Jewish Literature in France 1920–1932

2007 ◽  
pp. 162-200
Author(s):  
Nadia Malinovich

This chapter covers a set of concerns surrounding the emergence of a modern Jewish literature in the French language. It explains what the novelty of a few maverick intellectuals in the pre-war years that became a recognized genre of writing in the 1920s. It identifies Jewish writers who began to publish novels, plays, poems, collections of folklore, and short stories about different aspects of Jewish life and the issues of assimilation and acculturation in modern society. The chapter discusses Jewish literature in translation that comprised important components of literary renaissance. It also details how French readers were introduced to the world of east European and North African Jewry through novels and short stories written in French by writers who had migrated to France.

Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 320
Author(s):  
Mari Rethelyi

In Budapest, going to the coffeehouiennese Café and Fin-De-Siecle Cultuse was the quintessential urban habit. The coffeehouse, a Judaized urban space, although devoid of any religious overtones, was Jewish in that most of the owners and significant majority of the intellectual clientele were Jewish—secular and non-affiliated—but Jewish. The writers’ Jewishness was not a confessed faith or identity, but a lens on the experience of life that stemmed from their origins, whether they were affiliated with a Jewish institution or not, and whether they identified as Jews or not. The coffeehouse enabled Jews to create and participate in the culture that replaced traditional ethnic and religious affiliations. The new secular urban Jew needed a place to express and practice this new identity, and going to the coffeehouse was an important part of that identity. Hungarian Jewish literature centered in Budapest contains a significant amount of material on the coffeehouse. Literature provided a non-constrained and unfiltered venue for the secular Jewish urban intellectuals to voice freely and directly their opinions on Jewish life at the time. In the article I examine what the Jewish writers of the early 20th century wrote about Budapest’s coffeehouses and how their experience of them is connected to their being Jewish.


Author(s):  
Michael Stanislawski

This article notes that the study of the modern history of East European Jews is not a field driven at present by deep conceptual or ideological divides or abiding scholarly or methodological controversies. The past debates on this score between Israeli and diaspora Jewish scholarship have all but disappeared, as has even more dramatically the attempt at a Marxist version of juedische Wissenschaft. While the major works of the founders of the field from Simon Dubnov on ought to be studied and the impressive resurgence of interest in the history and culture of East European Jewry in the modern age is underway, the work is still largely undone. The crucial challenge to the field is not to succumb to the lachrymose and romanticized stereotypes of Jewish life in Eastern Europe while continuing to explore the history of this the largest Jewry in the world before the Holocaust.


2006 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-468
Author(s):  
Zoltán Ádám ◽  
László Csaba ◽  
András Bakács ◽  
Zoltán Pogátsa

István Csillag - Péter Mihályi: Kettős kötés: A stabilizáció és a reformok 18 hónapja [Double Bandage: The 18 Months of Stabilisation and Reforms] (Budapest: Globális Tudás Alapítvány, 2006, 144 pp.) Reviewed by Zoltán Ádám; Marco Buti - Daniele Franco: Fiscal Policy in Economic and Monetary Union. Theory, Evidence and Institutions (Cheltenham/UK - Northampton/MA/USA: Edward Elgar Publishing Co., 2005, 320 pp.) Reviewed by László Csaba; Piotr Jaworski - Tomasz Mickiewicz (eds): Polish EU Accession in Comparative Perspective: Macroeconomics, Finance and the Government (School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College of London, 2006, 171 pp.) Reviewed by András Bakács; Is FDI Based R&D Really Growing in Developing Countries? The World Investment Report 2005. Reviewed by Zoltán Pogátsa


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 150
Author(s):  
Veton Zejnullahi

The process of globalization, which many times is considered as new world order is affecting all spheres of modern society but also the media. In this paper specifically we will see the impact of globalization because we see changing the media access to global problems in general being listed on these processes. We will see that the greatest difficulties will have small media as such because the process is moving in the direction of creating mega media which thanks to new technology are reaching to deliver news and information at the time of their occurrence through choked the small media. So it is fair to conclude that the rapid economic development and especially the technology have made the world seem "too small" to the human eyes, because for real-time we will communicate with the world with the only one Internet connection, and also all the information are take for the development of events in the four corners of the world and direct from the places when the events happen. Even Albanian space has not left out of this process because the media in the Republic of Albania and the Republic of Kosovo are adapted to the new conditions under the influence of the globalization process. This fact is proven powerful through creating new television packages, written the websites and newspapers in their possession.


Author(s):  
Sergey Nickolsky

The question of the Russian man – his past, present and future – is the central one in the philosophy of history. Unfortunately, at present this area of philosophy is not suffciently developed in Russia. Partly the reason for this situation is the lack of understanding by researchers of the role played by Russian classical literature and its philosophizing writers in historiosophy. The Hunting Sketches, a collection of short stories by I.S. Turgenev, is a work still undervalued, not fully considered not only in details but also in general meanings. And this is understandable because it is the frst systematic encyclopedia of Russian worldview, which is not envisaged by the literary genre. To a certain extent, Turgenev’s line is continued by I. Goncharov (the theme of the mind and heart), L. Tolstoy (the theme of the living and the dead, nature and society, the people and the lords), F. Dostoevsky (natural and rational rights), A. Chekhov (worthy and vulgar life). This article examines the philosophical nature of The Hunting Sketches, its structure and content. According to author’s opinion, stories can be divided into ten groups according to their dominant meanings. Thus, in The Hunting Sketches the main Russian types are depicted: “natural man,” rational, submissive, cunning, honest, sensitive, passionate, poetic, homeless, suffering, calmly accepting death, imbued with the immensity of the world. In the image and the comments of the wandering protagonist, Ivan Turgenev reveals his own philosophical credo, which he defnes as a moderate liberalism – freedom of thought and action, without prejudice to others.


2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (10) ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Alexander N. Danilov

The article discusses the meanings of life and value priorities of the post- Soviet society. The author argues that, at present, there are symptoms of a global ideological crisis in the world, that the West does not have its own vision of where and how to move on and has no understanding of the future. Unfortunately, most of the post-Soviet countries do not have such vision as well. In these conditions, there are mistrust, confusion, paradoxical manifestation of human consciousness. The main meanings that determine our life-world are: the desire of citizens for social justice and social security, the desire to figure out and understand the basic values of modern society, how honestly and equally the authorities act toward their fellow citizens, and to what extent they reflect their interests. The meanings of life, which are the answers to the challenges of the time, are embodied in the cultural code of each nation, state. The growth points of new values, which will become the basis for the future sustainable development of a new civilization, have yet to be discovered in the systemic transformative changes of the culture. In this process, the emergence of a new system of values that governs human life is inevitable. However, modern technology brings new troubles to humans. It has provided wide opportunities for informational violence and public consciousness manipulation. Nowadays, the scenario that is implemented in Western consumer societies claims to be the dominant scenario. Meanwhile, today there is no country in the world that is a role model, there is no ideal that others would like to borrow. Most post-Soviet states failed to advance their societies to more decent levels of economic development, to meet the challenges of the modern information age, and to provide the population with new high living standards. Therefore, in conditions of growing confrontation, we should realistically understand the world and be ready to implement changes that will ensure sustainable development of the state and society without losing our national identity.


2013 ◽  
pp. 174-183
Author(s):  
Piotr Sadkowski

Throughout the centuries French and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they examine the question of identity dilemmas of contemporary men. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse Fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of the contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier’s text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motifs analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.


Author(s):  
Gianfranco Pacchioni

About 10,000 years ago, at the beginning of the agriculturalrevolution, on the whole earth lived between 5 and 8 million hunter-gatherers, all belonging to the Homo sapiens species. Five thousand years later, freed from the primary needs for survival, some belonging to that species enjoyed the privilege of devoting themselves to philosophical speculation and the search for transcendental truths. It was only in the past two hundred years, however, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, that reaping nature’s secrets and answering fundamental questions posed by the Universe have become for many full-time activities, on the way to becoming a real profession. Today the number of scientists across the globe has reached and exceeded 10 million, that is, more than the whole human race 10,000 years ago. If growth continues at the current rate, in 2050 we will have 35 million people committed full-time to scientific research. With what consequences, it remains to be understood. For almost forty years I myself have been concerned with science in a continuing, direct, and passionate way. Today I perceive, along with many colleagues, especially of my generation, that things are evolving and have changed deeply, in ways unimaginable until a few years ago and, in some respects, not without danger. What has happened in the world of science in recent decades is more than likely a mirror of a similar and equally radical transformation taking place in modern society, particularly with the advent ...


Author(s):  
Lyndsey Stonebridge

Samuel Beckett is known for his unique abstraction of human suffering. This chapter shows how his wartime experiences transformed his writing, producing one of the first really critical literary depictions of the new subject of human rights and humanitarianism. Beckett’s engagement with what he described in 1946 as ‘the time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins’ began with his own experience of displacement and with his work with the Irish Red Cross in Saint-Lô. The characters who wander through the three short stories that he first wrote in French, ‘La Fin’, ‘L’Explusé’, and ‘Le Calmant’, collectively known as the Nouvelles, are both subject to a regime of humanitarian indifference (‘They clothed me and gave me money’ read the first lines of ‘La Fin’) and restless agents, stumbling in a stripped down French, groping for a new narrative. These are the new clowns of the dark background of difference, ironists of their own suffering, chroniclers of the gap that had opened up between the placeless people and the rest of the world.


Author(s):  
Farhad Khosrokhavar

The creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (ISIS) changed the nature of jihadism worldwide. For a few years (2014–2017) it exemplified the destructive capacity of jihadism and created a new utopia aimed at restoring the past greatness and glory of the former caliphate. It also attracted tens of thousands of young wannabe combatants of faith (mujahids, those who make jihad) toward Syria and Iraq from more than 100 countries. Its utopia was dual: not only re-creating the caliphate that would spread Islam all over the world but also creating a cohesive, imagined community (the neo-umma) that would restore patriarchal family and put an end to the crisis of modern society through an inflexible interpretation of shari‘a (Islamic laws and commandments). To achieve these goals, ISIS diversified its approach. It focused, in the West, on the rancor of the Muslim migrants’ sons and daughters, on exoticism, and on an imaginary dream world and, in the Middle East, on tribes and the Sunni/Shi‘a divide, particularly in the Iraqi and Syrian societies.


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