Francophone Jewish Writers
Francophone Jewish Writers

Author: Lucille Cairns

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 178138262X

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This book considers the differing emotional investments in Israel of, on the one hand, Jews physically domiciled in Israel and, on the other hand, diasporic Jews living outside Israel for whom the country nonetheless forms a central point of affect. The book's purpose is to trace how these two types of investment are represented by francophone Jewish writers. Israel is at once a problematic geopolitical reality in international politics and a salient topos within Jewish cultural imaginaries that transcend national boundaries. However, it has often been claimed that Israel has aspecial relationship with France, which until 1967 was its greatest ally. Israel has a large francophone community (some 800,000), while France has the largest Jewish community in Europe (some 600,000). But Franco-Israeli relations have undergone radical, largely negative transformations under the Fifth Republic (1958- ). The scope of the book is wide, addressing the following questions. How do francophone Jewish writers represent Israel in their literary works? What responses to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict do they express both in these works and in non-literary discourse (interviews and journalistic articles)? What is the role in those responses of emotion, affect, cognition, and ethics? To answer these questions, the book examines 44 different autobiographies, memoirs and novels published between 1965 and 2012 by 27 different authors, both male and female, covering the full cultural spectrum of Jews: Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Mizrahi. The approach of the book is interdisciplinary, combining literary analysis with insights from the domains of history, journalism, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, and sociology.

Francophone Jewish Writers
Francophone Jewish Writers

Author: Lucille Cairns

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2015-11-24

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1781384355

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Francophone Jewish Writers examines how Franco-Jewish writers depict Israel in autobiographies, memoirs and novels, exploring how those depictions reflect and inflect current socio-political tensions within and between France and Israel.

Writing the Black Decade
Writing the Black Decade

Author: Joseph Ford

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-01-28

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 1498581870

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Writing the Black Decade: Conflict and Criticism in Francophone Algerian Literature examines how literature—and the way we read, classify, and critique literature—impacts our understanding of the world at a time of conflict. Using the bitterly-contested Algerian Civil War as a case study, Joseph Ford argues that, while literature is frequently understood as an illuminating and emancipatory tool, it can, in fact, restrain our understanding of the world during a time of crisis and further entrench the polarized discourses that lead to conflict in the first place. Ford demonstrates how Francophone Algerian literature, along with the cultural and academic criticism that has surrounded it, has mobilized visions of Algeria over the past thirty years that often belie the complex and multi-layered realities of power, resistance, and conflict in the region. Scholars of literature, history, Francophone studies, and international relations will find this book particularly useful.

Writing Occupation
Writing Occupation

Author: Julia Elsky

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2020-12-08

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1503614360

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Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a language that represented both a literary center and the promises of French universalism. But under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, these Jewish émigré writers—among them Irène Némirovsky, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, and Elsa Triolet—continued to write in their adopted language, even as the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws. In this book, Julia Elsky argues that these writers reexamined both their Jewishness and their place as authors in France through the language in which they wrote. The group of authors Elsky considers depicted key moments in the war from their perspective as Jewish émigrés, including the June 1940 civilian flight from Paris, life in the occupied and southern zones, the roundups and internment camps, and the Resistance in France and in London. Writing in French, they expressed multiple cultural, religious, and linguistic identities, challenging the boundaries between center and periphery, between French and foreign, even when their sense of belonging was being violently denied.

Is Theory Good for the Jews?
Is Theory Good for the Jews?

Author: Bruno Chaouat

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2016-12-16

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1781381216

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For at least fifteen years, any keen observer of European society has been aware that antisemitism is no longer a matter of racial theory, nationalism, or exclusion of the 'other.' While in the past antisemites saw Jews as all too modern 'rootless cosmopolitans' (to use Stalin's expression), today's European antisemitism construes them as obsolete precisely because they are attached to their roots, their land, their community, their origin. The Jews are now perceived as a reactionary force that hinders the progress of humankind toward multiculturalism, understood as the peaceful, infinitely enriching coexistence of ethnicities, races, religions, and cultures within the same territory. The antisemite of yore viewed the Jews as an inferior race; today he views them as racist. By looking back to the emergence of a postwar theoretical discourse on trauma, memory, victims, suffering, the Holocaust and the Jews, Is Theory Good for the Jews? explores how 'French thought' is implicated in intellectual, literary and ideological components of the global and local upsurge of antisemitism. The author probes the legacy of Heidegger in France and exposes the shortcomings of radical social critique and postcolonial theory confronted to the challenge of Islamic terrorism and Jew hatred. This book is the first effort to analyze French responses that have regrettably played their part in generating the new antisemitism.

Inventing the Israelite
Inventing the Israelite

Author: Maurice Samuels

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2009-12-07

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0804773424

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In this book, Maurice Samuels brings to light little known works of literature produced from 1830 to 1870 by the first generation of Jews born as French citizens. These writers, Samuels asserts, used fiction as a laboratory to experiment with new forms of Jewish identity relevant to the modern world. In their stories and novels, they responded to the stereotypical depictions of Jews in French culture while creatively adapting the forms and genres of the French literary tradition. They also offered innovative solutions to the central dilemmas of Jewish modernity in the French context—including how to reconcile their identities as Jews with the universalizing demands of the French revolutionary tradition. While their solutions ranged from complete assimilation to a modern brand of orthodoxy, these writers collectively illustrate the creativity of a community in the face of unprecedented upheaval.

Post-war Jewish Women's Writing in French
Post-war Jewish Women's Writing in French

Author: Lucille Cairns

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-12-02

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 1351194011

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"How have French Jewish women reacted to the great traumas of the last century - the Holocaust, North African decolonization and the resulting migration of African Jews to France, the Arab-Israeli crisis and the aftermath of 9/11? Cairns's major new volume identifies the themes of books by French Jewish women from 1945 to the present day, gauging to what extent they are dominated by, informed by, or relatively indifferent to these threatening events. Thirty authors in particular serve as representatives of a great, and greatly diverse, pool: divided not only as Ashkenazim or Sephardim, but by origins scattered across Algeria, Egypt, Germany, Hungary, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Russia, Tunisia, and Turkey. Theirs is a transnational, doubly-diasporic, and thus particularly complex paradigm in which feminism, loyalty to family culture and to the traditions of Judaism often exists in tension with French Republican models of assimilation, non-differentiation, and gender-blindness. Lucille Cairns is Professor of French Literature at the University of Durham."

Francophone Sephardic Fiction
Francophone Sephardic Fiction

Author: Judith Roumani

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-04-13

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1793620105

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Francophone Sephardic Fiction:Writing Migration, Diaspora, and Modernity approaches modern Sephardic literature in a comparative way to draw out similarities and differences among selected francophone novelists from various countries, with a focus on North Africa. The definition of Sepharad here is broader than just Spain: it embraces Jews whose ancestors had lived in North Africa for centuries, even before the arrival of Islam, and who still today trace their allegiance to ways of being Jewish that go back to Babylon, as do those whose ancestors spent a few hundred years in Iberia. The author traces the strong influence of oral storytelling on modern novelists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and explores the idea of the portable homeland, as exile and migration engulfed the long-rooted Sephardic communities. The author also examines diaspora concepts, how modernity and post-modernity threatened traditional ways of life, and how humor and an active return into history for the novel have done more than mere nostalgia could to enliven the portable homeland of modern francophone Sephardic fiction.

A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean
A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean

Author: Lia Brozgal

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-05-02

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0520393406

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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean brings together the fascinating personal stories of Jewish writers, scholars, and intellectuals who came of age in lands where Islam was the dominant religion and everyday life was infused with the politics of the French imperial project. Prompted by novelist Leïla Sebbar to reflect on their childhoods, these writers offer literary portraits that gesture to a universal condition while also shedding light on the exceptional nature of certain experiences. The childhoods captured here are undeniably Jewish, but they are also Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Turkish; each essay thus testifies to the multicultural, multilingual, and multi-faith community into which its author was born. The present translation makes this unique collection available to an English-speaking public for the first time. The original version, published in French in 2012, was awarded the Prix Haïm Zafrani, a prize given by the Elie Wiesel Institute of Jewish Studies to a literary project that valorizes Jewish civilization in the Muslim world.

Cities, Citizenship and Jews in France and the United States, 1905–2022 (Volume 2)
Cities, Citizenship and Jews in France and the United States, 1905–2022 (Volume 2)

Author: Josef W. Konvitz

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1000998983

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This comparative, transatlantic two-volume work covers nearly 120 years of the history of the rights, integration, and security of the Jewish people in both the United States and France, the countries with the largest and third-largest Jewish populations. Religious freedom and secularism have evolved differently in France and the United States, reinforcing their separate national identities. Yet there are parallels to their Jewish history, and in how the security of Jews has repeatedly defined and tested the national interests of France and the United States in world affairs. Drawing on the author’s personal experience as an international civil servant, these volumes explore topics such as tensions and common interests between France and the United States, the memory of the Shoah, social mobility, the tepid commitment of the United States to the rights of French Jews during World War II, trends in antisemitism and tolerance, and global climate change as a threat to largely coastal Jewish communities. They highlight what makes insecurity different in the 21st century and why a paradigm shift in policy is needed. This title is intended both for a general audience and advanced undergraduate and graduate students interested in Jewish history, urban history, and international relations.