Derrida's Marrano Passover
Derrida's Marrano Passover

Author: Agata Bielik-Robson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1501392638

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In this first ever monograph on Jacques Derrida's 'Toledo confession' – where he portrayed himself as 'sort of a Marrano of the French Catholic culture' – Agata Bielik-Robson shows Derrida's marranismo to be a literary experiment of auto-fiction. She looks at all possible aspects of Derrida's Marrano identification in order to demonstrate that it ultimately constitutes a trope of non-identitarian evasion that permeates all his works: just as Marranos cannot be characterized as either Jewish or Christian, so is Derrida's 'universal Marranism' an invitation to think philosophically, politically and – last but not least – metaphysically without rigid categories of identity and belonging. By concentrating on Derrida's deliberate choice of marranismo, Bielik-Robson shows that it penetrates deep into the very core of his late thinking, constantly drawing on the literary works of Kafka, Celan, Joyce, Cixous and Valéry, and throws a new light on his early works, most of all: Of Grammatology, Dissemination and 'Différance'. She also offers a completely new interpretation of many of Derrida's works only seemingly non-related to the Marrano issue, like Glas, Given Time: Counterfeit Money, Death Penalty Seminar, and Specters of Marx. In these new readings, this book demonstrates that the Marrano Derrida is not a marginal auto-biographical figure overshadowed by Derrida the Philosopher: it is one and the same thinker who discovered marranismo as a literary trope of openness, offering up a new genre of philosophical story-telling which centers around Derrida's Marrano 'auto-fable'.

The Marrano Phenomenon
The Marrano Phenomenon

Author: Agata Bielik-Robson

Publisher: MDPI

Published: 2019-05-09

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 303897904X

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What we call here the ‘Marrano phenomenon’ is still a relatively unexplored fact of modern Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution, but nevertheless exerts significant influence on modern humanities. Our aim, however, is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), i.e., the mostly Spanish and Portguese Jews of the 15th and 16th centuries, who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism ‘undercover’: such an approach already exists and has been developed within the field of historical research. We rather want to apply the ‘Marrano metaphor’ to explore the fruitful area of mixture and crossover which allowed modern thinkers, writers, and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication—without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness, which they subsequently developed as a ‘hidden tradition’. What is of special interest to us is the modern development of the non-normative forms of religious thinking located on the borderline between Christianity and Judaism, from Spinoza to Derrida.

Kabbalah and Literature
Kabbalah and Literature

Author: Kitty Millet

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-01-11

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1501359703

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Focuses on a range of Jewish and non-Jewish writers to examine the intersection of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, and secular Jewish literatures. Kabbalah and Literature shows how the Jewish mystical tradition contributes to the renewal of literature in a modern, global, and increasingly disconnected age. Kitty Millet explores Kabbalah's conceptual underpinnings, aesthetic principles, tenets, and signifiers to demonstrate how literature's absorption of kabbalistic material has altered its ontology, function, and the tasks it sets for itself. Reading writers from Europe and the Americas, Kitty Millet maps how the kabbalist's desire to "recover Eden" transforms into a latent messianic drive only intuitable through text. Thus it charts a journey of sorts, a migration of Jewish mystical material embedded surreptitiously within text in order to shift ever so slightly at times the range of the literary to encompass an aesthetic vision not easily reducible to the literal, the known, the allegorical, or even the philosophical. In this way, Kabbalah and Literature proposes a novel, intuitive approach, shifting focus away from the Jewish text's epistemological elements to embrace its "secrets."

Nocturnal Seeing
Nocturnal Seeing

Author: Elliot R. Wolfson

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2024-10-29

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 1503640973

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In this erudite new work, Elliot R. Wolfson explores philosophical gnosis in the writings of Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod. The juxtaposition of these three extraordinary, albeit relatively neglected, philosophers provides a prism through which Wolfson scrutinizes the interplay of ethics, politics, and theology. The bond that ties together the diverse and multifaceted worldviews promulgated by Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod is the mutual recognition of the need to enunciate a response to the calamities of the twentieth century based on an incontrovertible acknowledgment of the decadence and malevolence of human beings, without, however, succumbing to acrimony and despair. The speculation of each of these philosophers on melancholia and the tragicomedy of being is unquestionably intricate, exhibiting subtle variations and idiosyncrasies, but we can nevertheless identify a common denominator in their attempt to find the midpoint positioned between hope and hopelessness. As Wolfson articulates, Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod exemplify a philosophical sensibility informed by a nocturnal seeing, which is not merely a seeing in the night but rather a seeing of the night. Ultimately, the book reveals the potential for these thinkers' ideas to enhance our moral sensitivity and to encourage participation in the ongoing struggle for meaning and decency in the present.

Holocaust Literature and Representation
Holocaust Literature and Representation

Author: Phyllis Lassner

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2023-02-09

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1501391607

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Each scholar working in the field of Holocaust literature and representation has a story to tell. Not only the scholarly story of the work they do, but their personal story, their journey to becoming a specialist in Holocaust studies. What academic, political, cultural, and personal experiences led them to choose Holocaust representation as their subject of research and teaching? What challenges did they face on their journey? What approaches, genres, media, or other forms of Holocaust representation did they choose and why? How and where did they find a scholarly “home” in which to share their work productively? Have political, social, and cultural conditions today affected how they think about their work on Holocaust representation? How do they imagine their work moving forward, including new challenges, responses, and audiences? These are but a few of the questions that the authors in this volume address, showing how a scholar's field of research and resulting writings are not arbitrary, and are often informed by their personal history and professional experiences.

Poesis in Extremis
Poesis in Extremis

Author: Daniel Feldman

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-02-08

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13:

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How can genocide be witnessed through imaginative literature? How can the Holocaust affect readers who were not there? Reading the work of major figures such as Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Avrom Sutzkever, Ida Fink, Wladyslaw Szlengel, Itzhak Katzenelson, and Czeslaw Milosz, Poesis in Extremis poses fundamental questions about how prose and poetry are written under extreme conditions, either in real time or immediately after the Holocaust. Framed by discussion of literary testimony, with Wiesel's literary memoir Night as an entry point, this innovative study explores the blurred boundary of fact and fiction in Holocaust literature. It asks whether there is a poetics of the Holocaust and what might be the criteria for literary witnessing. Wartime writing in particular tests the limits of “poesis in extremis” when poets faced their own annihilation and wrote in the hope that their words, like a message in a bottle, would somehow reach readers. Through Poesis in Extremis, Daniel Feldman and Efraim Sicher probe the boundaries of Holocaust literature, as well as the limits of representation.

Talmud and Philosophy
Talmud and Philosophy

Author: Sergey Dolgopolski

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2024-08-06

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0253070694

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Wide-ranging and astutely argued, Talmud and Philosophy examines the intersections, partitions, and mutual illuminations and problematizations of Western philosophy and the Talmud. Among many philosophers, the Talmud has been at best an idealized and remote object and, at worst, if noticed at all, an object of curiosity. The contributors to this volume collectively ignite and probe a new mode of inquiry by approaching the very question of partitions, conjunctions, and disjunctions between the Talmud and philosophy as the guiding question of their inquiry. Rather than using the Talmud and its modes of argumentation to develop existing philosophical themes, these essays probe the question of how the Talmud as an intellectual discipline sheds new light on the unfolding of philosophy in the history of thought.

Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War
Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War

Author: Cynthia Gabbay

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-09-08

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1501379445

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Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War inaugurates a new field of research in literary and Jewish studies at the intersection of Jewish history and the internationalist cultural phenomenon emerging from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the Republican exile, and the Shoah. With the Spanish Civil War as a point of departure, this volume proposes a definition of Jewish textualities based on the entanglement of multiple poetic modes. Through the examination of a variety of narrative fiction and non-fiction, memoir, poetry, epistles, journalism, and music in Yiddish, Spanish, French, German, and English, these essays unveil non-canonic authors across the West and explore these works in the context of antisemitism, orientalism, and philo-Sephardism, among other cultural phenomena. Jewish writings from the war have much to tell about the encounter between old traditions and new experimentations, framed by urgency, migration, and messianic hope. They offer perspectives on memorial and post-memorial literatures triggered by transhistorical imagination, and many were written against the grain of canonic literature, where subtle forms of dissidence, manifested through language, structure, sound, and thought, sought to tune with the anti-fascist fight. This book revindicates the polyglossia of Jewish cultures and literatures in the context of genocide and epistemicide and proposes to remember the cultural phenomena produced by the Spanish Civil War, demanding a new understanding of the cosmopolitan imaginaries in Jewish literature.

Zäsuren / Caesurae
Zäsuren / Caesurae

Author: Chiara Caradonna

Publisher: Wallstein Verlag

Published: 2024-06-26

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 3835347209

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Ein Sammelband zu Celans einzigem Israel-Besuch 1969 mit Beiträgen zu der Frage, wie diese »Wende« und »Zäsur« für sein Leben und Werk zu verstehen sind. Im Oktober 1969 besuchte Paul Celan Israel zum ersten und einzigen Mal und nannte diesen Besuch danach »eine Wende, eine Zäsur« in seinem Leben. Wie ist diese Zäsur zu verstehen, und was ist ihre Bedeutung für Celans Spätwerk? NachwuchswissenschaftlerInnen und etablierte ForscherInnen im Bereich der internationalen Celan-Forschung gehen diesen Fragen nach und eröffnen neue Zugänge zu Celans Israel-Besuch sowie zu den Gedichten, die Celan nach der Rückkehr in Paris schrieb und die sich explizit auf diese Reise beziehen. Über den Israel-Besuch hinaus ist die zweite Hälfte des Buches dem noch wenig erforschten Spätwerk Celans gewidmet. Auseinandersetzungen mit philosophischen Themen, die für Celans Spätwerk von Bedeutung sind, begleiten textnahe Interpretationen von einzelnen Gedichten und Übersetzungen aus den letzten Jahren von Celans Schaffen. Mit einer Vielfalt an internationalen Stimmen und Perspektiven tritt das Buch dem Mythos der Unzugänglichkeit von Celans Spätwerk entschlossen entgegen und lädt die Leser dazu ein, sich ihm in der ganzen Fülle seiner Anregungen und Facetten neu zu nähern. Mit Beiträgen von Bertrand Badiou, Yarden Ben-Zur, Agata Bielik-Robson, Thomas C. Connolly, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Christine Ivanovic, Michael Levine, Adam Lipszyc, Camilla Miglio, Pawel Piszczatowski, Asif Rahamim, Alexandra Richter, Thomas Schestag, Galili Shahar, Bernd Witte, Shira Wolosky, Sandro Zanetti sowie mit Kunstwerken von Shy Abady.

Tradition and Equality in Jewish Marriage
Tradition and Equality in Jewish Marriage

Author: Melanie Malka Landau

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2012-03-29

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1441139338

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Often when people have become alienated from their religious backgrounds, they access their traditions through lifecycle events such as marriage. At times, modern values such as gender equality may be at odds with some of the traditions; many of which have always been in a state of flux in relationship to changing social, economic and political realities. Traditional Jewish marriage is based on the man acquiring the woman, which has symbolic and actual ramifications. Grounded in the traditional texts yet accessible, this book shows how the marriage is an acquisition and contextualises the gender hierarchy of marriage within the rabbinic exclusion of women from Torah study, the highest cultural practice and women's exemption from positive commandments. Melanie Landau offers two alternative models of partnership that partially or fully bypass the non-reciprocity of traditional Jewish marriage and that have their basis in the ancient rabbinic texts.