Jewish American Literature

Rabbi Yitshak Hutner (1906-1980) was a remarkable scholar, an enigmatic religious intellectual and a charismatic teacher. Drawing upon his public discourses and his written letters, I argue that Hutner's vocabulary-which remained rooted almost entirely in the vocabulary of traditional Talmudism-afforded him a ready garment in which to clothe a syncretic educational theory, which combines Hasidic approaches to spiritual instruction and remakes the traditions of Lithuanian piety and study for his new American audience. The present study interrogates a series of key themes that appear in Hutner's teachings, all of which pertain to issues of pedagogy and the construction of religious education. The essay advances a historical argument by examining the works of an important and influential modern Jewish thinker, but it is also driven by a constructive question: What does Hutner's vision of Jewish religious teaching and learning have to contribute to today's Jewish education, and to the broader world of higher education in North America in particular?

The Jewish educational agenda of the interwar years was dominated by
two complementary and sometimes-competing values: integration and
survival. Two of the most popular Jewish children’s books of the 1930s
exemplified the balancing act that American Jews sought to perform
between the prevailing assimilationist ethos and their allegiance to
Jewish continuity. Sadie Rose Weilerstein’s The Adventures of K’tonton
(Women’s League of the United Synagogue, 1935) and Mamie Goldsmith Gamoran’s Hillel’s Happy Holidays (Union of American Hebrew
Congregations, 1939) offered their young readers accessible archetypes
of American Jewish acculturation. The first was written by a religiously
observant immigrant from Eastern Europe and intended for a first- and
second-generation audience residing primarily in ethnically homogenous
enclaves. The latter, penned by a thoroughly acculturated Reform Jew of
German extraction, appealed to a more Americanized, suburban readership. Yet despite the differences between the books and their respective
authors, both underscored the growing realization that the unprecedented
freedom that American Jews found on these shores could result in the
dissolution of their religious and ethnic distinctiveness.

The full syllabus for a freshman\sophmore seminar taught at UC Berkeley during spring 2019. The seminar reflects on the connection between Jewish literature and the American comic books industry. It also explores main tensions of Jewish living, as it relates to race (where do white-passing Jews fall in the USA racial hierarchy), gender (what are Jewish masculinity and femininity), and God (how do Jews imagine the divine).

On the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto staged a now legendary revolt against their Nazi oppressors. Since that day, the deprivation and despair of life in the ghetto and the dramatic uprising of its inhabitants have captured the American cultural imagination. The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture looks at how this place and its story have been remembered in fine art, film, television, radio, theater, fiction, poetry, and comics. The book explores seventy years’ worth of artistic representations of the ghetto and revolt to understand why they became and remain touchstones in the American mind, including iconic works such as Leon Uris’s best-selling novel Mila 18, Roman Polanski’s Academy Award–winning film The Pianist, and Rod Serling’s teleplay In the Presence of Mine Enemies, as well as accounts in the American Jewish Yearbook and the New York Times, the art of Samuel Bak and Arthur Szyk, and the poetry of Yala Korwin and Charles Reznikoff. In probing these works, I pursue key questions of Jewish identity: What links artistic representations of the ghetto to the Jewish diaspora? How is art politicized or depoliticized? Why have Americans made such a strong cultural claim on the uprising? The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture shows the importance of the ghetto as a site of memory and creative struggle and reveals how this seminal event and locale served as a staging ground for the forging of Jewish American identity.

Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction is about the appearance of the specter in the work of five major US authors, and argues from this work that every one of us is a ghost writing, haunting ourselves and others. The book’s innovative structure sees chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, author of Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter, that is, without ghost writing.

Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt was offered an opportunity that would make any performer swoon: a star role in the ground-breaking film The Jazz Singer (1927). Yet Rosenblatt refused this artistic opportunity of a lifetime. This paper contextualizes Rosenblatt’s baffling decision, by exploring one possible relationship between the arts and law; in this case—the art of storytelling and the Jewish legal system. The study demonstrates where the two pursuits tread separate, unlinked paths to a common end. This vector is refracted through the lens of liturgical performances outside the religious synagogue service; specifically the propriety of cantorial concerts featuring prayers from the High Holy Days. This issue is addressed in legal writing and in storytelling, each modality using its own tools to tackle the trend. It is noted that legal systems without effective enforcement mechanisms—such as Jewish law in the late modern period—could use arts as compensatory media for achieving societal order. More significantly, however, arts and law are not umbilically connected; each cultural creation independently strives to fashion society.

Esse artigo busca analisar a representação do Holocausto no romance O Escritor Fantasma, de Philip Roth. A obra traz a primeira aparição de Nathan Zuckerman, alterego literário do escritor e fala dos conflitos do jovem autor judeu com sua comunidade, sua família e a representação da vida judaica no período do pós-segunda guerra. Sendo assim, o Holocausto aparece como ponto de ruptura e conflito, uma porção de sua história da qual o escritor precisa fazer sentido e apropriar-se.

In this article I trace numerous similarities in plot, setting, characters and motif in two novels. The approaching European war and holocaust in Israel Joshua Singer's novel The Family Carnovsky and the brutality of the Vietnam War of Roth's novel American Pastoral serve as the dreadful conditions which trigger the half-Jewish teenage child in each novel to revolt against the assimilating Jewish father figure and commit subversive acts against the U.S. government. I argue that the numerous similarities are not merely coincidental in this intertextual study, but that Roth has most likely updated Singer's depiction of a pre-WWII refuge family to America's next major crisis, namely the Vietnam era in the 1960s and 1970s.

In this essay, I explore the myths presented within two contemporary novels, Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated.  I propose that myths are used within these two texts as a meta-modern device to transcend post-modern theories, such as post-structuralism and deconstruction.  Fictional narratives, either passed down through the Jewish shtetl’s generations or those created by Jeanette for her own sake, ultimately enable a better understanding and connection to reality even while these narratives are separate from that reality due to their imagined origins.  While examining these cultural/personal myths, I draw a closer connection between religion and myth-telling as both Jeanette and the townspeople of Trachimbrod are deeply religious (Christianity in Oranges… and Judaism in EII).  While both Christianity and Judaism are called into question due to traumatic experiences within these novels, the characters remain devoted to their religious heritages and in order to remain devout the characters develop new stories, new myths in order to reconcile the past to the present and offer a new hope for the future.  It is important to note that within this meta-modern analysis similar themes are found within these novels, yet they belong to different countries, one to British literature and the other American; the novels were written almost twenty years apart by opposite genders regarding two different religions.  The comparison of these novels demonstrates that certain concerns and subjects can be universal, or perhaps a better term for this day and age would be trans-global.  Differences such as generation, gender, nationality, creed, etc. can be negotiated when authors and readers recognize a common humanity, a common history, and the common myth-making that bridge us together in a desire to belief in something and not nothing.  I include research from Nicoline Timmer, a meta-modern scholar, Amy Hungerford, a professor at Yale who researches the reinvestment of religious practice in contemporary American fiction, as well as authorial commentary from Winterson and Foer.

Upon the publication of Indignation in the fall of 2008, reviewers immediately charted the ways in which Philip Roth’s new novel revisited the terrain cov- ered in his earliest fiction. While critics were correct to see the novel’s resemblance to Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), I argue that Indignation more importantly marks a significant shift in Roth’s approach to writing about history. This essay explores the implications of this move and suggests how the critique of history that Roth posits in Indignation remains vital to understanding his late work.

La Règle du Jeu, numéro 71, dossier "La dépression : mal du siècle ?", 2020.

L'article consiste en une analyse de la symptomatologie d'un épisode dépressif majeur à travers des auteurs comme Philip Roth, Kafka, Stéphane Mosès, Alain Ehrenberg, Aharon Appelfeld, Yehuda Amichaï et Claude Olievenstein.

This article explores the career of Jacob Behrman (1921–2012) and the growth of Behrman House from a small Jewish bookseller to the leading publisher of Jewish religious school textbooks. Behrman’s success owed in part to his ability to appeal to the vast center, to gauge correctly his consumers’ needs and reflect their outlook and values, to eschew partisan- ship and play down ideological differences, and to swim with the tide. In addition, I make the case that Behrman House elevated the field of Jewish education by raising the quality of Jewish textbooks, and that through its ascendency played a role in redefining the goals of Jewish education and its undergirding ideological thrust. Behrman was not driven by a single model of Jewish education or a monolithic vision for the Jewish community, but rather, by business exigencies and a connection to Jewish peoplehood and culture.

Philip Roth's 2001 novella 'The Dying Animal' has attracted an increasing level of critical attention in recent years. Much of the resultant research has attempted to grapple with the distinctive manner in which Roth's narrator, David Kepesh, describes his experiences - often as a counterpoint to initial scepticism over the value of the text itself. Following on from this trend, this essay argues that Roth's novella can be reinterpreted as a multifaceted, even anti-misogynist text through a close reading of Roth's use of language and characterization. Focusing first on how Roth uses terms of address in the novella and concluding with an analysis of several minor characters, it becomes possible to detect methods of "counter-reading" which Roth's text actively encourages. Through a complex depiction of his narrator-protagonist's wilful ignorance, Roth consistently undermines the claims to authority that his character appears to be making - playfully subverting his own text as he does so.

Little or none is known about the social origin and meaning of the ancient rock paintings of Ethiopia and Horn of Africa. This article critically analyzed some of the ancient rock paintings of Hararqee (Eastern Ethiopia) with the intention to understand the social semiotical and rhetorical structures that underlie beneath these social ‘texts’. It did so through using the ancient Qaallu Institution of the Oromo of East and Horn of Africa as analytical device. Multi-disciplinary approach that combined concepts from various disciples was adopted as a guiding theoretical framework, while the Eurocentric approach that mystifies and de-Ethiopinizes them was rejected. Field data was collected from various sites besides archival data. Informants expert with the local’s social epistemology or wisdom were selected and used as ‘critical friends’. The results revealed both substantive and methodological insights. Substantively, it suggests that the Oromo Qaallu Institution and its sub-themes such as the pre- Christian belief in Black Sky-God, line of descent and identity, kingdomization, pastoral festival, and bovine symbolism crosscutting all of these. Methodologically, the unique Oromo social semiosis which can be referred to as ‘metaplasmic witticism’ appeared as the underlying rhetorical structure.