Midnight Convoy & Other Stories

Midnight Convoy & Other Stories

Author: S. Yizhar

Publisher: Toby Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13:

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The author is known for his lyricism and reverence for nature, and his sensory impressions and descriptions of Israel's landscape. This is a collection of his shorter fiction dating back to his first published works.


Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs

Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs

Author: Kfir Cohen

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2019-09-03

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 1788735587

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A sweeping new theory of world literature through a study of Palestinian and Israeli literature from the 1940s to the present Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs charts the aesthetic and political formation of neoliberalism and globalization in Israeli and Palestinian literature from the 1940s to the present. By tracking literature’s move from making worlds to reading signs, Cohen Lustig proposes a new way to read theorize our global contemporary. Cohen Lustig argues that the period of Israeli statism and its counterpart of Palestinian statelessness produced works that sought to make and create whole worlds and social time—create the new state of Israel, preserve collective visions of Palestinian statehood. During the period of neoliberalism, the period after 1985 in Israel and the 1993 Oslo Accords in Palestine, literature became about the reading of signs, where politics and history are now rearticulated through the private lives of individual subjects. Here characters do not make social time but live within it and inquire after its missing origin. Cohen Lustig argues for new ways to track the subjectivities and aesthetics produced by larger shifts in production. In so doing, he proposes a new model to understand the historical development of Israeli and Palestinian literature as well as world literature in our contemporary moment. With a preface from Fredric Jameson.


From Schlemiel to Sabra

From Schlemiel to Sabra

Author: Philip Hollander

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2019-05-17

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0253042070

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“Convincingly demonstrates the role of gender and sexuality in forming the Israeli state and . . . the place of literature as a force in politics.” —Choice In From Schlemiel to Sabra, Philip Hollander examines how masculine ideals and images of the New Hebrew man shaped the Israeli state. In this innovative book, Hollander uncovers the complex relationship that Jews had with masculinity, interrogating narratives depicting masculinity in the new state as a transition from weak, feminized schlemiels to robust, muscular, and rugged Israelis. Turning to key literary texts by S.Y. Agnon, Y.H. Brenner, L.A. Arieli, and Aharon Reuveni, Hollander reveals how gender and sexuality were intertwined to promote a specific Zionist political agenda. A Zionist masculinity grounded in military prowess could not only protect the new state but also ensure its procreative needs and future. Self-awareness, physical power, fierce loyalty to the state and devotion to the land, humility, and nurture of the young were essential qualities that needed to be cultivated in migrants to the state. By turning to the early literature of Zionist Palestine, Hollander shows how Jews strove to construct a better Jewish future.


Glory and Agony

Glory and Agony

Author: Yael Feldman

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2010-09-01

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 0804777365

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Glory and Agony is the first history of the shifting attitudes toward national sacrifice in Hebrew culture over the last century. Its point of departure is Zionism's obsessive preoccupation with its haunting "primal scene" of sacrifice, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, as evidenced in wide-ranging sources from the domains of literature, art, psychology, philosophy, and politics. By placing these sources in conversation with twentieth-century thinking on human sacrifice, violence, and martyrdom, this study draws a complex picture that provides multiple, sometimes contradictory insights into the genesis and gender of national sacrifice. Extending back over two millennia, this study unearths retellings of biblical and classical narratives of sacrifice, both enacted and aborted, voluntary and violent, male and female—Isaac, Ishmael, Jephthah's daughter, Iphigenia, Jesus. Glory and Agony traces the birth of national sacrifice out of the ruins of religious martyrdom, exposing the sacred underside of Western secularism in Israel as elsewhere.


Reading Israel, Reading America

Reading Israel, Reading America

Author: Omri Asscher

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-11-26

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1503610942

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American and Israeli Jews have historically clashed over the contours of Jewish identity, and their experience of modern Jewish life has been radically different. As Philip Roth put it, they are the "heirs jointly of a drastically bifurcated legacy." But what happens when the encounter between American and Israeli Jewishness takes place in literary form—when Jewish American novels make aliyah, or when Israeli novels are imported for consumption by the diaspora? Reading Israel, Reading America explores the politics of translation as it shapes the understandings and misunderstandings of Israeli literature in the United States and American Jewish literature in Israel. Engaging in close readings of translations of iconic novels by the likes of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, and Yoram Kaniuk—in particular, the ideologically motivated omissions and additions in the translations, and the works' reception by reviewers and public intellectuals—Asscher decodes the literary encounter between Israeli and American Jews. These discrepancies demarcate an ongoing cultural dialogue around representations of violence, ethics, Zionism, diaspora, and the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews. Navigating the disputes between these "rival siblings" of the Jewish world, Asscher provocatively untangles the cultural relations between Israeli and American Jews.


The Routledge Encyclopedia of Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century

Author: Sorrel Kerbel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-11-23

Total Pages: 1394

ISBN-13: 1135456070

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Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.


Machine, Metaphor, and the Writer

Machine, Metaphor, and the Writer

Author: Bettina L. Knapp

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 1989-09-15

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780271026466

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The brilliant and far-reaching comparative and interdisciplinary work explores the impact of the machine on the literary mind and its ramifications. Knapp displays an unusual command of world literatures in dealing with a topic that is of outstanding importance to a broad field of scholars and generalists, including those concerned with contemporary literature, comparative literature, and Jungian theory. It is very much in line with the current trend toward interdisciplinary studies. Knapp offers powerful and original analyses of texts by French, Irish, Japanese, Israeli, German, Polish, and American authors: Alfred Jarry, James Joyce, Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz, Luigi Pirandello, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Juan Jose Arreola, S. Yizhar, Jiro Osaragi, N. K. Narayan, Peter Handke, and Sam Shepard. The authors explored here were deeply affected by the changes occurring in their lives and times and reacted to these ideationally and feelingly. In some of their writings, images, characters, and plots were used to create monstrous and robotlike individuals unable to accept the world around them and hence seeking to destroy it. Others of these writers attempted to understand and integrate the environmental, human, and mechanical alterations taking place about them, and to transform these into positive attributes. The realization of the increasing domination of the machine, we see, catalyzed and mobilized each author into action. Each in his own way spoke his mind, revealing the corrosive and beneficial factors in his world as he saw them.


The Reading Group Insider

The Reading Group Insider

Author: The eBook Insider

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2011-10-04

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0307949923

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The Reading Group Insider is a valuable resource for everything you need to know about reading groups. If you are looking for ideas to enhance your current group's experiences, interested in joining a reading group, or starting one of your own, the suggestions within The Reading Group Insider will get you started on the right path. This is the place to find excerpts to browse for help with choosing good discussion titles; Q&As with the authors of some tried and true reading group picks; recipes to complement what you're reading; tips on how to start or join a reading group of your own; travel and field trip ideas to spice up your meetings; and much more. Suggested discussion questions are provided for different genres and types of books, including book-to-film adaptations and memoirs. Over 50 suggestions of reading group titles from both favorite and emerging authors are presented within as well, all with extra content or reading group guides included so that the resources you need are right at your fingertips. Once you've consulted The Reading Group Insider, you'll be eager to start reading, meeting and discussing! (A Publication of The eBook Insider Series)