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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

Without jews?