Postmodern Love In The Contemporary Jewish Imagination

"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"--

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.

This innovative study combines readings of contemporary literature, art, and performance to explore the diverse and complex directions of contemporary Jewish culture in Israel and the diaspora.

Early Israel offers the most sweeping reinterpretation of the Pentateuch since the nineteenth-century Documentary Hypothesis. Engaging a dozen-plus modern academic disciplines—from anthropology, biblical studies, Egyptology and semiotics, to linguistics, cognitive poetics and consciousness studies; from religious studies, Jewish studies, psychoanalysis and literary criticism, to mysticism studies, cognitive psychology, phenomenology and philosophy of mind—it wrests from the Pentateuch an outline of the heretofore undiscovered ancient Israelite mystical-initiatory tradition of the First Temple priests. The book effectively launches a new research area: Pentateuchal esoteric mysticism, akin to a "center" or "organizing principle" discussed in biblical theology. The recovered priestly system is discordant vis-à-vis the much-later rabbinical project. This volume appeals to a diverse academic community, from Biblical and Jewish studies to literary studies, religious studies, anthropology, and consciousness studies.

This book is concerned with the “impious” Holocaust fictions of four contemporary Jewish American novelists. It argues that their work should not be seen as insensitive, but rather as explorations of various forms of renewal.

Postmodern Apologetics provides an introduction to contemporary French thinkers who argue for the coherence and viability of Christian faith and religious experience with phenomenological and hermeneutical tools. It treats both French philosophers and appropriations of their thought in the North American context.

Rody proposes a new paradigm for understanding the changing terrain of contemporary fiction. She claims that what we have long read as ethnic literature is in the process of becoming 'interethnic'. Examining an extensive range of Asian American fictions, she offers readings of three especially compelling examples.

Explores the comic devices Roth uses to satirize his times, the Jewish community, and himself.

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.

This book offers a hermeneutical reading of Franz Rosenzweig's 1921 masterpiece, The Star of Redemption. In her analysis, Yudit K. Greenberg draws on German idealistic and Romantic ideas as well as Kabbalistic philosophical strands in Rosenzweig's thinking. She portrays Rosenzweig as a transitional figure between philosophy and theology, Judaism and German culture, modernity and postmodernity.

This volume, which grew out of a conference of the same name held at Bowling Green State University in March 2006, represents new scholarly perspectives on the way in which the Holocaust is remembered in history, literary studies and theatre. It is a response to changing representations of the Holocaust across generations, disciplines, and in various cultural and national contexts. The contributions address the following questions: How do historians, artists, scholars, and teachers negotiate the language of the Holocaust as survivors die, leaving future generations to respond to the dictum: Never again? How do children and grandchildren of survivors, perpetrators, bystanders transmit the difficult legacy of the Holocaust in American, Israeli, French, German, Swiss and Austrian contexts while navigating feelings of transgenerational guilt or victimhood? How can we do justice to survivor testimony when the survivors can no longer speak directly or mediate the testimony to us? How does transferred and multiply mediated knowledge translate into meaningful artifacts for the next generations? The collection features an interview about interdisciplinarity within Holocaust studies conducted at the conference with keynote speakers Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer. The articles in the first section explore the complex relationship between memory, oral history and historiography in cross-cultural contexts. The second section includes articles on texts by Cynthia Ozick, Thane Rosenbaum, Daniel Handler, W.G Sebald, Monika Maron, Stephan Wackwitz, Jonathan Foer, Art Spiegelman, Georges-Arthur Goldstein, Binjamin Wilkomirski, Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bernhard, Tim Blake Nelson, and Diane Samuel.

When Cone wrote Black Theology and Black Power, he signaled to the world that the American black faith tradition would no longer recognize the confines of the church walls as the extent of its purview in society. Cone liberated the Gospel of Christ from its institutionalized forms, unhinging it from oppressive and racist power structures in American society and releasing it to do its work in the public sphere. Black Faith and Public Talk continues Cone's theme of power in the public realm and examines the economic, political, cultural, gender, and theological implications of black faith and black theology.

What image of Latin America have North American fiction writers created, found, or echoed, and how has the prevailing discourse about the region shaped their work? How have their writings contributed to the discursive construction of our southern neighbors, and how has the literature undermined this construction and added layers of complexity that subvert any approach based on stereotypes? Combining American Studies, Canadian Studies, Latin American Studies, and Cultural Theory, Breinig relies on long scholarly experience to answer these and other questions. Hemispheric Imaginations, an ambitious interdisciplinary study of literary representations of Latin America as encounters with the other, is among the most extensive such studies to date. It will appeal to a broad range of scholars of American Studies.

In the Western literary tradition, the "jew" has long been a figure of ethnic exclusion and social isolation--the wanderer, the scapegoat, the alien. But it is no longer clear where a perennial outsider belongs. This provocative study of contemporary British writing points to the figure of the "jew" as the litmus test of multicultural society. Efraim Sicher and Linda Weinhouse examine the "jew" as a cultural construction distinct from the "Jewishness" of literary characters in novels by, among others, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Doris Lessing, Monica Ali, Caryl Philips, and Zadie Smith, as well as contemporary art and film. Here the image of the "jew" emerges in all its ambivalence, from postcolonial migrant and modern everyman to more traditional representations of the conspirator and malefactor. The multicultural discourses of ethnic and racial hybridity reflect dissolution of national and personal identities, yet the search for transnational, cultural forms conceals both the acceptance of marginal South Asian, Caribbean, and Jewish voices as well as the danger of resurgent antisemitic tropes. Innovative in its contextualization of the "jew" in the multiculturalism debate in contemporary Britain, Under Postcolonial Eyes: Figuring the "jew" in Contemporary British Writing analyzes the narrative of identities in a globalized culture and offers new interpretations of postmodern classics.

The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century examines magical realism in literatures from around the globe. Featuring twenty-seven essays written by leading scholars, this anthology argues that literary expressions of magical realism proliferate globally in the twenty-first century due to travel and migrations, the shrinking of time and space, and the growing encroachment of human life on nature. In this global context, magical realism addresses twenty-first-century politics, aesthetics, identity, and social/national formations where contact between and within cultures has exponentially increased, altering how communities and nations imagine themselves. This text assembles a group of critics throughout the world—the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia—who employ multiple theoretical approaches to examine the different ways magical realism in literature has transitioned to a global practice; thus, signaling a new stage in the history and development of the genre.

Sound disc contains: songs performed by Rara bands.

Providing an assessment of Jewish identity, this volume presents critical engagements with a number of Jewish writers and filmmakers from a variety of European countries, including Austria, France, Germany, Poland, and the UK. The novels and films discussed explore the meaning of being Jewish in Europe today, and investigate the extent to which this experience is shaped by factors that lie outside the national context, notably by the relationship to Israel. As the recent attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and the targeting of a Jewish supermarket in Paris, demonstrate, these questions are more pressing than ever, and will challenge Jews, as well as Jewish writers and intellectuals, as they explore the answers. This book was originally published as a special issue of Jewish Culture and History.