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In this new volume, Langer, one of the most distinguished scholars writing on Holocaust literature and representation, assesses various literary efforts to establish a place in modern consciousness for the ordeal of those victimized by Nazi Germany's crimes against humanity. Essays discuss the film Life Is Beautiful, the uncritical acclaim of Fragments, the fake memoir by Benjamin Wilkomirski, reasons for the exaggerated importance still given to...
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Identifying who was "inside" and who was "outside" the Soviet/Russian body politic has been a matter of intense and violent urgency, especially in the high Stalinist and post-Soviet periods. It is a theme encountered prominently in film. Employing a range of interpretive methods practiced in Russian/Soviet film studies, Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema highlights the varied ways that Russian and Soviet cinema constructed otherness and foreignness....
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Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, best known for his writings on the Holocaust, is also the accomplished author of novels, essays, tales, and plays as well as portraits of seminal figures in Jewish life and experience. In this volume, leading scholars in the fields of Biblical, Rabbinic, Hasidic, Holocaust, and literary studies offer fascinating and innovative analyses of Wiesel's texts as well as enlightening commentaries on his considerable...
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S. An-Sky's novel dramatizes the dilemmas of Jewish young people in late Tsarist Russia as they strive to throw off their traditional religious upbringing to adopt a secular and modern identity. The action unfolds in the town of M. in the Pale of Settlement, where an engaging cast of characters wrestles with cultural and social issues. Their exploits culminate in helping a young Jewish woman evade an arranged marriage and a young Russian woman leave...
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Fictional representations of horrific events run the risk of undercutting efforts to verify historical knowledge and may heighten our ability to respond intellectually and ethically to human experiences of devastation. In this captivating study of the epistemological, psychological, and ethical issues underlying Holocaust fiction, Emily Miller Budick examines the subjective experiences of fantasy, projection, and repression manifested in Holocaust...
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Argues that first- and second-generation Jewish American writers had an ambivalent relationship with educational success.
Jewish American immigrants and their children have been stereotyped as exceptional educational achievers, with attendance at prestigious universities leading directly to professional success. In College Bound, Dan Shiffman uses literary accounts to show that American Jews' relationship with education was in fact far more complex....
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Argues that Jewish writers used depictions of Jews as animals to question prevalent notions of Jewish identity.
The Infrahuman explores a little-known aspect in major works of Jewish literature from the period preceding World War II, in which Jewish writers in German, Hebrew, and Yiddish employed figures of animals in pejorative depictions of Jews and Jewish identity. Such depictions are disturbing because they sometimes rival common anti-Semitic...
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While Anne Frank was in hiding during the German Occupation of the Netherlands, she wrote what has become the world's most famous diary. But how could an unknown Jewish girl from Amsterdam be transformed into an international icon? Renowned Dutch scholar David Barnouw investigates the facts and controversies that surround the global phenomenon of Anne Frank. Barnouw highlights the ways in which Frank's life and ultimate fate have been represented,...
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Examines how Jewish women have used poetry to challenge their historical limitations while rewriting their potential futures.
Jewish women have had a fraught relationship with history, struggling for inclusion while resisting their limited role as (re)producers of the future. In Queer Expectations, Zohar Weiman-Kelman shows how Jewish women writers turned to poetry to write new histories, developing "queer expectancy" as a conceptual tool for understanding...
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A Marxist history of Israeli literature, tracing the relations between economic, social, and aesthetic transformations.
Signatures of Struggle offers a unique perspective on Israeli literature, bringing Marxist cultural critique to bear on a field from which it has hitherto been absent. Oded Nir moves beyond the dominant interpretive horizon of Israeli literary criticism: the relation of literature to national ideology. Rather than reproducing the...
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A comprehensive survey of the most important writing to come out of the Holocaust.
Finalist for the 2019 National Jewish Book Award in the Anthologies and Collections Category presented by the Jewish Book Council
Silver Winner for Anthologies, 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards
Writing in Witness is a broad survey of the most important writing about the Holocaust produced by eyewitnesses at the time and soon after. Whether they intended...
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Comprehensive analysis of 220 hours of outtakes that impels us to reexamine our assumptions about a crucial Holocaust documentary.
Claude Lanzmann's 1985 magnum opus, Shoah, is a canonical documentary on the Holocaust-and in film history. Over the course of twelve years, Lanzmann gathered 230 hours of location filming and interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, which he condensed into a 9½-hour film. The unused footage was scattered...
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Sinister tales written since the early twentieth century by the foremost Hebrew authors, including S.Y. Agnon, Leah Goldberg, and Amos Oz, reveal a darkness at the foundation of Hebrew culture. The ghosts of a murdered Talmud scholar and his kidnapped bride rise from their graves for a nocturnal dance of death; a girl hidden by a count in a secret chamber of an Eastern European castle emerges to find that, unbeknownst to her, World War II ended years...
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Surveys the current state of Jewish American and Holocaust literatures as well as approaches to teaching them.
What does it mean to read, and to teach, Jewish American and Holocaust literatures in the early decades of the twenty-first century? New directions and new forms of expression have emerged, both in the invention of narratives and in the methodologies and discursive approaches taken toward these texts. The premise of this book is that despite...
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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,...
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Analyzes audio recordings of interwar Hebrew plays, providing a new model for the use of sound in theater studies.
Possessed Voices tells the intriguing story of a largely unknown collection of audio recordings, which preserve performances of modernist interwar Hebrew plays. Ruthie Abeliovich focuses on four recordings: a 1931 recording of The Eternal Jew (1919/1923), a 1965 recording of The Dybbuk (1922), a 1961 radio play of The Golem (1925), and...
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An in-depth look at Elie Wiesel's writings, from his earliest works to his final novels.
Elie Wiesel (1928—2016) was one of the most important literary voices to emerge from the Holocaust. The Nazis took the lives of most of his family, destroyed the community in which he was raised, and subjected him to ghettoization, imprisonment in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and a death march. It is remarkable not only that Wiesel survived and found a way to...
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The American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company is an enchanting tale set in the silent film era. Beginning in 1915, in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where a Jewish family makes one and two reel silent films, the novel is composed of six chapters, each a discrete silent film in itself.
Joey, the too-beautiful-to-be-a-boy son of moviemaker, Simon, and his actress wife, Hannah, imagines stories that his uncle's camera turns into scenes for their movies. Witness...
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The stories in John J. Clayton's newest collection are luminous, expressing a struggle to see growth and meaning in life as much as possible. Nearly all focus on family, and the characters, most of them Jewish, grapple with questions of living, dying, loving, and worshipping. Clayton has published several novels, including Mitzvah Man (TTUP, 2011), but he is best known for his critically-acclaimed short fiction, which has been included in O. Henry...
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An authoritative biography of the dean of American proletarian writers during the interwar years.
Jewish American Communist writer and cultural figure Michael Gold (1893—1967) was a key progressive author of his generation, yet today his work is too often forgotten. A novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, journalist, and editor, Gold was the leading advocate of leftist, proletarian literature in the United States between the two world wars. His...