Springtime for Ulysses

Why did Mel Brooks name one of the main characters in The Producers (1967) after James Joyce's Leopold Bloom? Tracing the meanings of that name over the course of a half century, from Joyce's Ulysses (1922) to the stage adaptation Ulysses in Nighttown (1958) to Brooks's film, illuminates how the landmark modernist novel not only acquired outsize significance for American Jewish readers but in fact became a Jewish text. Having affiliated itself with highbrow Joycean modernism in a bid for respectability, Jewish culture discovered in the source of that respectability something not so highbrow and hardly respectable at all: an enjoyable perversity rooted in popular comic performance. The Jewish form and content of both Ulysses and The Producers turn out to celebrate ethnic, racial, sexual, and class difference in defiance of Christian norms of taste, health, and citizenship; and it is in Brooks's popular citation of the literary that this defiance becomes visible.

Complexes of Emotions in Joseph and Aseneth

The ancient Greek novel introduced to the history of literature a new topos: the “complex of emotions.” This became a staple of storytelling and remains widely in use across a variety of genres to the present day. The Hellenistic Jewish text Joseph and Aseneth employs this topos in at least three passages, where it draws attention to the cognitive-emotional aspect of the heroine’s conversion. This is interesting for what it contributes to our understanding of the genre of Aseneth, but it also has social-historical implications. In particular, it supports the idea that Aseneth reflects concerns about Gentile partners in Jewish-Gentile marriages, that Gentile partners might convert out of expedience or that they might be less than fully committed to abandoning “idolatrous” attachments. The representations of deep, grievous, and complex emotions in Aseneth’s transformational turn from idolatry to monolatry, then, might play a psychagogic role for the Gentile reader interested in marrying a Jewish person.

The Jew and the Funny in Latvian Literature

The aim of the present research is to consider one of the aspects of the Jewish text in Latvian literature: the connection of Jewish images with the category of the funny and the comic. A significant part of the Jewish text in Latvian literature is associated with the genre of comedy, within the framework of which a typical image of a Jew begins to form: the first landmark texts (the 17th– 19th centuries) are comedies in which it is the Jew who plays a central role in the system of characters. At the same time, the genre of comedy brings to the fore two functions of the category of the comic: laughter is associated with the situation of the character (funny, sometimes miserable) or it is caused by a comic situation in which other characters are involved. On the one hand, the Jew is the object of laughter (comical depiction of the manner of speech, appearance, behavior); on the other hand, in some texts it is the Jew who maintains the intrigue. The article examines the historical logic of the development of the Jewish text: a Jew as an object of ridicule – a Jew as a component of a comic plot – a Jew as a carrier of vice. Since the 1940s, the Jewish text actually loses its connection with the category of the comic, which is associated with the intensification of the flow of anti-Semitic literature in the interwar and war periods and the dominance of the theme of the Holocaust in the literature of the second half of the 20th century.

Textual Transmission as Textual Participation

One of the most fundamental notions of rabbinic Judaism is that concerning textual transmission. The Jewish text is always on the move—sometimes back and forth—from God to humanity, from generation to generation, from teacher to students. Textual transmission encompasses and even necessitates another idea, that of ...

The Relationship of Vulnerability to Religiosity in the Adult Jewish Learner

This article examines the role of vulnerability in personal religious transformation. It offers several “working” definitions of the terms and also mines the use of the term through the portrait of three adult Jewish learners who each experienced vulnerability as a result of Jewish text study for different reasons. This sense of vulnerability was either itself a religious experience characterized as a mixture of humility, gratitude, and belonging or catalyzed enhanced study that led to a greater sense of knowledge of and participation within a religious community. Vulnerability is understood by one learner as the insecurity of ignorance, which inspired her to take agency for her learning and compensate for pre-existing gaps. For the second, vulnerability is less about ignorance or openness in an act of study, but the insecurity of the performative aspects of Judaism in the shared space of community. This prompted him to learn more to overcome these uncomfortable feelings. For another, vulnerability represents an existential state of humanity that connects all people. Vulnerability for her is a positive state of openness; she seeks out Jewish experiences of study and prayer where she can exhibit her vulnerability in the presence of others equally willing to share their own moments of joy, doubt, humility, and failure. In each instance, vulnerability created a paradoxical motivation to study—the discomfort of not fitting in or knowing enough that, in turn, gave rise to feelings of enhanced religiosity induced by the study experience. To that end, the paper also explores vulnerability as a generative aspect of transformative learning that leads to enhanced spiritual states.

Pleasures and Dangers of Conversion

This chapter examines Joseph and Aseneth, a Greek Jewish text that was translated into Latin in late twelfth-century England, and how it reemerges as significant within a crisis over Jewish conversion. Joseph and Aseneth, an account of the marriage of Joseph, then second in command to Pharaoh, to the Egyptian beauty Aseneth, was probably composed in the mid-first century in Egypt. The Jewish story is a text of the Diaspora in Egypt that imagines the circumstances of the marriage. Two of its major themes, conversion and female agency, offer a glimpse into the relations between Christians and Jews. The chapter shows how, in the Middle Ages, Joseph and Aseneth becomes a narrative of its heroine's conversion to Christianity and considers Jewish conversion as a deadly topic in the era following the Crusades.