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.

Essential Papers on Jews and the Left(New York: New York University Press, 1997); pp. viii + 552 (paperback)

2000 ◽  
pp. 433-434
Author(s):  
Ezra Mendelsohn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
New York University ◽  
Previous Volume

Ezra Mendelsohn’s book appeared in the series Essential Papers on Jewish Studies and is an excellent continuation of the previous volume, Essential Papers on Zionism. Both books present a complicated picture of the two most significant currents in contemporary Jewish political and ideological life. I would be glad to see a third volume on the traditional, conservative movements (with Agudat Yisrael as the most important) and perhaps another containing the other currents which cannot be represented in the previous books....

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gatta
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Educational Programs ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Place Making ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Wendell Berry ◽  
Religious Question ◽  
Spirit Of Place ◽  
The Way

The question of how space becomes place, through human experience and imagination, has for some time occupied scholars of diverse disciplines. This book pursues the further religious question of how places have acquired hallowed or spirit-bearing meaning throughout the course of American literary history—not only in Christian or semipantheistic terms but as outgrowths of the ancient Roman principle of a site’s genius loci. After an opening chapter devoted to representations of home places, commentary proceeds to a chapter devoted to resettlement and pilgrimage themes; then to an inquiry about imagination in place; then to a literary-steeped sampling of diverse American sites and landforms; and finally to a consideration of how place-making and site-based learning might figure in collegiate educational programs. Along the way, this book’s spirit-of-place readings range across texts by canonical figures such as Thoreau, Stowe, Cather, and Wendell Berry as well as an array of lesser-known writers.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document