Jüdische Literatur

This is a translation from Hebrew of renowned author Rachman Chaim's first book and constitutes critique of Israel's institutions and society in general, and of its academic system in particular. It is interspersed with poems and letters that are revealing, and between its lines one can read first-hand authentic outcries that expose the corruption and mediocrity of the academic elite, its discriminatory and racist conduct that suppresses individualism; the trafficking of religion; the injustices of the establishment that keep people under militaristic oppression; and a proposal for a different way of thinking in a brainwashed society that is headed for perdition.The author is a retired faculty member from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Rachman Chaim was born (1953) in Esfahan, Iran, and grew up in Tehran. He immigrated as a youngster to Israel (1968) and was educated at the Alonei Yitskhak Youth Aliyah Boarding School. He was a soldier during the Yom Kippur War. Throughout his professional life as a materials scientist, he lived in the US for several periods of time. He has published more than 125 scientific papers in peer reviewed journals. Since 2014 he has published 16 books, among them three of his own political poems as well as Hebrew translations of Classic Persian poetry, including the Golestan and the Bustan of Saadi, and the Divans of Hafez, Sheikh Bahaei, Obeid Zakani.

Are we ever done leaving home? Acclaimed poet and memoirist David Biespiel tells the story of the rise and fall of his Jewish boyhood in Texas, and his search for the answer to his life's central riddle.After a near-forty-year exile, Biespiel returns for a day to the world he left behind as a different person. He creates a moving meditation on the meaning of home, uncovering bittersweet realities of age, youth, and family with tenderness and devastating honesty.Robert Pinsky writes, "In the great American tradition of improvised cultural makings and unmakings, migration and recurrence, David Biespiel unfolds our national quest onto an unexpected terrain: a decidedly Texan and traditionally Jewish neighborhood of Houston. A surprising, heartbreaking and inspiring story."

The first detailed reference and critical guide to Anglo-Jewish writing. It offers accurate and up-to-date information on its subjects, as well as expert summaries and criticism of their works. Baker and Shumaker offer a comprehensive view of many important poets, dramatists, fiction and nonfiction writers, literary critics and other scholars.

The poems of Marc Kaminsky's The Stones of Lifta address the heartbreak of a history torqued and twisted by fear and hatred, but this poet's heart remains unbroken, alive, responsive, and attuned to a painful dissonance. He consents, humbly and bravely, to abide with the suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians, to align himself with both his heritage and his empathy, so that the indissoluble contradictions of that conflict become, ultimately, nothing less than the paradox at the heart of being fully, vulnerably, honestly human. -Richard HoffmanSample:HINANIUnworthy as I am, when I sawfootage of my friend Menachem climbing beneaththe Jerusalem hills with an old man-a displaced person-an Arabwho guided him into the ruins of his homein Lifta, I felt somethingbecome as clear and actual to meas if for one pulse beat I hearda voice speaking to my heart.Call it the divine, it is the voice that callsto us once or twice in a lifetime.We recognize it immediately and answer, Here I am,for we remember it from beforewe were born, and remain ready all our lives to gowhere it sends us. It spoke clearlyand distinctly as I sat with Menachemin my Brooklyn office, watchinghis unfinished film, it said to me, Goto Lifta, accompany your friend to the emptied villageof Lifta, walk beside him as he treads carefullyaround the boulder that blocks the winding path up to Lifta.

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Middle Eastern Studies. Religion & Spirituality. In WINGS, Israeli poet Amir Or's thirteenth book of poetry, transcendence is not a flight from the concrete intimacy of history and experience, but an opening within it, an interrogation of its baffling sweep, its beauty and its violence, that reveals, in the heart of unity, a profound multiplicity, the community of love, and the endless labor of birth. In these poems, we hear the sky speak with a music that seems to be wrought of hard roads, and vice versa: we see heaven and earth as shimmering mirages of each other, and the pilgrim's journey beyond time, towards liberation, as the secret heart of both. This bilingual edition follows WINGS with an encore, the brief Basho-like sequence Travelog, both translated by poet Seth Michelson. It also includes explanatory notes and an insightful critical afterword by the translator, and an interview with Amir Or by Nevena Milojevi¿.

This book collects twenty two previously published essays and one new one by Erich S. Gruen who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. His many articles on this subject have, however, appeared mostly in conference volumes and Festschriften, and have therefore not had wide circulation. By putting them together in a single work, this will bring the essays to the attention of a much broader scholarly readership and make them more readily available to students in the fields of ancient history and early Judaism. The pieces are quite varied, but develop a number of connected and related themes: Jewish identity in the pagan world, the literary representations by Jews and pagans of one another, the interconnections of Hellenism and Judaism, and the Jewish experience under Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman empire.

The Edward Lewis Wallant Award was founded by the family of Dr. Irving and Fran Waltman in 1963 and is supported by the University of Hartford’s Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies. It is given annually to an American writer, preferably early in his or her career, whose fiction is considered significant for American Jews. In The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction, editors Victoria Aarons, Avinoam J. Patt, and Mark Shechner, who have all served as judges for the award, present vital, original, and wide-ranging fiction by writers whose work has been considered or selected for the award. The resulting collection highlights the exemplary place of the Wallant Award in Jewish literature. With a mix of stories and novel chapters, The New Diaspora reprints selections of short fiction from such well-known writers as Rebecca Goldstein, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dara Horn, and Julie Orringer. The first half of the anthology presents pieces by winners of the Wallant award, focusing on the best work of recent winners. The New Diaspora’s second half reflects the evolving landscape of American Jewish fiction over the last fifty years, as many authors working in America are not American by birth, and their fiction has become more experimental in nature. Pieces in this section represent authors with roots all over the world—including Russia (Maxim Shrayer, Nadia Kalman, and Lara Vapnyar), Latvia (David Bezmozgis), South Africa (Tony Eprile), Canada (Robert Majzels), and Israel (Avner Mandelman, who now lives in Canada). This collection offers an expanded canon of Jewish writing in North America and foregrounds a vision of its variety, its uniqueness, its cosmopolitanism, and its evolving perspectives on Jewish life. It celebrates the continuing vitality and fresh visions of contemporary Jewish writing, even as it highlights its debt to history and embrace of collective memory. Readers of contemporary American fiction and Jewish cultural history will find The New Diaspora enlightening and deeply engaging.

Author Michael Chabon is acutely attuned to life in contemporary America, providing insight into the history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in novels such as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), Wonder Boys (1995), and Telegraph Avenue (2012). The Pulitzer prize–winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon follows in the footsteps of past stylists, writing across multiple genres that include young-adult literature, essays, and screenplays. Despite his broad success, however, Chabon’s work has not been adequately examined from a critical perspective.Michael Chabon’s America: Magical Words, Secret Worlds, and Sacred Spaces is the first scholarly collection of essays analyzing the work of the acclaimed author. This book demonstrates how Chabon uses a broad range of styles and genres, including detective and comic book fiction, to define the American experience. These essays assess and analyze Chabon’s complete oeuvre, demonstrating his deep connection to the contemporary world and his place as a literary force.Providing a context for understanding the author’s work from cultural, historical, and stylistic perspectives, Michael Chabon’s America is a valuable study of a celebrated author whose work deserves close examination.

Many Jewish artists and writers contributed to the creation of popular comics and graphic novels, and in The Quest for Jewish Belief and Identity in the Graphic Novel, Stephen E. Tabachnick takes readers on an engaging tour of graphic novels that explore themes of Jewish identity and belief.The creators of Superman (Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster), Batman (Bob Kane and Bill Finger), and the Marvel superheroes (Stan Lee and Jack Kirby), were Jewish, as was the founding editor of Mad magazine (Harvey Kurtzman). They often adapted Jewish folktales (like the Golem) or religious stories (such as the origin of Moses) for their comics, depicting characters wrestling with supernatural people and events. Likewise, some of the most significant graphic novels by Jews or about Jewish subject matter deal with questions of religious belief and Jewish identity. Their characters wrestle with belief - or nonbelief - in God, as well as with their own relationship to the Jews, the historical role of the Jewish people, the politics of Israel, and other issues related to Jewish identity.In The Quest for Jewish Belief and Identity in the Graphic Novel, Stephen E. Tabachnick delves into the vivid kaleidoscope of Jewish beliefs and identities, ranging from Orthodox belief to complete atheism, and a spectrum of feelings about identification with other Jews. He explores graphic novels at the highest echelon of the genre by more than thirty artists and writers, among them Harvey Pekar (American Splendor), Will Eisner (A Contract with God), Joann Sfar (The Rabbi’s Cat), Miriam Katin (We Are On Our Own), Art Spiegelman (Maus), J. T. Waldman (Megillat Esther), Aline Kominsky Crumb (Need More Love), James Sturm (The Golem’s Mighty Swing), Leela Corman (Unterzakhn), Ari Folman and David Polonsky (Waltz with Bashir), David Mairowitz and Robert Crumb’s biography of Kafka, and many more. He also examines the work of a select few non- Jewish artists, such as Robert Crumb and Basil Wolverton, both of whom have created graphic adaptations of parts of the Hebrew Bible.Among the topics he discusses are graphic novel adaptations of the Bible; the Holocaust graphic novel; graphic novels about the Jews in Eastern and Western Europe and Africa, and the American Jewish immigrant experience; graphic novels about the lives of Jewish women; the Israel-centered graphic novel; and the Orthodox graphic novel.The book concludes with an extensive bibliography.No study of Jewish literature and art today can be complete without a survey of the graphic novel, and scholars, students, and graphic novel fans alike will delight in Tabachnick’s guide to this world of thought, sensibility, and artfulness.

In this collection of literary portraits, Jules Chametzky shares his recollections of more than forty notable Jewish writers, from Alfred Kazin to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Grace Paley, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Cynthia Ozick, Leslie Fiedler, Tillie Olsen, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, Joseph Brodsky, and Amos Oz-to name a few. Also included are cameo appearances by non-Jewish authors, such as James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Jose Yglesias. Not only do these various writers emerge as interesting and often complicated human beings, but Chametzky reveals himself to be a warm and gracious storyteller.