Brother Singulars

2020 ◽  
pp. 38-61
Author(s):  
Amy Feinstein
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Love Affair ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Cultural Ideals ◽  
Modern Writer ◽  
The Arts

Chapter 2 explores Stein’s use of Arnold’s Hebraism in her first fictions to signal the Jewish morality of her middle-class characters. In 1903, Stein wrote the novella Q.E.D. and the brief first draft of her novel The Making of Americans. In both works, she presents ill-fated romances between ethically-Jewish and more aesthetically-inclined characters. In Q.E.D., she allusively depicts the Jewish identity of her protagonist Adele, who finds herself in a love affair with the aptly named Helen. Adele’s frequent lamentations have biblical roots in texts attributed to the prophet Jeremiah. Stein closes the novella with her characters in a romantic stalemate, but her romance fusing Arnoldian Hebraism and Hellenism as an ideal of Jewish culture had just begun. The affianced couple in the first draft of The Making of Americans espouses Stein’s Arnoldian fusion. The novel’s paterfamilial voice of Hebraism dismisses as “modern” the Hellenic inclinations towards the arts by the young heroine and her fiancé. Similar to Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce, Stein, in her revising of Arnold, imagines the modern writer, her Brother Singular, as one of a plurality of individuals whose typologically Jewish cultural ideals combine the ethical traditions of the Hebrew with the intellectually liberating creativity of the Hellene.

Fagin's Coin of Truth: Economic Belief and Representation inOliver Twist

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-138
Author(s):  
Keith Clavin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Secondary Markets ◽  
Jewish Culture

This essay examines Fagin from Oliver Twist as a villain whose construction joins Victorian anxieties about counterfeiting and economic deceptiveness with separate yet related concerns about the author's role in representing criminal life. Dickens triangulates Fagin's identity through cultural fears about Jewish participation within secondary markets, increased distance between purchaser and seller in an expanding credit economy, and moral ambiguities in respect to fiction-making. Read against non-literary Victorian writing about counterfeiters and crime, Fagin can be understood as a forger of identities and narratives. His ability to exploit interpersonal belief and economic value is a central feature of his villainy and one with precedent in other aspects of Victorian financial life. Dickens critiques capitalist culture by associating it with the imitative, fictional, and Jewish culture. In contrast, he aligns sincerity and truth with the middle-class, normative characters. Throughout, he marks the distinction between these two groups with comic incidence. The marginalised figures are fodder for humour and irony, while the conventional heroes are earnest.

Spinoza’s Jewish Modernities

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Status ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
Great Culture

This introductory chapter considers why the hallmark of modern Jewish identity is its resistance to—and, at the same time, obsession with—definition. Like battles over national identity in the modern state, clashes over the nature and limits of Jewishness have frequently taken the shape of controversies over the status—and stature—of marginal Jews past and present. The Jewish rehabilitation of historical heretics and apostates with a vexed relationship to Judaism has become so much a part of contemporary discourse that it is difficult to imagine secular Jewish culture without it. Yet this tendency has a beginning as well as a template in modern Jewish history, which the chapter introduces in the figure of Baruch (or Benedictus) Spinoza (1632–1677)—“the first great culture-hero of modern secular Jews,” and still the most oft-mentioned candidate for the title of first modern secular Jew.

A ‘solid foundation’? Art schools and art education

2018 ◽  
pp. 127-165
Author(s):  
James Moore
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Art Education ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Textile Workers ◽  
Industrial Worker ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Solid Foundation ◽  
Economic Ideology ◽  
Art Schools

Despite the success of municipal art galleries in some quarters, the prevailing Liberal economic ideology of much of industrial Lancashire remained suspicious of state intervention in the arts. Many feared it would become economically costly and threaten local civic independence. However Royal Commissions that exposed the lack of artistic skills among industrial textile workers meant that attitudes gradually changed. Liberal Manchester became one of the first state-supported art schools. This chapter explores how local communities fought to shape art education and the successes and failure of local art education. Although aimed at the industrial worker, the art school remained a sphere in which bourgeois values and middle class students predominated, much to the chagrin of local critics.

Jewish New Age and the Middle Class: Jewish Identity Politics in Israel under Neoliberalism

Sociology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 575-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Kaplan ◽  
Rachel Werczberger
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
New Age ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Class Reproduction

This article asks why middle-class Israeli seculars have recently begun to engage with Jewish religiosity. We use the case of the Jewish New Age (JNA) as an example of the middle class’s turn from a nationalised to a spiritualised version of Judaism. We show, by bringing together the sociology of religion’s interest in emerging spiritualities and cultural sociology’s interest in social class, how after Judaism was deemed socially significant in identity-based struggles for recognition, Israeli New Agers started culturalising and individualising Jewish religiosity by constructing it in a spiritual, eclectic, emotional and experiential manner. We thus propose that what may be seen as cultural and religious pluralism is, in fact, part of a broader system of class reproduction.

Ethel A. Stephens’ “at home”: art education for girls and women

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Kummerfeld
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Art Education ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
Middle Class Woman ◽  
At Home

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the professional biography of Ethel A. Stephens, examining her career as an artist and a teacher in Sydney between 1890 and 1920. Accounts of (both male and female) artists in this period often dismiss their teaching as just a means to pay the bills. This paper focuses attention on Stephens’ teaching and considers how this, combined with her artistic practice, influenced her students. Design/methodology/approach – Using a fragmentary record of a successful female artist and teacher, this paper considers the role of art education and a career in the arts for respectable middle-class women. Findings – Stephens’ actions and experiences show the ways she negotiated between the public and private sphere. Close examination of her “at home” exhibitions demonstrates one way in which these worlds came together as sites, enabling her to identify as an artist, a teacher and as a respectable middle-class woman. Originality/value – This paper offers insight into the ways women negotiated the Sydney art scene and found opportunities for art education outside of the established modes.

Feminist Revolutionary Music Criticism and Wagner Reception

2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie McManus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Complex Network ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
The Arts ◽  
German School

Abstract Histories of progressive musical politics in mid-nineteenth-century Germany often center on the writings of Richard Wagner and Franz Brendel, relegating contributors such as the feminist and author Louise Otto (1819–95) to the periphery. However, Otto's lifelong engagement with music, including her two librettos, two essay collections on the arts, and numerous articles and feuilletons, demonstrates how one contemporary woman considered the progressive movements in music and in women's rights to be interrelated. A staunch advocate of Wagner, Otto contributed to numerous music journals, as well as her own women's journal, advising her female readers to engage with the music of the New German School. In the context of the middle-class women's movement, she saw music as a space for female advancement through both performance and the portrayals of women onstage. Her writings offer us a glimpse into the complex network of Wagner proponents who also supported women's rights, at the same time providing evidence for what some contemporary conservative critics saw as a concomitant social threat from both Wagnerian musical radicalism and the emancipated woman.

Attraction and Attribution: Framings of Sephardi Identity in Ashkenazi Prayer Books

2018 ◽  
pp. 221-240
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Cultural Goods ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Cultural Objects ◽  
Prayer Books ◽  
Wissenschaft Des Judentums

This chapter recounts how maskilim and early representatives of Wissenschaft des Judentums divided the shares of Jewish culture between Ashkenaz and Sepharad in order to address questions of Jewish identity arising in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany. It looks at the perception of medieval Jewish culture that affected the views of their contemporaries. It also analyses the acceptance of cultural goods between the Jewish communities of Ashkenaz and Sepharad and the notion of the divide. The chapter reviews studies that show how texts and ideas were transmitted between the different communities that were adapted and incorporated into the regional Jewish cultures. It describes collective cultural identities and their dynamism that can be studied in a nuanced way through examination of the transfer of cultural objects from one region to another.

Eros and Thanatos in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Garloff
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Love Affair ◽  
The Road ◽  
Open Boundaries ◽  
Lower Social Class ◽  
Otto Weininger

This chapter considers a locale famously fraught with questions of sex, love, and identity: turn-of-the-century Vienna. Vienna was the birthplace of psychoanalysis and a center of the crisis of modern Jewish identity, especially after the election of an openly antisemitic mayor in 1895. While Sigmund Freud maintained a resonant silence about Jewish-Gentile attractions, several bedfellows of psychoanalysis explicitly thematize such attractions. In his highly influential philosophy of sexuality, Sex and Character (1903), Otto Weininger rejects love as a model for Jewish-Gentile rapprochement in favor of a radical Jewish self-transformation, or rather, self-annihilation. The chapter reads Arthur Schnitzler's novel The Road into the Open (1908), which draws an analogy between a Gentile's uneven friendship with a Jewish writer and his love affair with a woman from a lower social class, as a critique of Weininger's philosophical tract. Whereas Weininger can accept Jewish assimilation only as a form of suicidal striving, Schnitzler depicts assimilation as a mutual, quasi-erotic exchange across open boundaries. Against Freud's conspicuous silence about and Weininger's vehement rejection of Jewish-Gentile love, Schnitzler advances a vision of Jewish integration in which Eros has a place.

Under Whose Sign? Hebraism and Yiddishism as Paradigms of Modern Jewish Literary History

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (3) ◽  
pp. 774-784
Author(s):  
Anita Norich
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Small Volume ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Letter Word ◽  
Sign Systems ◽  
Russian Poetry ◽  
English Translations ◽  
What Matters

In 1974 the Yiddish Poet Malka Heifetz Tussman, Born in Russia, Living in California, Published a Small Volume of Poems in Israel. This peripatetic author and text are paradigmatic of the cosmopolitan, multilingual nature of modern Jewish literature. The book, by a woman who was at various times a Yiddish teacher, an anarchist, and a writer of Russian poetry and English essays, was entitled ‘Under Your Sign.’ As the title indicates, the politics and poetics of sign systems are central concerns of this volume. I offer a few stanzas from one of its poems— ‘Widowhood’—to suggest the multiplicity of the signs of Jewish identity and literature. What we see in Tussman's poem, and more dramatically when we supplement it with two English translations, is that although it rails against the ways in which the sign (e.g., letter, word, trope) destroys, it also points to the sign's generative powers. And the poem offers a way of understanding the creative tensions that have dominated critical and creative expressions of modern Jewish literature. Under the signs of “Hebraism” and “Yiddishism,” we encounter two conflicting but equally productive views of Jewish literature, one that posits continuity and another that posits adaptation as the defining characteristic of Jewish culture. Tussman's poem, like these different paradigms of Jewish literary history, enables us to use the sign as a way of overcoming the divide between two languages and two views of the (Jewish and non-Jewish) world. My goal in what follows is not to protest against the reign of the sign on behalf of some notion of Jewish authenticity. To the contrary, I propose yet another sign—structured as a binary—to highlight the ambivalence of the sign “Jewish literature” and to stimulate debate about matters Jewish and what matters to Jews.

The Values of Middle Class Drug Users and Their Perceptions of the Values of Society

1980 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-48
Author(s):  
Robert Beech ◽  
Bernard Katz
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Background Information ◽  
Drug Usage ◽  
Social Economic Status ◽  
Cultural Ideals ◽  
Rokeach Value Survey

The values of twenty-four drug users were measured using the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS). Their perceptions of the values of society were measured by altering the instructions for the RVS. Background information on drug usage and social economic status was also obtained. The value systems which the drug users espouse and perceive to be in opposition to society's values form three themes: tranquility, aesthetics, and humanism. Although this group of drug users is often perceived by society as deviant, they appear to adhere to the literal meaning of these cultural ideals.

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