Alexander, Prof. Philip Stephen, (born 10 March 1947), Professor of Post-Biblical Jewish Literature, Manchester University, 1995–2011, now Emeritus; Co-Director, Manchester University Centre for Jewish Studies, 1995–2011

2007 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Jewish Literature

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.

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.

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.

Explication de texte: “Adventures of Menakhem-Mendl,” Sholem Aleichem in Moscow, Oxford, and Toronto

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-141
Author(s):  
Anna Shternshis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Nonheritage Learners

How does one teach a nineteenth-century Yiddish novel to twenty-first-century Canadian undergraduates? Can Jewish literature be of interest to nonheritage learners? The piece analyzes strategies of teaching of Letters of Menakhem Mendl written by the Ukrainian Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem at the end of the nineteenth century. The trajectory of teaching the novel in the context of Jewish studies to the context of diaspora studies provides unexpected insight into the meaning of this text.

Not by Firkowicz’s Fault: Daniel Chwolson’s Comic Blunders in Research of Hebrew Epigraphy of the Crimea and Caucasus, and their Impact on Jewish Studies in Russia

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-668
Author(s):  
Michael Nosonovsky ◽  
Dan Shapira ◽  
Daria Vasyutinsky-Shapira
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Political Pressure ◽  
Scholarly Community ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
Huge Impact ◽  
Academic Argument

AbstractDaniel Chwolson (1819–1911) made a huge impact upon the research of Hebrew epigraphy from the Crimea and Caucasus. Despite that, his role in the more-than-a-century-long controversy regarding Crimean Hebrew tomb inscriptions has not been well studied. Chwolson, at first, adopted Abraham Firkowicz’s forgeries, and then quickly realized his mistake; however, he could not back up. Th e criticism by both Abraham Harkavy and German Hebraists questioned Chwolson’s scholarly qualifications and integrity. Consequently, the interference of political pressure into the academic argument resulted in the prevailing of the scholarly flawed opinion. We revisit the interpretation of these findings by Russian, Jewish, Karaite and Georgian historians in the 19th and 20th centuries. During the Soviet period, Jewish Studies in the USSR were in neglect and nobody seriously studied the whole complex of the inscriptions from the South of Russia / the Soviet Union. The remnants of the scholarly community were hypnotized by Chwolson’s authority, who was the teacher of their teachers’ teachers. At the same time, Western scholars did not have access to these materials and/or lacked the understanding of the broader context, and thus a number of erroneous Chwolson’s conclusion have entered academic literature for decades.

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