Witness Through the Imagination
Witness Through the Imagination

Author: S. Lillian Kremer

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2018-02-05

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0814343945

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Witness through the Imagination presents a critical reading of themes and stylistic strategies of major American Holocaust fiction to determine its capacity to render the prelude, progress, and aftermath of the Holocaust. Criticism of Holocaust literature is an emerging field of inquiry, and as might be expected, the most innovative work has been concentrated on the vanguard of European and Israeli Holocaust literature. Now that American fiction has amassed an impressive and provocative Holocaust canon, the time is propitious for its evaluation. Witness Through the Imagination presents a critical reading of themes and stylistic strategies of major American Holocaust fiction to determine its capacity to render the prelude, progress, and aftermath of the Holocaust. The unifying critical approach is the textual explication of themes and literary method, occasional comparative references to international Holocaust literature, and a discussion of extra-literary Holocaust sources that have influenced the creative writers' treatment of the Holocaust universe.

Jewish American and Holocaust Literature
Jewish American and Holocaust Literature

Author: Alan L. Berger

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0791484440

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

American Jewry and the Holocaust
American Jewry and the Holocaust

Author: Yehuda Bauer

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2017-12-01

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0814343473

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this volume Yehuda Bauer describes the efforts made to aid European victims of World War II by the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. In this volume Yehudi Bauer describes the efforts made to aid European victims of World War II by the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, American Jewry's chief representative abroad. Drawing on the mass of unpublished material in the JDC archives and other repositories, as well as on his thorough knowledge of recent and continuing research into the Holocaust, he focuses alternately on the personalities and institutional decisions in New York and their effects on the JDC workers and their rescue efforts in Europe. He balances personal stories with a country-by-country account of the fate of Jews through ought the war years: the grim statistics of millions deported and killed are set in the context of the hopes and frustrations of the heroic individuals and small groups who actively worked to prevent the Nazis' Final Solution. This study is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the American Jewish response to European events from 1939 to 1945. Bauer confronts the tremendous moral and historical questions arising from JDC's activities. How great was the danger? Who should be saved first? Was it justified to use illegal or extralegal means? What country would accept Jewish refugees? His analysis also raises an issue which perhaps can never be answered: could American Jews have done more if they had grasped the reality of the Holocaust?

Jewish American Literature
Jewish American Literature

Author: Jules Chametzky

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 1264

ISBN-13: 9780393048094

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A collection of Jewish-American literature written by various authors between 1656 and 1990.

America, American Jews, and the Holocaust
America, American Jews, and the Holocaust

Author: Jeffrey Gurock

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-16

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 1136675280

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume incorporates studies of the persecution of the Jews in Germany, the respective responses of the German-American Press and the American-Jewish Press during the emergence of Nazism, and the subsequent issues of rescue during the holocaust and policies towards the displaced.

Holocaust Impiety in Jewish American Literature
Holocaust Impiety in Jewish American Literature

Author: Joost Krijnen

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-05-02

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 9004316078

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Holocaust is often said to be unrepresentable. Yet since the 1990s, a new generation of Jewish American writers have been returning to this history again and again, insisting on engaging with it in highly playful, comic, and “impious” ways. Focusing on the fiction of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Nathan Englander, this book suggests that this literature cannot simply be dismissed as insensitive or improper. It argues that these Jewish American authors engage with the Holocaust in ways that renew and ensure its significance for contemporary generations. These ways, moreover, are intricately connected to efforts of finding new means of expressing Jewish American identity, and of moving beyond the increasingly apparent problems of postmodernism.

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

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

A Mortuary of Books
A Mortuary of Books

Author: Elisabeth Gallas

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2019-04-30

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 147980987X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner, 2020 JDC-Herbert Katzki Award for Writing Based on Archival Material, given by the Jewish Book Council The astonishing story of the efforts of scholars and activists to rescue Jewish cultural treasures after the Holocaust In March 1946 the American Military Government for Germany established the Offenbach Archival Depot near Frankfurt to store, identify, and restore the huge quantities of Nazi-looted books, archival material, and ritual objects that Army members had found hidden in German caches. These items bore testimony to the cultural genocide that accompanied the Nazis’ systematic acts of mass murder. The depot built a short-lived lieu de memoire—a “mortuary of books,” as the later renowned historian Lucy Dawidowicz called it—with over three million books of Jewish origin coming from nineteen different European countries awaiting restitution. A Mortuary of Books tells the miraculous story of the many Jewish organizations and individuals who, after the war, sought to recover this looted cultural property and return the millions of treasured objects to their rightful owners. Some of the most outstanding Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Dawidowicz, Hannah Arendt, Salo W. Baron, and Gershom Scholem, were involved in this herculean effort. This led to the creation of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc., an international body that acted as the Jewish trustee for heirless property in the American Zone and transferred hundreds of thousands of objects from the Depot to the new centers of Jewish life after the Holocaust. The commitment of these individuals to the restitution of cultural property revealed the importance of cultural objects as symbols of the enduring legacy of those who could not be saved. It also fostered Jewish culture and scholarly life in the postwar world.

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

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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

American Talmud
American Talmud

Author: Ezra Cappell

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-16

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0791479951

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In American Talmud, Ezra Cappell redefines the genre of Jewish American fiction and places it squarely within the larger context of American literature. Cappell departs from the conventional approach of defining Jewish American authors solely in terms of their ethnic origins and sociological constructs, and instead contextualizes their fiction within the theological heritage of Jewish culture. By deliberately emphasizing historical and ethnographic links to religions, religious texts, and traditions, Cappell demonstrates that twentieth-century and contemporary Jewish American fiction writers have been codifying a new Talmud, an American Talmud, and argues that the literary production of Jews in America might be seen as one more stage of rabbinic commentary on the scriptural inheritance of the Jewish people.