The Fractured Jew

The Fractured Jew PDF Author: JOEL. WEST
Publisher: Brill Research Perspectives in
ISBN: 9789004510128
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
Historically Judaism has been called both a nation and a religion, yet there are those Jews who eschew the religious and national definitions for a cultural one. For example, while TV's Mrs. Maisel is ostensibly a Jew, the actor playing her is not, and Mrs. Maisel's actions are not always Jewish. In The Fractured JewJoel West separates Judaism into phenomenological and performative, starting with popular portrayals of Jews and Judaism, in today's media, as a jumping-off point to understand Judaism and Jewishness, not from the outside, but from the emic, internal, Jewish point of view.

The Fractured Jew

The Fractured Jew PDF Author: JOEL. WEST
Publisher: Brill Research Perspectives in
ISBN: 9789004510128
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 96

Get Book

Book Description
Historically Judaism has been called both a nation and a religion, yet there are those Jews who eschew the religious and national definitions for a cultural one. For example, while TV's Mrs. Maisel is ostensibly a Jew, the actor playing her is not, and Mrs. Maisel's actions are not always Jewish. In The Fractured JewJoel West separates Judaism into phenomenological and performative, starting with popular portrayals of Jews and Judaism, in today's media, as a jumping-off point to understand Judaism and Jewishness, not from the outside, but from the emic, internal, Jewish point of view.

The Fractured Jew

The Fractured Jew PDF Author: Joel West
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004510133
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 107

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Book Description
Musician Josh Groban claims that he is not Jewish because of his paternal lineage. Contrariwise, Comedian Tiffany Haddish claims Jewish identity specifically because of similar lineage. Using this contrast as a jumping off point, this book explores how Judaism and Jewishness represent themselves in popular culture.

Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew

Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew PDF Author: Lawrence Rosen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022631751X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
In this remarkable work by seasoned scholar Lawrence Rosen, we follow the fascinating intellectual developments of four ordinary Moroccans over the span of forty years. Walking and talking with Haj Hamed Britel, Yaghnik Driss, Hussein Qadir, and Shimon Benizri—in a country that, in a little over a century, has gone from an underdeveloped colonial outpost to a modern Arab country in the throes of economic growth and religious fervor—Rosen details a fascinating plurality of viewpoints on culture, history, and the ways both can be dramatically transformed. Through the intellectual lives of these four men, this book explores a number of interpretative and theoretical issues that have made Arab culture distinct, especially in relationship to the West: how nothing is ever hard and fast, how everything is relational and always a product of negotiation. It showcases the vitality of the local in a global era, and it contrasts Arab notions of time, equality, and self with those in the West. Likewise, Rosen unveils his own entanglement in their world and the drive to keep the analysis of culture first and foremost, even as his own life enmeshes itself in those of his study. An exploration of faith, politics, history, and memory, this book highlights the world of everyday life in Arab society in ways that challenge common notions and stereotypes.

Canadian Readings of Jewish History

Canadian Readings of Jewish History PDF Author: Daniel Maoz
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527590046
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
This book takes the reader through a genealogical embodied journey, explaining how our historical context, through various expressions of language, culture, knowledge, pedagogy, and power, has created and perpetuated oppression of marginalised identities throughout history. The volume is, in essence, a social justice initiative in that it shines a spotlight on elitist forms of knowledge, and their attached privileged protectors. As such, the reader will unavoidably reflect on their own pre-conceived meanings and culturally inherent notions while engaging with these pages, and in so doing open a third space where new forms of knowledge that may transcend time and space can evolve into endless possibilities. It is these possibilities of expanding the nuanced meanings of evolving knowledge, fluid lifestyles, and of a dynamic connection to humanity and God, which make this book contextually relevant in our post-modern landscape. It un-situates philosophies which have traditionally been unknowingly situated, and, in so doing, propels the reader to re-interpret discourse and recreate taken-for-granted “universal truths.”

Jewish American Writing and World Literature

Jewish American Writing and World Literature PDF Author: Saul Noam Zaritt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192609157
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody studies Jewish American writers' relationships with the idea of world literature. Writers such as Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley all responded to a demand to write beyond local Jewish and American audiences and toward the world, as a global market and as a transnational ideal. Beyond fame and global circulation, world literature holds up the promise of legibility, in which a threatened origin becomes the site for redemptive literary creativity. But this promise inevitably remains unfulfilled, as writers struggle to balance potential universal achievements with untranslatable realities, rendering impossible any complete arrival in the US and in the world. The work examined in this study was deeply informed by an intimate connection to Yiddish, a Jewish vernacular with its own global network and institutional ambitions. Jewish American Writing and World Literature tracks the attempts and failures, through translation, to find a home for Jewish vernacularity in the institution of world literature. The exploration of the translational uncertainty of Jewish American writing joins postcolonial critiques of US and world literature and challenges Eurocentric and Anglo-American paradigms of literary study. In bringing into conversation the fields of Yiddish studies, American Studies, and world literature theory, Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody proposes a new approach to the study of modern Jewish literatures and their implication within global empires of culture.

Remains of the Jews

Remains of the Jews PDF Author: Andrew S. Jacobs
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804747059
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Remains of the Jews studies the rise of Christian Empire in late antiquity (300-550 C.E.) through the dense and complex manner in which Christian authors wrote about Jews in the charged space of the “holy land.” The book employs contemporary cultural studies, particularly postcolonial criticism, to read Christian writings about holy land Jews as colonial writings. These writings created a cultural context in which Christians viewed themselves as powerful—and in which, perhaps, Jews were able to construct a posture of resistance to this new Christian Empire. Remains of the Jews reexamines familiar types of literature—biblical interpretation, histories, sermons, letters—from a new perspective in order to understand how power and resistance shaped religious identities in the later Roman Empire.

Passing Fancies in Jewish American Literature and Culture

Passing Fancies in Jewish American Literature and Culture PDF Author: Judith Ruderman
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253036976
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
This scholarly study explores the conflicting forces of assimilation and cultural heritage in literary portrayals of Jewish American identity. In Passing Fancies in Jewish American Literature and Culture Judith Ruderman takes on the fraught question of who passes for Jewish in American literature and culture. In today’s contemporary political climate, religious and racial identities are being reconceived as responses to culture and environment, rather than essential qualities. Many Jews continue to hold conflicting ideas about their identity?seeking deep engagement with Jewish history and the experiences of the Jewish people while holding steadfastly to the understanding that identity is fluid and multivalent. Looking at carefully chosen texts from American literature, Ruderman elaborates on the strategies Jews have used to “pass” from the late nineteenth century to the present?nose jobs, renaming, clothing changes, religious and racial reclassification, and even playing baseball. While traversing racial and religious identities has always been a feature of America’s nation of immigrants, Ruderman shows how the complexities of identity formation and deformation are critically relevant during this important cultural moment.

Constructions of 'the Jew' in English Literature and Society

Constructions of 'the Jew' in English Literature and Society PDF Author: Bryan Cheyette
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521558778
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Combining cultural theory, discourse analysis and new historicism with readings of the works of major contemporary authors, this study concludes that "the Jew" is characterized unstereotypically as the embodiment of uncertainty within English literature and society.

Am I a Jew?

Am I a Jew? PDF Author: Theodore Ross
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0142180394
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
“I was nine years old when my mother forced me to convert to Christianity….” When Theodore Ross moved from New York City to small-town Mississippi, his mother insisted that the family pretend to not be Jewish. He was sent to an Episcopal school, where he studied the Bible, sang in the choir, and even took communion. As an adult, he abandoned the religious charade, but wondered: Am I a Jew? In search of an answer, Ross immersed himself within communities on the fringes of Jewish identity—“Crypto-Jews,” “Lost Tribes,” the ultra-Orthodox, and more. Filled with humor, curiosity, and sincerity, Am I a Jew? explores America’s riotous religious diversity, and one man’s quest to stake a claim within it.

The Imaginary Jew

The Imaginary Jew PDF Author: Alain Finkielkraut
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803268951
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The Holocaust changed what it means to be a Jew, for Jew and non-Jew alike. Much of the discussion about this new meaning is a storm of contradictions. In The Imaginary Jew, Alain Finkielkraut describes with passion and acuity his own passage through that storm. Finkielkraut decodes the shifts in anti-Semitism at the end of the Cold War, chronicles the impact of Israel’s policies on European Jews, opposes arguments both for and against cultural assimilation, reopens questions about Marx and Judaism, and marks the loss of European Jewish culture through catastrophe, ignorance, and cliché. He notes that those who identified with Israel continued the erasure of European Judaism, forgetting the pangs and glories of Yiddish culture and the legacy of the Diaspora.