- Israel
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This essay examines the pleasure of the text in Dickens's novel Hard Times (1854) and considers the risks it takes in its performance as a novel in a utilitarian economy. Walking a tightrope between employing the genre as an agent of... more
This essay examines the pleasure of the text in Dickens's novel Hard Times (1854) and considers the risks it takes in its performance as a novel in a utilitarian economy. Walking a tightrope between employing the genre as an agent of social change and entertaining middle-class readers, Dickens fuses homo ludens with homo faber. The sheer pleasure of reading must be shown to be useful, yet the novel has not proven popular until recent years and its moral message does not wear will in a postmodern hedonistic culture. Nevertheless, imagination as means as well as metaphor must be tested by its success, and the author, like Mr Jupe, cannot afford to miss a trick.
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The Field of Honour: An Analysis of Isaak Babel's Cycle on the Field of Honour (Na Pole Chesti), with Reference to Gaston Vidal's Figures Et Anecdotes De La Grande Guerre. By C. D. Luck. Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, no. 18. Birmingham, U.K.: Department of Russian Language and Literature, Unive...more
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... such as Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) or the poet Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918), and some of the ways in which they may be important for the post-Holocaust generation will be ... The Jewish pauper is an uncultured, unwashed alien, but... more
... such as Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) or the poet Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918), and some of the ways in which they may be important for the post-Holocaust generation will be ... The Jewish pauper is an uncultured, unwashed alien, but there is humanity in his heart and there is ...
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This innovative study shows how the imaginary constructions of self and Other are shaping identification with Jewishness in the twenty-first century. The texts and artworks discussed in this book test a diverse range of ways of... more
This innovative study shows how the imaginary constructions of self and Other are shaping identification with Jewishness in the twenty-first century. The texts and artworks discussed in this book test a diverse range of ways of identifying as Jews and with the Jewish people, while engaging with postmodern and postcolonial discourses of hybridity and multiculturalism. This book selects six key areas in which the boundaries of Jewish identities have been interrogated and renegotiated: nation, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, and the Holocaust. In each of these areas Sicher explores how major and emerging contemporary writers and artists re-envision the meaning of their identities. Such re-envisioning may be literally visual or metaphorical in the search for expression of artistic self between the conventional paradigms of the past and new ways of thinking.
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Isaak Babel (1894–1940) is arguably one of the greatest modern short story writers of the early twentieth century. Yet his life and work are shrouded in the mystery of who Babel was—an Odessa Jew who wrote in Russian, who came from one of... more
Isaak Babel (1894–1940) is arguably one of the greatest modern short story writers of the early twentieth century. Yet his life and work are shrouded in the mystery of who Babel was—an Odessa Jew who wrote in Russian, who came from one of the most vibrant centers of east European Jewish culture and all his life loved Yiddish and the stories of Sholom Aleichem.This is the first book in English to study the intertextuality of Babel’s work. It looks at Babel’s cultural identity as a case study in the contradictions and tensions of literary influence, personal loyalties, and ideological constraint. The complex and often ambivalent relations between the two cultures inevitably raise controversial issues that touch on the reception of Babel and other Jewish intellectuals in Russian literature, as well as the “Jewishness” of their work
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In Wrestling with Shylock: Jewish Responses to the Merchant of Venice. Ed. Edna Nahshon and Michael Shapiro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 273-90.
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Whether or not we understand the Holocaust to be unique or following a series of catastrophes in Jewish history, there is no doubt that the writing that came out of those traumaticevents is worth examining both as testimony and as... more
Whether or not we understand the Holocaust to be unique or following a series of catastrophes in Jewish history, there is no doubt that the writing that came out of those traumaticevents is worth examining both as testimony and as literature. This article looks again at Holocaust poetry, this time circumventing Adorno’s much-cited and often misquoted dictum onpoetry after Auschwitz. The essay challenges the binary of either “Holocaust poetry is barbaric and impossible” or “art is uplifting and unaffected by the Holocaust.” I analyse three individual cases of Holocaust poetry as a means of both survival and testimony during the Holocaust – not retrospectively or seen by poets who were not there. Aesthetic and ethical issues are very much part of a writing in extremis which is conscious of the challenge well before Adorno and critical theory. In a comparison of Celan, Sutzkever, and Miłosz we can see their desperate attempt to write a poetry that meets the challenge of the historical ...
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This essay looks at three novels by contemporary Israeli female novelists from different religious backgrounds who describe the process of women’s repentance and return to religion [teshuvah]. The novels I will discuss by Noa Yaron-Dayan,... more
This essay looks at three novels by contemporary Israeli female novelists from different religious backgrounds who describe the process of women’s repentance and return to religion [teshuvah]. The novels I will discuss by Noa Yaron-Dayan, Mekimi [Raise Me Up] (2007), Michal Govrin, Hashem (1995; The Name, 1998), and Emunah Elon’s Simkhah gedolah bashamayim [If You Awaken Love] (2004) track a journey from the secular world to rediscovery of Jewish traditional lifestyles and renewed faith in the covenantal narrative between God and the people of Israel. Along the way, these novels expose the modern or progressive also engage in frank discussions about sex and sexuality. A persistent motif is modest clothing, and the kerchief in particular functions as an outer sign of the inner struggle in a return to Judaism in search of inner spirituality and femininity from an empowered position of personal choice. I conclude with a novel by Natanella Schlesinger, Akharei hama’asim [When the Deed Was Done] (2017), about two sisters who face the choices between secular and religious worlds. In contrast to the confessional mode of teshuvah, Schlesinger’s novel shows that the journey does not always end, and that the destination is not always known. These novels express women’s voices demanding to be heard in Israel’s ongoing culture wars.
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ABSTRACT This essay explores contemporary Jewish feminist artists’ engagement with the tensions between sexuality and sanctity of the female body in Jewish spaces and religious practices. The attempt to reclaim subjecthood within these... more
ABSTRACT This essay explores contemporary Jewish feminist artists’ engagement with the tensions between sexuality and sanctity of the female body in Jewish spaces and religious practices. The attempt to reclaim subjecthood within these spaces and practices rescues the female body from abjection. I have selected Jewish spaces and practices that are especially embodied (such as the mikveh or tefillin) in order to track common threads of a dialogue, although the artists are quite diverse in location, medium, outlook, and ideology. Ritual objects can be functional works of art or appropriated for different feminist agendas, but also spaces in which to work through more holistic concepts of the body. Finally, I will consider what is “religious” about embodied art and ask whether the erotic can also be “religious.” These art works, I contend, push the envelope of acceptability and visibility of the female body in Jewish spaces. However, the effectivity of such social and art activism should be measured against the possibility of change within Halakhah and the degree of acceptability of what is considered sacrilegious or goes against the principles of Judaism.
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Well researched and insightful, this book closes a major gap in Holocaust studies by discussing the role of literature, and particularly that of poetry, as testimony in the spiritual lives of victims during as well as after the Holocaust.
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This innovative study shows how the imaginary constructions of self and Other are shaping identification with Jewishness in the twenty-first century. The texts and artworks discussed in this book test a diverse range of ways of... more
This innovative study shows how the imaginary constructions of self and Other are shaping identification with Jewishness in the twenty-first century. The texts and artworks discussed in this book test a diverse range of ways of identifying as Jews and with the Jewish people, while engaging with postmodern and postcolonial discourses of hybridity and multiculturalism.
This book selects six key areas in which the boundaries of Jewish identities have been interrogated and renegotiated: nation, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, and the Holocaust. In each of these areas Sicher explores how major and emerging contemporary writers and artists re-envision the meaning of their identities. Such re-envisioning may be literally visual or metaphorical in the search for expression of artistic self between the conventional paradigms of the past and new ways of thinking.
This book selects six key areas in which the boundaries of Jewish identities have been interrogated and renegotiated: nation, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, and the Holocaust. In each of these areas Sicher explores how major and emerging contemporary writers and artists re-envision the meaning of their identities. Such re-envisioning may be literally visual or metaphorical in the search for expression of artistic self between the conventional paradigms of the past and new ways of thinking.
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A new approach to thinking about the representation of the Other in Western society, The Jew’s Daughter: A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative offers an insight into the gendered difference of the Jew. Focusing on a popular... more
A new approach to thinking about the representation of the Other in Western society, The Jew’s Daughter: A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative offers an insight into the gendered difference of the Jew. Focusing on a popular narrative of “The Jew’s Daughter,” which has been overlooked in conventional studies of European anti-Semitism, this innovative study looks at canonical and neglected texts which have constructed racialized and sexualized images that persist today in the media and popular culture. The book goes back before Shylock and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice and Isaac and Rebecca in Ivanhoe to seek the answers to why the Jewish father is always wicked and ugly, while his daughter is invariably desirable and open to conversion. The story unfolds in fascinating transformations, reflecting changing ideological and social discourses about gender, sexuality, religion, and nation that expose shifting perceptions of inclusion and exclusion of the Other. Unlike previous studies of the theme of the Jewess in separate literatures, Sicher provides a comparative perspective on the transnational circulation of texts in the historical context of the perception of both Jews and women as marginal or outcasts in society. The book draws on examples from the arts, history, literature, folklore, and theology to draw a complex picture of the dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations in England, France, Germany, and Eastern Europe from 1100 to 2017. In addition, the responses of Jewish authors illustrate a dialogue that has not always led to mutual understanding. Richly illustrated, this ground-breaking work will provoke questions about the history and present state of prejudiced attitudes in our society.
“an original as well as exhaustive study of one of the core images of anti-Semitism. … A must read in our age of renewed anti-Semitism and misogyny!”—Sander L. Gilman
“destined to become an essential work for scholars of Jewish Cultural Studies, Gender Theory, and Critical Race Studies alike.”— Neil Davison
“More than an analysis of conversion or anti-Semitism, this study leads us on an encyclopedic journey across time and space to explore an understudied pattern of constructed Jewish difference. The Jew and his daughter, Sicher demonstrates, have an impressive history of shaping discourses of gender, sexuality, race, and nation throughout Europe.”— Heidi Kaufman
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498527781/The-Jew's-Daughter-A-Cultural-History-of-a-Conversion-Narrative!
“an original as well as exhaustive study of one of the core images of anti-Semitism. … A must read in our age of renewed anti-Semitism and misogyny!”—Sander L. Gilman
“destined to become an essential work for scholars of Jewish Cultural Studies, Gender Theory, and Critical Race Studies alike.”— Neil Davison
“More than an analysis of conversion or anti-Semitism, this study leads us on an encyclopedic journey across time and space to explore an understudied pattern of constructed Jewish difference. The Jew and his daughter, Sicher demonstrates, have an impressive history of shaping discourses of gender, sexuality, race, and nation throughout Europe.”— Heidi Kaufman
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498527781/The-Jew's-Daughter-A-Cultural-History-of-a-Conversion-Narrative!