Agnon's Moonstruck Lovers

Agnon's Moonstruck Lovers PDF

Author: Ilana Pardes

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2013-11-26

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0295804777

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Agnon's Moonstruck Lovers explores the response of Israel’s Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon to the privileged position of the Song of Songs in Israeli culture. Standing at a unique crossroads between religion and secularism, Agnon probes the paradoxes and ambiguities of the Zionist hermeneutic project. In adopting the Song, Zionist interpreters sought to return to the erotic, pastoral landscapes of biblical times. Their quest for a new, uplifting, secular literalism, however, could not efface the haunting impact of allegorical configurations of love. With superb irony, Agnon's tales recast Israeli biblicism as a peculiar chapter within the ever-surprising history of biblical exegesis.

Unsettling Jewish Knowledge

Unsettling Jewish Knowledge PDF

Author: Anne C. Dailey

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2023-09-08

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1512824313

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Spanning the fields of literature, history, philosophy, and theology, Unsettling Jewish Knowledge adopts a fresh approach to the study of Jewish thought and culture. By creatively foregrounding the role of emotions, senses, and the imagination in Jewish experience, the book invites readers to consider what it means for Jewish identity and experience to be constituted outside the frameworks of reasoned thought and inquiry. The collection's eight essays offer innovative and provocative approaches to a diverse array of topics including modern Jewish-Christian relations, the book of Isaiah, contemporary Jewish fiction, and philosophical meditations on Jewish law. Their bold interpretations of Jewish texts and histories are centered on questions of faith, loss, prejudice, and enchantment--and the darker implications of these questions. The book's essays also illuminate the importance of desire as a key motivating force in the pursuit of knowledge. Weaving together insights from several disciplines, Unsettling Jewish Knowledge challenges us to grapple with the unexpected, the unconventional, and the uncomfortable aspects of Jewish experience and its representations. Contributors: Anne C. Dailey, John Efron, Yael S. Feldman, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Martin Kavka, Lital Levy, Shaul Magid, Eva Mroczek, Paul E. Nahme, Eli Schonfeld, Shira Stav.

Agnon’s Story

Agnon’s Story PDF

Author: Avner Falk

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-10-22

Total Pages: 773

ISBN-13: 9004367780

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The Hebrew writer S. Y. Agnon won the Nobel prize in literature in 1966. Hundreds of literary studies and one Hebrew-language biography have been published about him. This is the first complete psychoanalytic biography in any language.

Postmodern Love in the Contemporary Jewish Imagination

Postmodern Love in the Contemporary Jewish Imagination PDF

Author: Efraim Sicher

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-03-17

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1000539091

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Offering a radical critique of contemporary Israeli and diaspora fiction by major writers of the generation after Amos Oz and Philip Roth, this book asks searching questions about identity formation in Jewish spaces in the twenty-first century and posits global, transnational identities instead of the bipolar Israel/diaspora model. The chapters put into conversation major authors such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, and Nathan Englander with their Israeli counterparts Zeruya Shalev, Eshkol Nevo, and Etgar Keret and shows that they share common themes and concerns. Read through a postmodern lens, their preoccupation with failed marriage and failed ideals brings to the fore the crises of home, nation, historical destiny, and collective memory in contemporary secular Jewish culture. At times provocative, at others iconoclastic, this innovative study must be read by anyone concerned with Jewish culture and identity today, whether scholars, students, or the general reader.

Figuring Jerusalem

Figuring Jerusalem PDF

Author: Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-04-22

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 022678746X

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"For two thousand years, Hebrew writers imagined Jerusalem from a distance and used exile as a license for invention. The question at the heart of Figuring Jerusalem is this: how did these writers bring their imagination "home" in the Zionist century? Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, one of our leading scholars of modern Jewish literature, explores the perils of this newly acquired proximity to a people's sacred and inherited resources. Ezrahi finds that the same diasporic procedures-cultic, ethical, and aesthetic-that Hebrew writers practiced in exile were maintained throughout the first half of the twentieth century, even in proximity to the Temple Mount, while Jerusalem was under the successive control of the Ottomans, the British, and then the Jordanians. After 1948, when the state of Israel was founded but East Jerusalem and its holy sites remained under Arab control, Jerusalem continued to figure in the Hebrew imagination as mediated space. But after 1967, all this changed. Over the next half century, the claim to exclusive sovereignty reignited a messianic fervor that had been suppressed in Hebrew culture for two millennia. The temptations and dilemmas of proximity to the sacred would become acute in every area of Hebrew politics and culture. Figuring Jerusalem ranges from classical texts, biblical and medieval, to the post-1967 writings of work of S. Y. Agnon, and the uncrowned poet laureate of Jerusalem, Yehuda Amichai. Ezrahi shows, ultimately, that the wisdom Jews acquired through two thousand years of wandering and exile, as inscribed in their literary imagination, must be rediscovered if the diverse inhabitants of this City are not to slaughter each other once again in the name of an exclusive and vengeful God"--

A City in Fragments

A City in Fragments PDF

Author: Yair Wallach

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2020-06-30

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1503611140

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In the mid-nineteenth century, Jerusalem was rich with urban texts inscribed in marble, gold, and cloth, investing holy sites with divine meaning. Ottoman modernization and British colonial rule transformed the city; new texts became a key means to organize society and subjectivity. Stone inscriptions, pilgrims' graffiti, and sacred banners gave way to street markers, shop signs, identity papers, and visiting cards that each sought to define and categorize urban space and people. A City in Fragments tells the modern history of a city overwhelmed by its religious and symbolic significance. Yair Wallach walked the streets of Jerusalem to consider the graffiti, logos, inscriptions, official signs, and ephemera that transformed the city over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As these urban texts became a tool in the service of capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism, the affinities of Arabic and Hebrew were forgotten and these sister-languages found themselves locked in a bitter war. Looking at the writing of—and literally on—Jerusalem, Wallach offers a creative and expansive history of the city, a fresh take on modern urban texts, and a new reading of the Israel/Palestine conflict through its material culture.

Zionism and Melancholy

Zionism and Melancholy PDF

Author: Nitzan Lebovic

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2019-04-24

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 025304183X

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Nitzan Lebovic claims that political melancholy is the defining trait of a generation of Israelis born between the 1960s and 1990s. This cohort came of age during wars, occupation and intifada, cultural conflict, and the failure of the Oslo Accords. The atmosphere of militarism and conservative state politics left little room for democratic opposition or dissent. Lebovic and others depict the failure to respond not only as a result of institutional pressure but as the effect of a long-lasting "left-wing melancholy." In order to understand its grip on Israeli society, Lebovic turns to the novels and short stories of Israel Zarchi. For him, Zarchi aptly describes the gap between the utopian hope present in Zionism since its early days and the melancholic reality of the present. Through personal engagement with Zarchi, Lebovic develops a philosophy of melancholy and shows how it pervades Israeli society.

The Marriage Plot

The Marriage Plot PDF

Author: Naomi Seidman

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2016-06-22

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0804799628

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For nineteenth-century Eastern European Jews, modernization entailed the abandonment of arranged marriage in favor of the "love match." Romantic novels taught Jewish readers the rules of romance and the choreography of courtship. But because these new conceptions of romance were rooted in the Christian and chivalric traditions, the Jewish embrace of "the love religion" was always partial. In The Marriage Plot, Naomi Seidman considers the evolution of Jewish love and marriage though the literature that provided Jews with a sentimental education, highlighting a persistent ambivalence in the Jewish adoption of European romantic ideologies. Nineteenth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literature tempered romantic love with the claims of family and community, and treated the rules of gender complementarity as comedic fodder. Twentieth-century Jewish writers turned back to tradition, finding pleasures in matchmaking, intergenerational ties, and sexual segregation. In the modern Jewish voices of Sigmund Freud, Erica Jong, Philip Roth, and Tony Kushner, the Jewish heretical challenge to the European romantic sublime has become the central sexual ideology of our time.

The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua

The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua PDF

Author: Yael Halevi-Wise

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2020-12-22

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0271088621

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Once referred to by the New York Times as the “Israeli Faulkner,” A. B. Yehoshua’s fiction invites an assessment of Israel’s Jewish inheritance and the moral and political options that the country currently faces in the Middle East. The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua is an insightful overview of the fiction, nonfiction, and hundreds of critical responses to the work of Israel’s leading novelist. Instead of an exhaustive chronological-biographical account of Yehoshua’s artistic growth, Yael Halevi-Wise calls for a systematic appreciation of the author’s major themes and compositional patterns. Specifically, she argues for reading Yehoshua’s novels as reflections on the “condition of Israel,” constructed multifocally to engage four intersecting levels of signification: psychological, sociological, historical, and historiosophic. Each of the book’s seven chapters employs a different interpretive method to showcase how Yehoshua’s constructions of character psychology, social relations, national history, and historiosophic allusions to traditional Jewish symbols manifest themselves across his novels. The book ends with a playful dialogue in the style of Yehoshua’s masterpiece, Mr. Mani, that interrogates his definition of Jewish identity. Masterfully written, with full control of all the relevant materials, Halevi-Wise’s assessment of Yehoshua will appeal to students and scholars of modern Jewish literature and Jewish studies.