Prologue

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Jodi Eichler-Levine
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Family ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Personal Connection ◽  
American Judaism ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Emotional Resonance ◽  
Tactile Memory

The prologue explores the author’s personal connection with crafting through the heirlooms her own Jewish American family has passed down in the twentieth century, including a matzah cover and a wedding canopy. Using her grandmother’s kitschy mid-twentieth century needlepoint of a rabbi as a starting point, it lays out emotional resonance carried by tactility. Tactile memory is a central part of American Judaism.

Revaluations through Dance: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought in Isadora Duncan's Speech The Dance of the Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Mind

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.

scholarly journals Trans-Screens of Gender and Jewishness in Jill Soloway's Transparent: Post-Network TV and the Screendance Scene

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Schwadron
Keyword(s):  
American Family ◽  
Jewish American

This essay analyzes the artful insertion of screendance scenes in Season Two of Jill Soloway’s Amazon hit, Transparent (2014- ), highlighting how bodies and camera choreograph affective connections core to the plot in this televisual portrait of a Jewish American family. In doing so, I underscore a layered screenic trans-ness that conjoins circular manipulations of time and bodily action to overlay transgender and transhistorical experiences as co-constitutive themes.

scholarly journals A White, Jewish, Rap-Infused Desire for Blackness: David Burd's Lil Dicky

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-88
Author(s):  
Ethan Sabourin
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
White Male ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Identity Markers

Known by his moniker Lil' Dicky, David Burd has been making rap music with an exceedingly Jewish twist for several years. This paper examines the Jewish and racial implications, and especially the intersections between the two, in Burd's lyrics and videos. Using James Baldwin's commentary on the Jewish-American condition in "On Being 'White' and Other Lies" as a starting point, I consider how Burd utilizes Jewish identity markers as a stand-in for Blackness in order to give his rap a unique ethnic position. Through three of his songs, I analyze the ways that Burd's relationship with race has evolved, culminating in his 2018 single "Freaky Friday" where Lil' Dicky and Chris Brown 'switch bodies'. In this song Dicky is able to say the N-word by having been placed by Burd into a Black body. Burd's music reflects a piece of contemporary, White, Male, Jewish consciousness and has implications for those who see themselves reflected in it.

The Search for Religious Authenticity and the Case of Passover Peanut Oil

2020 ◽  
pp. 212-234
Author(s):  
Zev Eleff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Orthodox Judaism ◽  
Peanut Oil ◽  
Lived Religion ◽  
Periodical Literature ◽  
Chicken Fat ◽  
American Judaism

This chapter uses the rise and fall of a popular Passover cooking ingredient to explore the role of competing European folkways to determine the religious course of American Orthodox Judaism. In the first half of the twentieth century, traditional-leaning Jews happily used peanut oil in place of chicken fat, relying on the Lithuanian position that peanuts were not considered a “legume,” a category of foods that Ashkenazic Jewry traditionally withheld from during the Passover holiday, in addition to leaven breads. However, late-arriving Hungarian and Israeli folkways fought and triumphed over the Lithuanian foodway by the final decades of the 1900s. This is emblematic of a broader religious confrontation with American Judaism. The use of a variety of sources––responsa, economic, archival, and periodical literature––underscores the importance of “lived religion” and the usefulness of folkways and foodways to gain a fuller appreciation of religious history.

Afterword

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Wild
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Artistic Development ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Lasting Influence

This concluding chapter first turns to Virginia Woolf's famous remark that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’. It examines the problems inherent in taking too seriously Virginia Woolf's tongue-in-cheek claim for December 1910 as a starting point for artistic development in Britain in the twentieth century. The lasting influence of these inflexible interpretations of Woolf's thesis has hampered our understanding of what lies on the other side of this putative watershed. The chapter then re-examines the designation of this period's literature as ‘Edwardian’, and lays out the potentially problematic and misleading nature of this label before conceding that, despite the label's shortcomings, the term ‘Edwardian’ still has its uses.

Rising from the Gutter

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-92
Author(s):  
Jean Lee Cole
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
East Side ◽  
Jewish American Literature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
English Speaking

This chapter shows how the early comic strip was developed and then came to influence comic fiction in the early twentieth century. As the editor of the New York Journal‘s comic supplement, Rudolph Block regularized the use of panels, repetitive storylines, and caricature, resulting in the multi-panel format that defines the comic-strip genre. Block’s role in the development of the comic strip has gone largely unrecognized; as a writer of Jewish American literature, Block has been forgotten. Using the pseudonym Bruno Lessing, Block published nearly a hundred stories between 1905 and 1920 in popular magazines. These humorous stories, full of rich dialect and accompanied by vibrant illustrations, translated the multiethnic culture of the Lower East Side for a mainstream, English-speaking audience. Block represented dialect and caricature as opportunities for negotiation and play, providing ways to display identity in multiple and shifting forms.

From A Man for All Seasons to Wolf Hall (c. 1960–present)

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-190
Author(s):  
J. Patrick Hornbeck
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Early English ◽  
Historical Play ◽  
Past Half

Chapter 5 takes as its starting point the premiere of Robert Bolt’s historical play about the life of Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons. It goes on to consider Wolsey’s representation in academic writings and influential historical fictions in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. The chapter explores the five biographies of the cardinal that appeared during this period, discussing at the same time how Wolsey has been represented in the broader historiography of the early reign of Henry VIII. While revisionists of the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated little interest in Wolsey, their discoveries about the early English Reformation have shaped the most recent academic representations of the cardinal. At the same time, however, some of the most influential representations of Wolsey in the past half-century have been fictional. Therefore, the chapter also analyzes Bolt’s play, the controversial television drama The Tudors, and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 178-188
Author(s):  
Laura Arnold Leibman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
American History ◽  
African Ancestry ◽  
European American ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
World War ◽  
American Judaism ◽  
American Jewish

The epilogue shows how changes in the understanding of race between Sarah’s lifetime and that of her granddaughter Blanche Moses set the stage for the erasure of Sarah and Isaac’s African ancestry from family memory. The subsequent silence around Sarah and Isaac’s story reflects other losses in the larger story of American Judaism. Following World War II, the emerging field of Jewish American history struggled to place Jews in the ethno-racial landscape of the Americas, and the histories of non-white and multiracial Jews often went untold. Was it insecurity over their own whiteness that caused European-American Jewish historians to write Jews of color out of the story of American Judaism, or just that their own genealogies led them to create histories that mirrored their families’ experiences and self-understandings? The chapter ends by looking at how descendants of Sarah and Isaac today responded to the telling of their history.

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