New Directions In Jewish American And Holocaust Literatures

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.

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. “The range of critical approaches and authors examined makes this a valuable resource for scholars and teachers. Particularly in this troubling political moment, meditations on the new and continued relevance of Jewish American and Holocaust literatures for scholars, students, and the American public in general are invaluable.” — Sharon B. Oster, author of No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature

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

The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture reflects current approaches to Holocaust literature that open up future thinking on Holocaust representation. The chapters consider diverse generational perspectives—survivor writing, second and third generation—and genres—memoirs, poetry, novels, graphic narratives, films, video-testimonies, and other forms of literary and cultural expression. In turn, these perspectives create interactions among generations, genres, temporalities, and cultural contexts. The volume also participates in the ongoing project of responding to and talking through moments of rupture and incompletion that represent an opportunity to contribute to the making of meaning through the continuation of narratives of the past. As such, the chapters in this volume pose options for reading Holocaust texts, offering openings for further discussion and exploration. The inquiring body of interpretive scholarship responding to the Shoah becomes itself a story, a narrative that materially extends our inquiry into that history.

Offering a radical critique of contemporary Israeli and diaspora fiction by major writers of the generation after Amos Oz and Philip Roth, this book asks searching questions about identity formation in Jewish spaces in the twenty-first century and posits global, transnational identities instead of the bipolar Israel/diaspora model. The chapters put into conversation major authors such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, and Nathan Englander with their Israeli counterparts Zeruya Shalev, Eshkol Nevo, and Etgar Keret and shows that they share common themes and concerns. Read through a postmodern lens, their preoccupation with failed marriage and failed ideals brings to the fore the crises of home, nation, historical destiny, and collective memory in contemporary secular Jewish culture. At times provocative, at others iconoclastic, this innovative study must be read by anyone concerned with Jewish culture and identity today, whether scholars, students, or the general reader.

Holocaust Graphic Narratives examines Holocaust graphic novels and memoirs, analyzing the genre as one that enables intergenerational transmission of trauma and memory. Here, the graphic novel becomes a medium uniquely positioned to create a sense of felt immediacy, urgency, and authenticity at the intersection of history and the imagination.

Part I of each volume will feature 5-7 major review chapters, including 2-3 long chapters reviewing topics of major concern to the American Jewish community written by top experts on each topic, review chapters on "National Affairs" and "Jewish Communal Affairs" and articles on the Jewish population of the United States and the World Jewish Population. Future major review chapters will include such topics as Jewish Education in America, American Jewish Philanthropy, Israel/Diaspora Relations, American Jewish Demography, American Jewish History, LGBT Issues in American Jewry, American Jews and National Elections, Orthodox Judaism in the US, Conservative Judaism in the US, Reform Judaism in the US, Jewish Involvement in the Labor Movement, Perspectives in American Jewish Sociology, Recent Trends in American Judaism, Impact of Feminism on American Jewish Life, American Jewish Museums, Anti-Semitism in America, and Inter-Religious Dialogue in America. Part II-V of each volume will continue the tradition of listing Jewish Federations, national Jewish organizations, Jewish periodicals, and obituaries. But to this list are added lists of Jewish Community Centers, Jewish Camps, Jewish Museums, Holocaust Museums, and Jewish honorees (both those honored through awards by Jewish organizations and by receiving honors, such as Presidential Medals of Freedom and Academy Awards, from the secular world). We expand the Year Book tradition of bringing academic research to the Jewish communal world by adding lists of academic journals, articles in academic journals on Jewish topics, Jewish websites, and books on American and Canadian Jews. Finally, we add a list of major events in the North American Jewish Community.

This book offers insight into the ways students enrolled in European classrooms in higher education come to understand American experience through its literary fiction, which for decades has been a key component of English department offerings and American Studies curricula across the continent and in Great Britain and Ireland. The essays provide an understanding of how post-World War II American writers, some already elevated to ‘canonical status’ and some not, are represented in European university classrooms and why they have been chosen for inclusion in coursework. The book will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and American studies, and to students in American literature and American studies courses.

In this book, scholars with expertise in various national literatures and cultures explore how the Holocaust has been represented in novels, memoirs, film, television, and architecture. This book provides a unique vantage point for the scholar and student to compare how national context impacts representations of the Holocaust.

This book analyzes sensationalized Nazi and Holocaust representations in Anglo-American cultural and political discourses. Recognizing that this history is increasingly removed from contemporary life, it explains how irreverent representations can help rejuvenate the story for successive generations of new learners. Surveying seventy-five-years of transatlantic activities, the work erects counterposing categorizes of “constructive and destructive memorializing,” providing scholars with a new framework for elucidating both this history and its historicization.

This annotated edition of Holocaust survivor Sara Nomberg-Przytyk's postwar memoir follows her life as an investigative journalist during the emergence and deterioration of the communist state in Poland. Once a devoted communist herself, Nomberg-Przytyk recounts how antisemitism and government corruption shattered her illusions.

Prompted by centuries of warfare, political oppression, natural disasters, and economic collapses, exile has had an enormous impact not only on individuals who have undergone transplantation from one culture to another but also on the host societies they have joined and those worlds they have left behind. Written by prominent literary critics, creative authors, and artists, the essays gathered within Exile in Global Literature and Culture: Homes Found and Lost meditate upon the painful journeys—geographic, spiritual, emotional, psychological—brought about due to exilic rupture, loss, and dislocation. Yet exile also fosters potential pleasures and rewards: to extend scholar Martin Tucker’s formulation, wherever the exile might land in flight, he bears with him the sweetness of survival, the triumph of transcendence, the luxury of liminality, and the invitation to innovate and invent in new lands. Indeed, exile embodies both blessing and curse, homes found and lost. Furthermore, this book adheres to (and tests) the premise that exile‘s deepest and innermost currents are manifested through writing and other artistic forms.

This volume engages with memory of the Holocaust as expressed in literature, film, and other media. It focuses on the cultural memory of the second and third generations of Holocaust survivors, while also taking into view those who were children during the Nazi period. Language loss, language acquisition, and the multiple needs of translation are recurrent themes for all of the authors discussed. By bringing together authors and scholars (often both) from different generations, countries, and languages, and focusing on transgenerational and translational issues, this book presents multiple perspectives on the subject of Holocaust memory, its impact, and its ongoing worldwide communication.

Few topics in modern history draw the attention that the Holocaust does. The Shoah has become synonymous with unspeakable atrocity and unbearable suffering. Yet it has also been used to teach tolerance, empathy, resistance, and hope. Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust provides a starting point for teachers in many disciplines to illuminate this crucial event in world history for students. Using a vast array of source materials—from literature and film to survivor testimonies and interviews—the contributors demonstrate how to guide students through these sensitive and painful subjects within their specific historical and social contexts. Each chapter provides pedagogical case studies for teaching content such as antisemitism, resistance and rescue, and the postwar lives of displaced persons. It will transform how students learn about the Holocaust and the circumstances surrounding it.

Sacred Body analyzes exemplary Jewish texts, narratives, and cultural practices that show how these artifacts unhinge the "sacred" from the divine and focus instead on the "everyday sacred," earthly existence in order to celebrate life-affirming decisions, actions, and relationships, and avoid abstraction, metaphysics, and apocalypticism.

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. Alan L. Berger is the Raddock Eminent Scholar Chair of Holocaust Studies and directs the Holocaust and Judaic Studies program and the Center for the Study of Values and Violence after Auschwitz at Florida Atlantic University. His previous books include Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust, also published by SUNY Press, and the Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature (coedited with David Patterson and Sarita Cargas). Gloria L. Cronin is Professor of English at Brigham Young University and has written and edited numerous books, including A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in the Novels of Saul Bellow.

Yiddish and Hebrew writer I. L. Peretz (1852–1915) was a major leader of Eastern European Jewry in the years prior to World War I, and was deeply involved in Jewish politics and communal life throughout his lifetime. In The Radical Isaac, Adi Mahalel examines a central part of his life and art that has often been neglected, namely, his close alignment with the needs of the Jewish working-class and his deep devotion to progressive politics. Although there have been numerous studies of Peretz and his work, this very central component of his life nonetheless remains severely understudied. By offering close readings of the "radical" Peretz, Mahalel recasts the way political activism is understood in scholarly evaluations of the writer's work. Employing a partly chronological, partly thematic scheme, Mahalel follows Peretz's radicalism from its inception and then through the various ways in which it was synchronically expressed during this intense period of history.