Teaching Jewish American Literature
Teaching Jewish American Literature

Author: Roberta Rosenberg

Publisher: Modern Language Association

Published: 2020-04-01

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1603294465

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A multilingual, transnational literary tradition, Jewish American writing has long explored questions of personal identity and national boundaries. These questions can engage students in literature, writing, or religion; at Jewish, Christian, or secular schools; and in or outside the United States. This volume takes an expansive view of Jewish American literature, beginning with writing from the earliest colonies in the Americas and continuing to contemporary Soviet-born authors in the United States, including works that engage deeply with religious concepts and others that embrace assimilation. It invites readers to rethink the nature of American multiculturalism, suggests pairings of Jewish American texts with other ethnic American literatures, and examines the workings of whiteness and privilege. Contributors offer varied perspectives on classic texts such as Yekl, Bread Givers, and "Goodbye, Columbus," along with approaches to interdisciplinary topics including humor, graphic novels, and musical theater. The volume concludes with an extensive resources section.

College Bound
College Bound

Author: Dan Shiffman

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2017-10-27

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1438467230

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Argues that first- and second-generation Jewish American writers had an ambivalent relationship with educational success. Jewish American immigrants and their children have been stereotyped as exceptional educational achievers, with attendance at prestigious universities leading directly to professional success. In College Bound, Dan Shiffman uses literary accounts to show that American Jews’ relationship with education was in fact far more complex. Jews expected book learning to bring personal fulfillment and self-transformation, but the reality of public schools and universities often fell short. Shiffman examines a wide range of novels and autobiographies by first- and second-generation writers, including Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, Elizabeth Gertrude Stern, Ludwig Lewisohn, Marcus Eli Ravage, Lionel Trilling, and Leo Rosten. Their visions of learning as a process of critical questioning—enlivening the mind, interrogating cultural standards, and confronting social injustices—present a valuable challenge to today’s emphasis on narrowly measurable outcomes of student achievement. “This is a rich, well-researched, and compelling study that displays a mastery of its authors and texts, as well as the relevant scholarly studies. It presents its findings in fluent, readable prose.” — Eric Sundquist, Johns Hopkins University “Shiffman makes an important and timely contribution to the field of American Jewish studies, especially involving the place of education at the turn of the twentieth century and into the war years.” — Victoria Aarons, Trinity University

New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literatures
New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literatures

Author: Victoria Aarons

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2019-02-28

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1438473206

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Surveys the current state of Jewish American and Holocaust literatures as well as approaches to teaching them. What does it mean to read, and to teach, Jewish American and Holocaust literatures in the early decades of the twenty-first century? New directions and new forms of expression have emerged, both in the invention of narratives and in the methodologies and discursive approaches taken toward these texts. The premise of this book is that despite moving farther away in time, the Holocaust continues to shape and inform contemporary Jewish American writing. Divided into analytical and pedagogical sections, the chapters present a range of possibilities for thinking about these literatures. Contributors address such genres as biography, the graphic novel, alternate history, midrash, poetry, and third-generation and hidden-child Holocaust narratives. Both canonical and contemporary authors are covered, including Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Anne Frank, Dara Horn, Joe Kupert, Philip Roth, and William Styron. Victoria Aarons is O.R. & Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of English at Trinity University. She is the author of several books, including Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction and The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow. Holli Levitsky is Professor of English and Director of Jewish Studies at Loyola Marymount University and Affiliated Professor at the University of Haifa. She is the author of Summer Haven: The Catskills, the Holocaust, and the Literary Imagination.

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: 320

ISBN-13: 9780521796996

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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.

Call It English
Call It English

Author: Hana Wirth-Nesher

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-02-14

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1400829534

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Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay. Call It English tells a story of preoccupation with pronunciation, diction, translation, the figurality of Hebrew letters, and the linguistic dimension of home and exile in a culture constituted of sacred, secular, familial, and ancestral languages. Through readings of works by Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, Delmore Schwartz, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and other writers, it demonstrates how inventive literary strategies are sites of loss and gain, evasion and invention. The first part of the book examines immigrant writing that enacts the drama of acquiring and relinquishing language in an America marked by language debates, local color writing, and nativism. The second part addresses multilingual writing by native-born authors in response to Jewish America's postwar social transformation and to the Holocaust. A profound and eloquently written exploration of bilingual aesthetics and cross-cultural translation, Call It English resounds also with pertinence to other minority and ethnic literatures in the United States.

Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature
Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature

Author: Gloria L. Cronin

Publisher: Infobase Learning

Published: 2015-04-22

Total Pages: 1294

ISBN-13: 1438140614

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Presents a reference on Jewish American literature providing profiles of Jewish American writers and their works.

The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature
The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature

Author: Hana Wirth-Nesher

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-12-09

Total Pages: 884

ISBN-13: 1316395340

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This History offers an unparalleled examination of all aspects of Jewish American literature. Jewish writing has played a central role in the formation of the national literature of the United States, from the Hebraic sources of the Puritan imagination to narratives of immigration and acculturation. This body of writing has also enriched global Jewish literature in its engagement with Jewish history and Jewish multilingual culture. Written by a host of leading scholars, The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature offers an array of approaches that contribute to current debates about ethnic writing, minority discourse, transnational literature, gender studies, and multilingualism. This History takes a fresh look at celebrated authors, introduces new voices, locates Jewish American literature on the map of American ethnicity as well as the spaces of exile and diaspora, and stretches the boundaries of American literature beyond the Americas and the West.

Open Your Hand
Open Your Hand

Author: Ilana Blumberg

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2018-11

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1978800819

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Fifteen years into a successful career as a college professor, Ilana M. Blumberg faced a teaching crisis that shook her core beliefs and sent her on a life-changing journey. Open Your Hand shares her remarkable personal story, drawing upon Blumber's Jewish faith and her American ideals to forge a teaching practice with the potential to transform society

The New Jewish American Literary Studies
The New Jewish American Literary Studies

Author: Victoria Aarons

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-04-18

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 110842628X

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Introduces readers to the new perspectives, approaches and interpretive possibilities in Jewish American literature that emerged in the twenty-first Century.