband, Karl, a writer and diplomat, Hertz brings out the human stories behind the documents, sets them in the context of Berlin’s evolving society, and connects them to the broad sweep of European history.
Author: Shmuel Feiner
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253065151
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 646
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Book Description
The second volume of Shmuel Feiner's The Jewish Eighteenth Century covers the period from 1750 to 1800, a time of even greater upheavals, tensions, and challenges. The changes that began to emerge at the beginning of the eighteenth century matured in the second half. Feiner explores how political considerations of the Jewish minority throughout Europe began to expand. From the "Jew Bill" of 1753 in Britain, to the surprising series of decrees issued by Joseph II of Austria that expanded tolerance in Austria, to the debate over emancipation in revolutionary France, the lives of the Jews of Europe became ever more intertwined with the political, social, economic, and cultural fabric of the continent. The Jewish Eighteenth Century, Volume 2: A European Biography, 1750-1800 concludes Feiner's landmark study of the history of Jewish populations in the period. By combining an examination of the broad and profound processes that changed the familiar world from the ground up with personal experiences of those who lived through them, it allows for a unique explanation of these momentous events.
Author: Manja Herrmann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311029771X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
Wilhelm Herzberg’s novel Jewish Family Papers, which was first published under a pseudonym in 1868, was one of the bestselling German-Jewish books of the nineteenth century. Its numerous editions, reviews, and translations – into Dutch, English, and Hebrew – are ample proof of its impact. Herzberg’s Jewish Family Papers picks up on some of the most central contemporary philosophical, religious, and social debates and discusses aspects such as emancipation, antisemitism, Jewishness and Judaism, nationalism, and the Christian religion and culture, as well as gender roles. So far, however, the novel has not received the scholarly attention it so assuredly deserves. This bilingual volume is the first attempt to acknowledge how this outstanding source can contribute to our understanding of German-Jewish literature and culture in the nineteenth century and beyond. Through interdisciplinary readings, it will discuss this forgotten bestseller, embedding it within various contemporary discourses: religion, literature, emancipation, nationalism, culture, transnationalism, gender, theology, and philosophy.
Author: Laura Levitt
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814752179
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Many of us belong to communities that have been scarred by terrible calamities. And many of us come from families that have suffered grievous losses. How we reflect on these legacies of loss and the ways they inform each other are the questions Laura Levitt takes up in this provocative and passionate book. An American Jew whose family was not directly affected by the Holocaust, Levitt grapples with the challenges of contending with ordinary Jewish loss. She suggests that although the memory of the Holocaust may seem to overshadow all other kinds of loss for American Jews, it can also open up possibilities for engaging these more personal and everyday legacies. Weaving in discussions of her own family stories and writing in a manner that is both deeply personal and erudite, Levitt shows what happens when public and private losses are seen next to each other, and what happens when difficult works of art or commemoration, such as museum exhibits or films, are seen alongside ordinary family stories about more intimate losses. In so doing she illuminates how through these “ordinary stories” we may create an alternative model for confronting Holocaust memory in Jewish culture.
Author: Kerry Wallach
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472123009
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
Weimar Germany (1919–33) was an era of equal rights for women and minorities, but also of growing antisemitism and hostility toward the Jewish population. This led some Jews to want to pass or be perceived as non-Jews; yet there were still occasions when it was beneficial to be openly Jewish. Being visible as a Jew often involved appearing simultaneously non-Jewish and Jewish. Passing Illusions examines the constructs of German-Jewish visibility during the Weimar Republic and explores the controversial aspects of this identity—and the complex reasons many decided to conceal or reveal themselves as Jewish. Focusing on racial stereotypes, Kerry Wallach outlines the key elements of visibility, invisibility, and the ways Jewishness was detected and presented through a broad selection of historical sources including periodicals, personal memoirs, and archival documents, as well as cultural texts including works of fiction, anecdotes, images, advertisements, performances, and films. Twenty black-and-white illustrations (photographs, works of art, cartoons, advertisements, film stills) complement the book’s analysis of visual culture.
Author: Rebecca Cypess
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580469213
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
A rich interdisciplinary exploration of the world of Sara Levy, a Jewish salonnière and skilled performing musician in late eighteenth-century Berlin, and her impact on the Bach revival, German-Jewish life, and Enlightenment culture.
