Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans

Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction explores modern Jewish literature from 1492 to the early twenty-first century, rotating around the concept of aterritoriality to appreciate the diasporic journey Jews have embarked on across geographic and linguistic spheres to the present day. At the center are canonical figures like Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, Bruno Schulz, Anne Frank, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Jacobo Timerman, Moacyr Scliar, and Susan Sontag. Unlike the output of other national literatures, Jewish literature does not have a fixed address. As a result, its practitioners are at once insiders and outsiders.

Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans

“Into the mainstream” looks at immigrant Jewish writers in America, such as Abraham Cahan (The Rise of David Levinsky), Anzia Yezierska (Bread Givers), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories), all of whom transitioned from Yiddish into English, and analyzes Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as a transitional novel. We notice here the transition from “ethnic” to “national” writer in the careers of Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick. Much was gained and lost in Jewish literature as a result of Jews becoming a “successful minority” in America. Jewish readers have always been a voracious audience of international literature.


Author(s):  
Anne Whitehead

This chapter outlines a second key context for the resurgence of interest in empathy: the rapid growth of interest in human rights discourses in the early twenty-first century. The first section, ‘Cultivating empathy’, reviews key claims made by human-rights scholars concerning the empathy-building qualities of fiction, before outlining the critical response to such claims and introducing Edith Stein’s phenomenological model of empathy as a promising framework. The second section, ‘Reading humanitarian campaigns’ reads side by side Sara Ahmed and Virginia Woolf to provide a feminist underpinning for an other-directed approach to empathy. The third section, ‘Positioning the empathetic gaze’ reads Susan Sontag alongside Pat Barker to argue that both writers are cognisant, in looking at another’s suffering, of the implication of the gaze in structures of power and privilege. The final section, ‘Empathy and the institution’, focuses on Pat Barker’s Life Class to ask where and when the scene of empathy is situated, and with what effects.


Schulz/Forum ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 26-43
Author(s):  
Zofia Ziemann

The paper revisits a popular trope of the anglophone reception of the work and figure of Bruno Schulz, offering an overview of its history based on examples from literary criticism and paratextual framing since the first edition of Celina Wieniewska’s translation in 1963 to the present. It is argued that although in the beginning the mentions of Kafka naturally had a marketing potential, helping to introduce a then unknown author to Englishspeaking readers, the analogy was not used in a cynical or superficial way, nor was Schulz ever presented as Kafka’s poor relative. Its early proponents (Isaac Bashevis Singer, Cyntha Ozick, and Philip Roth) genuinely believed in Schulz’s affinity with Kafka and the Central European Jewish tradition at large. At least since the early 1990s, Schulz has been listed on a par with Kafka, other high modernists, and other eminent authors from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, often becoming a point of reference for reviewers of translated fiction. If the phrase “Polish Kafka” still sometimes appears in this shorthand form, it is usually presented as a cliché and/or critically elaborated. In contrast to the contemporary understanding of “Polish Kafka” in Poland as almost an evocation of an inferiority complex, in the anglophone realm the comparison to Kafka has been an expression of bona fide admiration for Schulz.


Author(s):  
Linda Greenhouse

The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction draws on the Court’s history and its written and unwritten rules to show how it operates in the early twenty-first century. Today’s Supreme Court, housed in a majestic building on Capitol Hill, bears little resemblance to the institution launched by the Framers of the Constitution and was originally seen as the weakest of the three branches of government. Over the next 200 years, the Court put the independence the Framers gave it to use and now largely defines itself. How do cases reach the Supreme Court? What features have other courts around the world taken from the Supreme Court, and what have they left?


Author(s):  
Dale Chapman

Hailed by corporate, philanthropic, and governmental organizations as a metaphor for democratic interaction and business dynamics, contemporary jazz culture has a story to tell about the relationship between political economy and social practice in the era of neoliberal capitalism. The Jazz Bubble approaches the emergence of the neoclassical jazz aesthetic since the 1980s as a powerful, if unexpected, point of departure for a wide-ranging investigation of important social trends during this period. The emergence of financialization as a key dimension of the global economy shapes a variety of aspects of contemporary jazz culture, and jazz culture comments upon this dimension in turn. During the stateside return of Dexter Gordon in the mid-1970s, the cultural turmoil of the New York fiscal crisis served as a crucial backdrop to understanding the resonance of Gordon’s appearances in the city. The financial markets directly inform the structural upheaval that major label jazz subsidiaries must navigate in the music industry of the early twenty-first century, and they inform the disruptive impact of urban redevelopment in communities that have relied upon jazz as a site of economic vibrancy. In examining these issues, The Jazz Bubble seeks to intensify conversations surrounding music, culture, and political economy.


Author(s):  
Harald Schoen ◽  
Sigrid Roßteutscher ◽  
Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck ◽  
Bernhard Weßels ◽  
Christof Wolf

After a brief review of the scholarly discussion about the idea that context affects political behavior, this chapter proposes a model for the analysis of contextual effects on opinion formation and voting behavior. It highlights theoretical issues in the interplay of various contextual features and voter predispositions in bringing about contextual effects on voters. This model guides the analyses of contextual effects on voter behavior in Germany in the early twenty-first century. These analyses draw on rich data from multiple voter surveys and various sources of information about contextual features. The chapter also gives an overview of different methodological approaches and challenges in the analysis of contextual effects on voting behavior.


Author(s):  
Linda Freedman

The questions that drove Blake’s American reception, from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century through to the explosion of Blakeanism in the mid-twentieth century, did not disappear. Visions of America continued to be part of Blake’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first century American legacy. This chapter begins with the 1982 film Blade Runner, which was directed by the British Ridley Scott but had an American-authored screenplay and was based on a 1968 American novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It moves to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film, Dead Man and Paul Chan’s twenty-first century social activism as part of a protest group called The Friends of William Blake, exploring common themes of democracy, freedom, limit, nationhood, and poetic shape.


Author(s):  
Lisa Heldke

John Dewey’s record as a feminist and an advocate of women is mixed. He valued women intellectual associates whose influences he acknowledged, but did not develop theoretical articulations of the reasons for women’s subordination and marginalization. Given his mixed record, this chapter asks, how useful is Dewey’s work as a resource for feminist philosophy? It begins with a survey of the intellectual influences that connect Dewey with a set of women family members, colleagues, and students. It then discusses Dewey’s influence on the work of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century pragmatist feminist philosophers. Dewey’s influence has been strongest in the fields of feminist epistemology, philosophy of education, and social and political philosophy. Although pragmatist feminist philosophy remains a small field within feminist philosophy, this chapter argues that its conceptual resources could be put to further good use, particularly in feminist metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory.


Nature ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 488 (7412) ◽  
pp. 495-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Kääb ◽  
Etienne Berthier ◽  
Christopher Nuth ◽  
Julie Gardelle ◽  
Yves Arnaud

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