Arab-Jewish Literature
Arab-Jewish Literature

Author: Reuven Snir

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-01-07

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9004390685

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Arab-Jewish Literature: The Birth and Demise of the Arabic Short Story, Reuven Snir offers an account of the emergence of the art of the Arabic short story among the Arabized Jews during the 1920s, especially in Iraq and Egypt, its development in the next two decades, until the emigration to Israel after 1948, and the efforts to continue the literary writing in Israeli society, the shift to Hebrew, and its current demise. The stories discussed in the book reflect the various stages of the development of Arab-Jewish identity during the twentieth century and are studied in the relevant updated theoretical and literary contexts. An anthology of sixteen translated stories is also included as an appendix to the book. "Highly recommended for academic libraries collecting in the areas of Arab-Jewish cultural history, diaspora and exile studies, and literary identity formations." - Dr. Yaffa Weisman, Los Angeles, in: Association of Jewish Libraries News and Reviews 1.2 (2019)

Glory and Agony
Glory and Agony

Author: Yael Feldman

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2010-09-01

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 0804777365

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

How Close Reading Made Us
How Close Reading Made Us

Author: Yael Segalovitz

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2024-09-01

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 1438498705

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Does reading shape who we are? What happens to the relationship between reading and subject-formation as methods of interpretation travel globally? Yael Segalovitz probes these questions by tracing the transnational journey of the New Critical practice of close reading from the United States to Brazil and Israel in the mid-twentieth century. Challenging the traditional view of New Criticism as a purely aesthetic project, Segalovitz illustrates its underlying pedagogical objective: to cultivate close readers capable of momentarily suspending subjectivity through focused attention. How Close Reading Made Us shows that close reading, as a technique of the self, exerted a far-reaching influence on international modernist literary production, impacting writers such as Clarice Lispector, Yehuda Amichai, William Faulkner, João Guimarães Rosa, and A. B. Yehoshua. To appreciate close reading's enduring vitality in literary studies and effectively adapt this method to the present, Segalovitz argues, we must comprehend its many legacies beyond the confines of the Anglophone tradition.

Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination
Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination

Author: Yaron Peleg

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 1501729357

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Calling into question prevailing notions about Orientalism, Yaron Peleg shows how the paradoxical mixture of exoticism and familiarity with which Jews related to Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century shaped the legacy of Zionism. In Peleg's view, the tension between romancing the East and colonizing it inspired a revolutionary reform that radically changed Jewish thought during the Hebrew Revival that took place between 1900 and 1930. Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination introduces a fresh voice to the contentious debate over the concept of Orientalism. Zionism has often been labeled a Western colonial movement that sought to displace and silence Palestinian Arabs. Based on his readings of key texts, Peleg asserts that early Zionists were inspired by Palestinian Arab culture, which in turn helped mold modern Jewish gender, identity, and culture. Peleg begins with the new ways in which the lands of the Bible are formulated as a modern "Orient" in David Frishman's Bamidbar. He continues by showing how in The Sons of Arabia, Moshe Smilansky laid the basis for the literary construction of the "New Jew," modeled after Palestinian Arabs. Peleg concludes with a discussion of L. A. Arielli's 1913 play Allah Karim! in which both the promise and the problems of the Land of Israel as "Orient" marked the end of Hebrew Orientalism as a viable cultural option.

Jewish Literatures in Spanish and Portuguese
Jewish Literatures in Spanish and Portuguese

Author: Ruth Fine

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-10-24

Total Pages: 686

ISBN-13: 3110563797

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume offers a thorough introduction to Jewish world literatures in Spanish and Portuguese, which not only addresses the coexistence of cultures, but also the functions of a literary and linguistic space of negotiation in this context. From the Middle Ages to present day, the compendium explores the main Jewish chapters within Spanish- and Portuguese-language world literature, whether from Europe, Latin America, or other parts of the world. No comprehensive survey of this area has been undertaken so far. Yet only a broad focus of this kind can show how diasporic Jewish literatures have been (and are ) – while closely tied to their own traditions – deeply intertwined with local and global literary developments; and how the aesthetic praxis they introduced played a decisive, formative role in the history of literature. With this epistemic claim, the volume aims at steering clear of isolationist approaches to Jewish literatures.

Israeli Identity in Transition
Israeli Identity in Transition

Author: Anita Shapira

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2004-10-30

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0313027781

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The last 15 years have witnessed deep changes in Israeli society. The naive solidarity of the early years of statehood has given way to more sophisticated approaches, and the atmosphere of the 1990s was conducive towards critique and open discussion. It was the age of the Oslo Accords, of the large wave of immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, economic growth and prosperity, and a concurrent feeling of security and well-being. Israel was fast becoming a postcapitalist society, a junior member of the global village. This newly acquired self-assurance led to openness towards unorthodox views on basic questions of Israeli identity. The new mood found expression in the cultural climate and in the public debates. The Zionist narrative in relation to the Palestinians; the early troubled absorption of immigrants from Islamic countries; the discrimination against the Arab Israeli minority; the delay in the 1950s in incorporating the memory of the Holocaust into collective memory; the Zionist attitude towards the Jewish Diaspora, all these were issues on the cultural and intellectual agenda, subjects of heated controversies. This book attempts to come to grips with these themes. The complex texture of Israeli society is drawn here by a number of hands, presenting up-to-date approaches, as viewed by experts.

Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sources of Wonder
Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sources of Wonder

Author: Michael Marmur

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2016-05-12

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 144262583X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) was one of the twentieth century’s most influential Jewish thinkers, a respected theologian and enthusiastic civil rights activist who marched to Selma with Martin Luther King, Jr. His theology emphasized the immediacy of wonder and awe, yet his writing was studded with signs of his vast knowledge of traditional scholarship. No other Jewish thinker of note in the twentieth century used such a wide range of texts so extensively. Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sources of Wonder is the first book to demonstrate how Heschel’s political, intellectual, and spiritual commitments were embedded in his reading of Jewish tradition. By shedding new light on how Heschel’s theological project reconciled the demands of tradition and the modern world, Michael Marmur offers an inspirational lesson in how contemporary Jewish thought can embrace both the texts of the past and the challenges of the present.

Borders, Territories, and Ethics
Borders, Territories, and Ethics

Author: Adia Mendelson-Maoz

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 2018-08-15

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1612495362

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadow of the Intifada by Adia Mendelson-Maoz presents a new perspective on the multifaceted relations between ideologies, space, and ethics manifested in contemporary Hebrew literature dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the occupation. In this volume, Mendelson-Maoz analyzes Israeli prose written between 1987 and 2007, relating mainly to the first and second intifadas, written by well-known authors such as Yehoshua, Grossman, Matalon, Castel-Bloom, Govrin, Kravitz, and Levy. Mendelson-Maoz raises critical questions regarding militarism, humanism, the nature of the State of Israel as a democracy, national identity and its borders, soldiers as moral individuals, the nature of Zionist education, the acknowledgment of the Other, and the sovereignty of the subject. She discusses these issues within two frameworks. The first draws on theories of ethics in the humanist tradition and its critical extensions, especially by Levinas. The second applies theories of space, and in particular deterritorialization as put forward by Deleuze and Guattari and their successors. Overall this volume provides an innovative theoretical analysis of the collage of voices and artistic directions in contemporary Israeli prose written in times of political and cultural debate on the occupation and its intifadas.

The People of the Book and the Camera
The People of the Book and the Camera

Author: Ofra Amihay

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2022-06-30

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0815655320

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Amihay offers a pioneering study of the unique nexus between literature and photography in the works of Hebrew authors. Exploring the use of photography—both as a textual element and through the inclusion of actual images— Amihay shows how the presence of visual elements in a textual work of fiction has a powerful subversive function. Contemporary Hebrew authors have turned to photography as a tool to disrupt narratives and give voice to marginalized sectors in Israel, including women, immigrants, Mizrahi Israelis, LGBTQ+ individuals, second-generation Holocaust survivors, and traumatized army veterans. Amihay discusses standard novels alongside graphic novels, challenging the dominance of the written word in literature. In addition to providing a poetic analysis of imagetext pages, Amihay addresses the social and political issues authors are responding to, including gender roles, Zionism, the ethnic divide in Israel, and its Palestinian minority. In exploring these avant-garde novels and their authors, Amihay elevates their significance and calls for a more expansive definition of canonical Hebrew literature.