German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust
German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust

Author: P. Bos

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2005-06-03

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1403979332

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Combining cultural history and literary analysis, this study proposes a new and thought-provoking reading of the changing relationship between Germans and Jews following the Holocaust. Two Holocaust survivors whose work became uniquely successful in the Germany of the 1980s and 1990s, Grete Weil and Ruth Kluger, emerge as exemplary in their contributions to a postwar German discussion about the Nazi legacy that had largely excluded living Jews. While acknowledging that the German audience for the works of Holocaust survivors began to change in the 1980s, this study disputes the common tendency to interpret this as a sign of greater willingness to confront the Holocaust, arguing instead that it resulted from a continued German misreading of Jews' criticisms. By tracing the particular cultural-political impact that Weil's and Kluger's works had on their German audience, it investigates the paradox of Germany's confronting the Holocaust without necessarily confronting the Jews as Germans. Furthermore, for the authors this literature also had a psychological impact: their 'return' to the German language and to Germany is read not as an act of mourning or nostalgia, but rather as a public call to Germans for a dialogue about the Nazi past, as a way to move into the public realm the private emotional and psychological battles resulting from German Jews' exclusion from and persecution by their own national community.

The Image of Bar Kokhba in Traditional Jewish Literature
The Image of Bar Kokhba in Traditional Jewish Literature

Author: Richard G. Marks

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2004-05-01

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 0271041447

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Marks' painstaking investigation into the figure of Bar Kokhba in traditional Jewish literature has indeed provided a corrective to those on both sides of the Zionist political spectrum and in doing so he has once again shown that historical investigations are often quite useful in elucidating and clarifying various modern debates.-Jewish Political Studies Review"This is a very significant contribution to both Jewish literature and history. The materials which Marks works through are well-known, but at many points he offers original interpretations. He provides a comprehensive synthesis of all the historical interpretations of Bar Kokhba."-Richard D. Hecht, University of California, Santa BarbaraBar Kokhba led the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 132-135 A.D., which resulted in massive destruction and dislocation of the Jewish populace of Judea. In early rabbinic literature, Bar Kokhba was remembered in two ways: as an imposter claiming to be the Messiah and as a glorious military leader whose successes led Rabbi Akiva, one of the great rabbinic authorities of Jewish tradition, to acclaim him the Messiah. These two earliest images formed the core of most later perceptions of Bar Kokhba, so that he became the prototypical false messiah and the paradigmatic rebel of Jewish history.The Image of Bar Kokhba in Traditional Jewish Literature is a history of the perceptions that later Jewish writers living in the fourth through seventeenth centuries formed of this legendary hero-villain whose actions, in their eyes, had caused enormous suffering and disappointed messianic hopes. Richard Marks examines each writer's account individually and in the context of its period, exploring particularly political and religious implications. He builds a history of images and looks at larger patterns, such as the desacralizing of traditional imagery. His findings raise timely political questions about Bar Kokhba's image among Jews today.

Exclusion, Exile, and the Wandering Jew in Jewish Literature
Exclusion, Exile, and the Wandering Jew in Jewish Literature

Author: Regine Rosenthal

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2024-02-06

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1527562565

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Based on a medieval extrabiblical Christian legend, the figure of the Wandering Jew has long served as a negative representation of all Jews. Condemned by Christ to endless wandering and everlasting life, the Wandering Jew has lived on ever since in literature and criticism as a legendary and symbolic paradigm, ranging from anti-Jewish stereotype to the generalized cultural Other. While Romanticism took him outside of the Jewish context, nineteenth-century antisemitic racism again adopted the figure in an evolving discourse that culminated in his image in Nazi propaganda as the despicable, racialized cultural Other who needed to be exterminated. The present work takes up this trope in all its complex, intersecting facets and shifts the focus of the inquiry from the perspective of the dominant culture to that of the Jewish Other. Starting with nineteenth-century American popular and mainstream writers, it explores the responses to, and the subversions and reinventions of, the paradigmatic figure in works by a variety of European, Canadian, and American Jewish writers and thinkers. It also opens the discussion to the broader issues of contemporary society and politics, such as pervasive uprootedness, transborder migration, the plight of refugees, and states’ rights versus human rights.

Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity
Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity

Author: Jonathan M. Hess

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2010-03-12

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0804774234

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For generations of German-speaking Jews, the works of Goethe and Schiller epitomized the world of European high culture, a realm that Jews actively participated in as both readers and consumers. Yet from the 1830s on, Jews writing in German also produced a vast corpus of popular fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content, audience, and function. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity offers the first comprehensive investigation in English of this literature, which sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. This study examines the ways in which popular fiction assumed an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. It locates in nineteenth-century Germany a defining moment of the modern Jewish experience and the beginnings of a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today.

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature
The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature

Author: Benjamin Schreier

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2020-09-18

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0812297563

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Benjamin Schreier argues that Jewish American literature's dominant cliché of "breakthrough"—that is, the irruption into the heart of the American cultural scene during the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley—must also be seen as the critically originary moment of Jewish American literary study. According to Schreier, this is the primal scene of the Jewish American literary field, the point that the field cannot avoid repeating and replaying in instantiating itself as the more or less formalized academic study of Jewish American literature. More than sixty years later, the field's legibility, the very condition of its possibility, remains overwhelmingly grounded in a reliance on this single ethnological narrative. In a polemic against what he sees as the unexamined foundations and stagnant state of the field, Schreier interrogates a series of professionally powerful assumptions about Jewish American literary history—how they came into being and how they hardened into cliché. He offers a critical genealogy of breakthrough and other narratives through which Jewish Studies has asserted its compelling self-evidence, not simply under the banner of the historical realities Jewish Studies claims to represent but more fundamentally for the intellectual and institutional structures through which it produces these representations. He shows how a historicist scholarly narrative quickly consolidated and became hegemonic, in part because of its double articulation of a particular American subject and of a transnational historiography that categorically identified that subject as Jewish. The ethnological grounding of the Jewish American literary field is no longer tenable, Schreier asserts, in an argument with broad implications for the reconceptualization of Jewish and other identity-based ethnic studies.

Jewish American and Holocaust Literature
Jewish American and Holocaust Literature

Author: Alan L. Berger

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2004-09-22

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0791462102

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Deepens and enriches our understanding of the Jewish literary tradition and the implications of the Shoah. Challenging the notion that Jewish American and Holocaust literature have exhausted their limits, this volume reexamines these closely linked traditions in light of recent postmodern theory. Composed against the tumultuous background of great cultural transition and unprecedented state-sponsored systematic murder, Jewish American and Holocaust literature both address the concerns of postmodern human existence in extremis. In addition to exploring how various mythic and literary themes are deconstructed in the lurid light of Auschwitz, this book provides critical reassessments of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, as well as contemporary Jewish American writers who are extending this vibrant tradition into the new millennium. These essays deepen and enrich our understanding of the Jewish literary tradition and the implications of the Shoah.

The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature
The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature

Author: Hana Wirth-Nesher

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-06-12

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 1139826476

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For more than two hundred years, Jews have played important roles in the development of American literature. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature addresses a wide array of themes and approaches to the distinct yet multifaceted body of Jewish American literature. Essays examine writing from the 1700s to major contemporary writers such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Topics covered include literary history, immigration and acculturation, Yiddish and Hebrew literature, popular culture, women writers, literary theory and poetics, multilingualism, the Holocaust, and contemporary fiction. This collection of specially commissioned essays by leading figures discusses Jewish American literature in relation to ethnicity, religion, politics, race, gender, ideology, history, and ethics, and places it in the contexts of both Jewish and American writing. With its chronology and guides to further reading, this volume will prove valuable to scholars and students alike.