Transgression in Jewish Literature

1994 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-120
Author(s):  
Jyl Felman
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Tony Kushner ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Library Collection ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Angels In America

Jewish library collection policies as they relate to Jewish gay and lesbian issues are discussed. Questions considered are whether a book about gay Jews or a book written by a Jewish gay author should be included in Judaica collections. The issue is placed within a historical Jewish literary tradition which includes authors such as Grade, Ozick, Miller, Roth and Rukeyser-who write about such transgressive themes as sexuality, assimilation, self-loathing, agnostic rabbis, etc. Through personal examples drawn from her collection of Jewish short stories, Hot Chicken Wings, the author makes a case for including books with Jewish lesbian content. Also considered are the consequences of excluding such works and the ultimate arbitrariness of banning works with gay content from the Jewish library shelf. The author also comments on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, written by a gay Jewish man, Tony Kushner. Even though Angels is being touted as an AIDS play, it is replete with Jewish characters, questions about assimilation, and Jewish self-loathing as exhibited by the lead character Roy Cohn. The play derives from a long tradition of Jewish avant-garde writing dealing with the nature of Jewish identity. For this reason, the author uses Angels to make a case against censoring gay themes in Judaica collections. Jewish literature throughout the ages has had a transgressive bent, and gay themes must be read in this context and viewed by Jews as legitimate literary material worthy of reading by Jewish communities.

Jewish Identity and the Intercommunal Links between Diaspora Jewish Communities in the Second Temple Period

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Trotter
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Second Temple ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Second Temple Period ◽  
Jerusalem Temple ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple

Abstract Many diaspora communities identify not only with a distant homeland but also with others distant from the homeland. How exactly do these intercommunal connections take place and contribute toward a shared identity? What specific aspects of diasporan identity are created or strengthened? What practices are involved? This study will begin to answer these questions through investigating two practices which were widespread among diaspora Jewish communities during the last two centuries of the Second Temple period (1st cent. B.C.E.–1st cent. C.E.). First, we will show how sending offerings and making pilgrimages to the Jerusalem temple from these communities enabled regular intercommunal contact. Then, we will suggest some ways in which these voluntary practices reinforced a cohesive Jewish identity and the importance of the homeland, especially the city of Jerusalem and the temple, for many diaspora Jews, whether they lived in Alexandria, Rome, Asia Minor, or Babylonia.

A Southern Drawl from beyond the Grave

1966 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 99-101
Author(s):  
Rene Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
Book Award ◽  
National Book

The bell has finally tolled for Flannery O'Connor. The National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize have both passed up the opportunity to honor her posthumous collection of short stories, Everything that Rises Must Converge. Still, you can't help wondering what best-sellerdom could have done to a book like this. Few will read it through and most of those who stop at the halfway mark will become rabid anti-O'Connorites. Of all the first-rate American writers of the century, she is the easiest to put down. Her characters are self-conciously larger than life, her prose laden with portent in every semi-colon, her plotting so relentlessly tragic that every sentence is like a step – inevitable and often predictable – toward a witches' brew of a Grand Guignol finale. Impatient readers will feel Flannery is getting nowhere pretty slow. After some stirring and simmering of emotions, they'll quit and stop reading short of the climax, with the worst possible results. An O'Connor story is not one of those “New Yorker” Flirtations that ramble charmingly and stop coquettishly: Flannery O'Connor is no playful, teasing minx.

The Beginnings of a French Jewish Literature

2007 ◽  
pp. 38-56
Author(s):  
Nadia Malinovich
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Widespread Phenomenon ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores the tension between universalism and particularism as expressed in the pre-war poetry, novels, and essays of André Spire, Edmond Fleg, Henri Franck, and Jean-Richard Bloch. It examines the question of Jewish identity in the modern world through writers that paved the way for the much more widespread phenomenon of Jewish self-questioning in the post-war years. It also looks at André Spire's ground-breaking Poèmes juifs and Quelques Juifs that offered a scathing critique of both Jewish assimilation and French antisemitism. It discusses Henri Franck's prose poem La Danse devant l'arche, which describes a young man's quest for the meaning of life and reveals a similar tension between affirming the specificity of Jewish roots and embracing a larger French cultural heritage.

Fictional German governesses in Edwardian popular culture: English responses to German militarism and modernity

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Bayley
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
Selection Of

Historians have tended to focus on propaganda when assessing Edwardian attitudes towards Germans, but a shift of focus to fiction reveals a rather different picture. Whereas propaganda created the cliché of ‘the Hun’, fiction produced non- and even counter-stereotypical figures of Germans. An analysis of German governess characters in a selection of short stories, performances, novels, and cartoons indicates that the Edwardian image of Germans was not purely negative but ambivalent and multifarious. Imagined German governesses appeared as patriots and spies, pacifists and warmongers, spinsters and seducers, victims and evil-doers. A close look at characterisations by Saki [H. H. Munro], M. E. Francis [Margaret Blundell], Dorothy Richardson, D. H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, Frank Hart and others reveals not only their variety but also their metaphorical use as responses to Germany’s aggressive militarism and avant-garde modernity. Each governess figure conveyed a positive, negative or ambivalent message about the potential impact of German militarism and modernity on England and Englishness. The aggregate image of German governesses, and by inference Germans, was therefore equivocal and demonstrates the mixed feelings of Edwardians toward their ‘cousin’ country.

Tim O’Brien

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Calloway
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
United States Army ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
The United States ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Tim O'brien ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
Katherine Anne Porter

Tim O’Brien (b. 1946) is a well-known contemporary American writer of seven novels, one memoir, and numerous short stories, nonfiction essays, and reviews. He has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Esquire, and selections from The Things They Carried and other works are frequently anthologized in textbooks and short-st collections, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century. One of three children, O’Brien lived in his birth town of Austin, Minnesota, until the age of ten when his family relocated to Worthington, Minnesota. After a public school education, he graduated from Macalaster College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, summa cum laude with a degree in political science. Shortly after graduation, his plans for graduate school were interrupted by the Vietnam War. The United States Army drafted O’Brien, and he served in Quang Ngai Province in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970. Upon his discharge from the military, O’Brien enrolled in graduate school at Harvard University, planning to study government, and worked briefly as a reporter for the Washington Post. When the short sketches that O’Brien published in magazines and newspapers while in Vietnam led to the publication of If I Die in A Combat Zone in 1973, O’Brien began a full-time writing career and left graduate school. His reputation was established in 1979 when he received the National Book Award for his second novel, Going After Cacciato (1978). In addition to that novel, his best-known work includes The Things They Carried (1990), which received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award for fiction and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Estranger and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and In the Lake of the Woods (1994), which received the novel of the year award from Time magazine and the Society of American Historians’ James Fenimore Cooper Prize for outstanding historical novel. O’Brien has also received the National Magazine Award and the Katherine Anne Porter Award, as well as numerous other accolades. In 2012 he received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation’s Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, and in 2013 he had the distinction of becoming the first fiction writer to receive The Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. O’Brien is well known for blurring the boundaries between fiction and fact and for debating the issue of relative truth in his work while treating such universal subjects as love, death, the imagination, memory, the art of writing, aging, and war. While the topic of Vietnam emerges in all of O’Brien’s major works, he does not consider himself a war writer per se. Since 1999 O’Brien has taught creative writing at Texas State University. He continues to give readings and talks around the country.

Díaz, Junot

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yomaira C. Figueroa
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Short Story ◽  
English Language ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Institute Of Technology

Junot Díaz is a Dominican American award-winning fiction writer and essayist. For over twenty years his work has helped to map and remap Latinx, Caribbean, and American literary and cultural studies. Since his collection of short stories, Drown, debuted in 1996, Díaz has become a leading literary figure in Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and diaspora studies. His voice is critically linked to the legacy of Latinx Caribbean literary poetics reaching back to the 1960s (including Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, 1967). Díaz’s work is likewise transnational and diasporic, often reflecting the lived experiences of working-class immigrant populations of color in northeastern urban centers. Within a broader scope, Díaz’s writing is tied to feminist African American and Chicana literary traditions, with Díaz citing the influence of writers such as Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros in his writing practice. His 2007 award-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, earned him a Pulitzer Prize in fiction and catapulted him into literary superstardom. Díaz followed that success with his 2012 collection of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her, which was a finalist for both the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In 2012, Díaz was conferred the MacArthur Fellows Program Award, commonly known as the MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and in 2017, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2019, he was the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the fiction editor at the renowned literary magazine the Boston Review. Over the course of his professional writing career, Díaz has published numerous nonfiction essays and political commentaries, and coauthored opinion editorials on immigration and reflections on Caribbean and US politics. His short story “Monstro,” published in 2012, further rooted Díaz in the genres of science fiction and Afrofuturism. “Monstro” was understood to be a teaser for a now discarded novel of the same name. The simultaneous publication of the English-language Islandborn and Spanish-language Lola in 2018 represented the author’s first foray into the genre of children’s literature. Like much of Díaz’s literary oeuvre, the children’s books chronicle the experiences and memories of Afro-Dominicans in the diaspora through the perspective of a child narrator. Díaz is one of the founders of Voices of Our Nation (VONA), a summer creative writing workshop for writers of color where he helps aspiring writers to workshop their fiction. Díaz’s fiction and nonfiction writings have catalyzed work in literary, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx studies, prompting renewed discourses on literary representations of masculinity, gender, sexuality, intimacy, sexual violence, dictatorship, immigration, disability, Dominican history, race and anti-blackness, anti-Haitianism, decolonization and radical politics, and diaspora and belonging.

“An Essential Expression of the People”: Interpretations of Hasidic Song in the Composition and Performance History of Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem

2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 777-820 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Jewish Music ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance

Abstract This article examines Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem: Three Pictures of Chassidic Life, considering its score, its performance history, and early recordings of the second movement, “Nigun,” by Yehudi Menuhin, Joseph Szigeti, and Mischa Elman, to investigate the idea, promoted by the composer and many of his performers and critics, that the music represented Jewish identity through the evocation of Hasidic song. Bloch's score and Menuhin's performances were described as expressing what was often characterized during the early twentieth century as a self-affirming racial feeling that linked the modern diaspora in America to Eastern European Hasidic Jewish communities. With Baal Shem, Bloch and his performers and listeners participated in a self-conscious effort to construct a modern Jewish identity that they believed could be conveyed in the sounds and structures of art music. Menuhin's lifelong friendship and collaboration with Bloch underscores the crucial roles of Bloch's performers in working with the composer to devise compositional and performance tropes for the representation of Hasidic song, and in creating his broad reputation as a composer of a definitive Jewish music, a reputation Bloch would sometimes embrace and at other times disavow.

scholarly journals Gry z czasem, pamięcią i historią: O prozie Milady Součkovej [Games with time, memory and history: About the prose of Milada Součková]

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kamila Woźniak
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Avant Garde

Games with time, memory and history: About the prose of Milada SoučkováThe article discusses selected short stories by the Czech avant-garde writer Milada Součková. The author presents a brief interpretation of certain primary themes in the writer’s work, such as the themes of memory and history as a kind of framework of Součková’s writing. Another aspect of the article indicates subjects related to specific historical events that constitute for Součková a backdrop for presenting so-called alternative history which is combined with the microcosm of the characters in her stories. Gry z czasem, pamięcią i historią: O prozie Milady SoučkovejW artykule omówione zostały wybrane opowiadania czeskiej pisarki awangardowej Milady Součkovej. Autorka szkicu przedstawia interpretację stałych motywów w twórczości tej pisarki, takich jak motyw pamięci i historii, jako swoistej klamry ujmującej pisarstwo Součkovej. Kolejnym aspektem artykułu jest wskazanie na funkcjonowanie wątków związanych z konkretnymi wydarzeniami historycznymi, stanowiącymi tło do zaprezentowania tzw. historii alternatywnej, łączącej się z mikroświatem przedstawionych postaci.

Terror, Race, Security

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yulia Egorova
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
Caste Discrimination ◽  
The World ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
State Of Israel

The chapter engages with the two main themes of the book by focusing on the way in India the relationship between Jews and Muslims and imageries of Jewish and Muslim communities became affected by the Mumbai attacks and the general post 9/11 rhetoric of the “war on terror.” The chapter shows that these events and the securitization discourses that emerged in their aftermath created new challenges for local Jewish and Muslims groups, but it also complicates accounts that reduce Jewish-Muslim relations to problems of security. The ethnographic examples presented in this chapter suggest that concerns about the perceived Muslim threat that some of the Jewish respondents exhibited in relation to Indian Muslims ultimately had very little to do with Islam and were embedded in the wider problematics of security issues facing Jewish communities around the world, the politics of Jewish identity arbitration in the State of Israel, and even the reality of caste discrimination in India.

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