Monique R. Balbuena, Homeless Tongues: Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. xi + 239 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
Sephardic Diaspora

This chapter reviews the book Homeless Tongues: Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora (2016), by Monique R. Balbuena. Homeless Tongues is the first in-depth analysis of contemporary Sephardic poetry, focusing on three relatively unknown authors: Sadia Lévy, Margalit Matitiahu, and Juan Gelman. According to Balbuena, Sephardic writers have often been marginalized even within the field of Jewish studies. Seeking to “observe the contours” of the multiplicity of Jewish literature, she presents Lévy, Matitiahu, and Gelman as examples par excellence of cultural, literary, and linguistic multiplicity. She argues that translation and the trope of linguistic dialogue between languages is the primary means by which the three Sephardic poets interact with majority languages and cultures.

German-Jewish Literature and Culture and the Field of German-Jewish Studies

2007 ◽  
pp. 165-184
Author(s):  
Mark H. Gelber
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
German Society ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Host Culture ◽  
European Culture ◽  
German Jewish

This chapter delineates the parameters of developments and relationships to the 'Jewish contribution discourse'. It notes the marginality of Jewish culture in present-day Germany that has enabled the emergence of the quintessential post-modern field of cultural studies in Germany and the basis for diverse criticism. It also mentions Moritz Goldstein, who boldly claimed in his 'Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass' that the Jews in Germany had become the custodians and arbiters of the spiritual treasures of German society. The chapter explores the understanding of European culture as largely Jewish, which militates against the idea of a possible Jewish contribution to that culture since the term 'contribution' appears to make little sense if the Jewish element is the dominant one. It explains the concept of a contribution that rests on the notion of a dominant host culture to which guests might contribute.

Omri Asscher, Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. 256 pp.

2021 ◽  
pp. 281-283
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Writers

This chapter studies Omri Asscher's Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews (2020). This book employs translation to think about how two groups — American and Israeli Jews — understand and relate to one another. It stresses how adoption of different everyday languages and residence in distinct territories produced two collectives possessing divergent modern Jewish identities: when Jewish people and institutions came to mediate, manage, and regulate the social meanings of translated texts in the United States and Israel, they employed translations to define their center in contradistinction to its perceived antipode. Asscher also convincingly demonstrates how Israeli critics of the 1950s through the 1980s took pride in the literary successes of American Jewish writers, while dismissing the contents of their writing on ideological grounds. In contrast with his points about American Jewish translations of Israeli literature and Israeli translations of American Jewish literature from the 1950s to the 1980s, Asscher's broader claim about translation lacks effective substantiation.

Benjamin Schreier, The Impossible Jew: Identity and Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History. New York: New York University Press, 2015. 269 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
New York University ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The Way

This chapter reviews the book The Impossible Jew: Identity and Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (2015), by Benjamin Schreier. In The Impossible Jew, Schreier challenges the dominance of a totalizing (historicist/nationalist/anthropologist) context in Jewish studies in America. Rather than asking what is “Jewish” in a text, he wishes to focus on scholars’ and readers’ inclination to conceptualize texts within one of these essentialist categories. He rejects the approach used by scholars to distinguish between the “Jews” and the “non-Jews.” Instead, he offers an alternative that highlights the way (Jewish) literature destabilizes these same categories. The Impossible Jew is thus a reflection on the impossibility of Jewishness as a coherent identity.

scholarly journals “They Remembered That They Had Seen It in a Jewish Midrash”: How a Samaritan Tale Became a Legend of the Jews

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 635
Author(s):  
Steven Fine
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Scholarship ◽  
Belles Lettres ◽  
Rare Instance

This article relates the transmission history of a single Samaritan text and its fascinating trajectory from a Samaritan legend into early modern rabbinic tradition, and on to nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish studies circles. It focuses on the only Samaritan narrative cited in all of Louis Ginzberg’s monumental Legends of the Jews (1909–1938). Often called the “Epistle of Joshua son of Nun,” I trace the trajectory of this story from a medieval Samaritan chronicle to Samuel Sulam’s 1566 publication of Abraham Zacuto’s Sefer Yuḥasin. From there, we move to early modern belles lettres in Hebrew and Yiddish, western scholarship and then to the great Jewish anthologizers of the fin de siècle, Micha Yosef Berdyczewski, Judah David Eisenstein and Louis Ginzberg. I will suggest reasons why this tale was so appealing to Sulam, a Sephardi scholar based in Istanbul, that he appended it to Sefer Yuḥasin, and what about this tale of heroism ingratiated it to early modern European and then early Zionist readers. The afterlife of this tale is a rare instance of Samaritan influence upon classical Jewish literature, undermining assumptions of unidirectional Jewish influence upon the minority Samaritan culture from antiquity to modern times.

Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 15

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Academic World ◽  
Review Section ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Polish Culture ◽  
New Research ◽  
A Site

This book highlights new research on Jewish spiritual and religious life in Poland before modern political ideas began to transform the Jewish world. It covers a range of topics. Three articles deal with rabbinic scholarship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and a fourth presents accounts of Purim festivities at that time. The eighteenth-century studies focus on Jewish spirituality. Four articles deal with the Frankist movement, the main topics being Frankist propaganda; non-Christian Frankists; Jonathan Eibeschuetz and the Frankists; and the influence of Frankism on Polish culture. There are four articles on hasidism; the childhood of tsadikim in hasidic legends; the fall of the Seer of Lublin; and the hasidism of Gur and one about Nahman Krochmal. The chapters further the study of Jewish religious traditions in Poland, a topic central to an understanding of Jewish society and history in Poland but one which has long been considered marginal by the academic world. Substantial space is given to new research in other areas of Polish–Jewish studies. There is an extensive survey of the papal Holocaust papers, as well as contributions relating to education for girls, to Auschwitz as a site of memories, and to aspects of Jewish literature, politics, society, and economics. The review section includes two separate essays with contrasting opinions on Yaffa Eliach’s monumental study of Eishyshok.

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