Jewish Life as the Main Theme of Saul Bellow’s Novels

2020 ◽  
Vol 04 (04) ◽  
pp. 6-8
Author(s):  
Arti Sinha ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Living Condition ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
The Real ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Intellectuals

As the most influential contemporary American literary figure, Saul Bellow is the true picture of confusion and spiritual emptiness of western society. He, in his literary career, wrote a large number of novels, which won several awards including ‘Nobel Prize’. In his novels, Bellow explores modern living condition. He depicts urban intellectuals, especially the plight of American-Jewish intellectuals and is concerned about the real need and aspirations of the modern man.

Aesthetics/Ascetics

2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28
Author(s):  
Jeremy Stolow
Keyword(s):  
Popular Religion ◽  
Orthodox Jewish ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Competing Demands ◽  
Prayer Books ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Jewish Intellectuals

This article focuses on the relationship of aesthetics and ascetics with regard to the publication and popular reception of Kosher By Design, a cookbook published by a major American Jewish Orthodox press, ArtScroll Publications. The article analyses the ideological, rhetorical, discursive, and iconographic modes of address embedded within this text, treating them as instances of popular religion, and also as elements of a project in and through which the Orthodox Jewish intellectuals associated with ArtScroll seek to assert new forms of religious authority, in the context of a broader culture of “kosher consumerism,” to which this text is directed. The article ends by highlighting the paradoxical character of this form of “post-scripture,” in which books like Kosher By Design, and by extension other ArtScroll texts—including their popular prayer-books—are caught between competing demands of popularity and authority, art and asceticism, and religious stringency and bourgeois living.

Gabriela Mistral

1946 ◽  
Vol 3 (02) ◽  
pp. 168-189
Author(s):  
Margaret J. Bates
Keyword(s):  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Gabriela Mistral ◽  
The Real ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Fundamental Reason ◽  
Selection Of

When, on November sixteenth last, the newspapers announced the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature to a Chilean poetess, Gabriela Mistral, the news came as a surprise to many Americans, who, although they considered themselves well read, had never heard her name. The fundamental reason we know so little of this remarkable woman who enjoys such a great popularity in the Spanish-speaking world, not only for her words but for her deeds, is because the limited number of her poems which have been translated into English, by heavy hands, for the most part, allow hardly a glimmer of the real Mistral to shine through them. Of course, all translation of poetry is difficult but that of Gabriela extremely so because of her unique selection of words. She has created a plant that does not grow on English soil.

Early American Mikva’ot: Ritual Baths as the Hope of Israel This chapter originally appeared as an article in the journal Religion in the Age of Enlightenment 1 (2009): 109–45, and I am grateful to the editors for allowing it to be reprinted here. The article would not have been possible without the help and/or suggestions of the following people: Eric Leibman, Karl Watson, Jonathan Sarna, Gail Sherman, Lily Duym, Myrna C. Moreno, Rabbi Kenneth Brodkin, R. Grant Gillmore III, Rebbetzin Devora Wilhelm, Abraham W. Rosenberg, Philip Dikland, Bert Lippincott III, Kent Coupé, Barbara Siegel, Jodi Schorb, Margot Mindari, Aviva Ben-Ur, and Rachel Frankel. I am also indebted to resources or people at the following museums and archives: Jewish Cultural Historical Museum (Curaçao), Ets Haim Library (Amsterdam), Joods Historisch Museum (Amsterdam), Centro Cultural Judaico Pernambuco (Brazil), AJHS Archives (New York), Newport Historical Society, SECAR, and Mikveh Shoshana (Oregon). Funding for research done for this article and my book, Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism : A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life ( London and Portland, OR : Vallentine Mitchell, 2012) more broadly was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, Stillman Drake and Ruby Lankford Grants, and Reed College. Any mistakes are of course my own.

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Historical Society ◽  
American Jewish Life ◽  
Early American ◽  
Reed College ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
New Interpretation

They Sure Will Be of Minority Groups

2018 ◽  
pp. 112-135
Author(s):  
Samira K. Mehta
Keyword(s):  
Minority Groups ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
American Jewish Life ◽  
The Family ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
The One

Interfaith families that are also interracial are less able to seamlessly fit into “mainstream” American Jewish life, which is dominated by Ashkenazi culture and racially coded as white. On the one hand, this can make interactions in Jewish communities more challenging. On the other, these families are often given more freedom and flexibility for including traditions from the Christian side of the family than their white interfaith counterparts.

Jerold S. Auerbach, Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel 1896–2016. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019. xii + 309 pp.

2021 ◽  
pp. 290-292
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
West Bank ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
American Jewish Life ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
The Times

This chapter examines Jerold S. Auerbach's Print to Fit (2019). In this book, Auerbach charges that the New York Times consistently slanted its treatment of Israel in ways that discredited its struggle for survival and instead sympathized with the enemies of Zionism. Having assiduously combed through close to a century of articles, editorials, and op-ed pieces, Auerbach has discovered, especially in recent decades, a “preoccupation with Palestinian victimization — even when Israelis were the victims.” Print to Fit is especially harsh in its treatment of two of the Times' stars, the late Anthony Lewis and Thomas L. Friedman for having so often conveyed their own disenchantment with what they held to be the moral and political failings of Israel — in particular, the extension of Jewish settlements into the West Bank. Written from the political periphery of American Jewish life, Print to Fit risks overstating its case by simplifying it.

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