A red rose in the dark

Following Wittgenstein, this book investigates the dialogic, aesthetic and mystical language-games of Zelda, Yehuda Amichai, Admiel Kosman, and Shimon Adaf based on their family resemblance of intertextuality in their language-games. It resists common social-cultural categorizations while focusin...

Beyond political messianism

In recent decades, a group of second generation religious Zionist West Bank settlers have turned away from the collectivist political messianic ideology of the first generation of settlers and have begun to explore poetry as a mode of individual self-expression. Based on interviews of eight key f...

Blooming spaces

Debora Vogel (1900-1942) wrote in Yiddish unlike anyone else. Yiddish, her fourth language after Polish, Hebrew, and German, became the central vehicle for her modernist experiments in poetry and prose. This ground-breaking collection presents the work of the key yet unrecognized figure in the co...

Broken heart / broken wholeness

The book examines the Soviet Yiddish writer Der Nister's (Pinkhas Kahanovitsh, 1884–1950) vision of a post-Holocaust Jewish reconstruction, challenging the Jewish “homelessness” in the Diaspora.

Double agents

Why were white bourgeois gay male writers so interested in spies, espionage, and treason in the twentieth century? Erin G. Carlston believes such figures and themes were critical to exploring citizenship and its limits, requirements, and possibilities in the modern Western state. Through close re...

Doubting the devout

Before 1985, depictions of ultra-Orthodox Jews in popular American culture were rare, and if they did appear, in films such as Fiddler on the Roof or within the novels of Chaim Potok, they evoked a nostalgic vision of Old World tradition. Yet the ordination of women into positions of religious le...

Fragments of hell

In this compelling and engaging book, Dvir Abramovich introduces readers to several landmark novels, poems and stories that have become classics in the Israeli Holocaust canon. Discussed are iconic writers such as Aharon Appelfeld, Dan Pagis, Etgar Keret, Yoram Kaniuk, Uri Tzvi Greenberg and Ka-T...

Her glory all within

Representation of the religious sector is a new phenomenon in modern Israeli literature, emerging from a diversification of Israeli culture that began in the 1970s. Barbara Landress here explores the intricacies of fiction about Orthodox women in contemporary contexts, offering a subtle interpret...

Holy envy

What is between us and the Christians is a deep dark affair which will go for another hundred generations . . .” (Amos Oz, Judas)Among the great social shifts of the post–World War II era is the unlikely sea-change in Jewish Christian relations. We read each other’s scriptures and openly discuss ...

I, wandering jew

Combining history, detective story, and memoir, a surprising and revealing account of the antisemitic myth of “the Wandering Jew”The story behind the mythical figure of “the Wandering Jew” is one of the most fascinating tales in European history. In I, Wandering Jew, National Jewish Book Award–wi...

Jewish studies as counterlife

This book seeks to harness the possibilities offered by the evolving collection of forces by which Jewish Studies is constituted and practiced in order to open, refashion, and exemplify possibilities for a humanities to come.

Jews and the ends of theory

This volume assesses the role of Jews, as both agents and figures, in the development of critical and literary theory in the twentieth century and beyond. Its topics range from Biblical criticism to the relationship between Derrida and Levinas, from Mizrachi Jews in Israel to the Zionisms of Bub...

Modern jewish worldmaking through yiddish children's literature

How modern Yiddish children’s literature gave expression to emerging forms of Jewish identityAs migration carried Yiddish to several continents during the long twentieth century, an increasingly global community of speakers and readers clung to Jewish heritage while striving to help their childre...

Mysticism in twentieth-century hebrew literature

Challenging the notion that Jewish mysticism ceased to exist in the Hassidic enclaves of early nineteenth century Europe, Hamutal Bar-Yosef delves into the mystical elements of twentieth-century Israeli literature. Exploring themes such as unity, death, and sex, Bar-Yosef traces the influence and...

Nostalgia for a foreign land

This volume focuses on several Russian authors among many who immigrated to Israel with the “big wave” of 1990s or later, and whose largest part of the works was written in Israel: Dina Rubina, Nekod Singer, Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, and Mikhail Yudson.

Occupied words

How Yiddish changed to express and memorialize the trauma of the HolocaustThe Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousand...

Old truths and new clichés

From the Nobel Prize–winning writer, a new collection of literary and personal essaysOld Truths and New Clichés collects nineteen essays—most of them previously unpublished in English—by Isaac Bashevis Singer on topics that were central to his artistic vision throughout an astonishing and prolifi...

Queer theory and the jewish question

The essays in this volume boldly map the historically resonant intersections between Jewishness and queerness, between homophobia and anti-Semitism, and between queer theory and theorizations of Jewishness. With important essays by such well-known figures in queer and gender studies as Judith But...

Reorienting the east

The first comprehensive investigation of premodern Jewish travel writing about the Islamic worldReorienting the East explores the Islamic world as it was encountered, envisioned, and elaborated by Jewish travelers from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. The first comprehensive investigat...

Sorrow and distress in the talmud

Both the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud depict a wide range of sorrowful situations tied to every level of society and to the complexities of human behavior and the human condition. The causes and expressions of sorrow amongst the Sages, however, are different from their counterparts ...

Static forms

Shir Alon develops a new theory of the emergence of modernist literary forms through a series of parallel readings of Arabic and Hebrew prose.

Strictly kosher reading

For centuries, fervently observant Jewish communities have produced thousands of works of Jewish law, thought, and spirituality. But in recent decades, the literature of America’s Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] community has taken on brand-new forms: selfhelp books, cookbooks, monthly magazines, parenti...

The charm of wise hesitancy

This volume explores the growing fascination with Talmudic stories among secular and religious Israelis in recent decades, inspired by contemporary Israeli writers who have sought to make readers aware of the special qualities of these well-crafted narratives that portray universal human situations.

The codification of jewish law and an introduction to the jurisprudence of the mishna berura

The Mishna Berura is, without a doubt, Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan's greatest and most complex contribution to the canon of Orthodox Jewish Law; it is a singular work that synthesizes Jewish traditions, laws, and mores into a practical halakhic guide to daily religious life. For all of his traditiona...

The holocaust in central european literatures and cultures

Relating the Holocaust to poetic and aesthetic phenomena has often been considered taboo, as only authentic testimony, documents, or at least 'unliterary', prosaic approaches were seen as appropriate. However, from the very beginning of Holocaust literature and culture, there were tendencies towa...

The teachings of maimonides

This groundbreaking book was among the most important of those that presented the teachings of Maimonides, as represented by his many published works, as a unified whole, thus bringing about a renaissance in the study of this seminal scholar. The author, the Reverend Abraham Cohen, states in his ...

Time and difference in rabbinic judaism

How the rabbis of late antiquity used time to define the boundaries of Jewish identityThe rabbinic corpus begins with a question–“when?”—and is brimming with discussions about time and the relationship between people, God, and the hour. Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism explores the rhythms...

Vixens disturbing vineyards

Embarrassment and embracement are two moments in the reading, misreading and re-reading of scriptures, defined broadly to include both canonical and non-canonical texts. Despite what Harold Bloom calls our "belatedness" in this process, every reading community has its way of confronting that mome...

Voices of jewish-russian literature

This definitive and comprehensive anthology of major nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, nonfiction and poetry by eighty Jewish-Russian writers explores both timeless themes and specific tribulations of a people’s history.

With both feet on the clouds

Why do Israelis dislike fantasy? Put so bluntly, the question appears frivolous. But in fact, it goes to the deepest sources of Israeli historical identity and literary tradition. Uniquely among developed nations, Israel’s origin is in a utopian novel, Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (1902), which pre...

Without jews?