A rich and provocative overview of Jewish American poetry.

The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry collects more than 200 poems by over 100 poets to celebrate contemporary writers, born after World War II, who write about Jewish themes. In bringing together poets whose writings explore cultural Jewish topics with those who directly address Jewish religious themes as well as those who only indirectly touch on their Jewishness, this anthology offers a fascinating insight into what it is to be a Jewish poet. Featuring established poets as well as representatives of the next generation of Jewish voices, included are poems by, among others, Ellen Bass, Jane Hirshfield, Ed Hirsch, David Lehman, Charles Bernstein, Carol V. Davis, Judith Skillman, Jacqueline Osherow, Alan Shapiro, Ira Sadoff, Melissa Stein, Matthew Zapruder, Philip Schultz, and Jane Shore.

A collection of Jewish-American literature written by various authors between 1656 and 1990.

A collection of "more than two hundred poems by American Jewish poets on Jewish subjects and themes."--Jacket.

Singing in a Strange Land explores how the history and cultural conditions of Jewish poetry and poetic production—from the destruction of the Second Temple and Babylonian exile to medieval Spain, the Nazi Holocaust, the contemporary Gulf War, and the second Palestinian intifada—have shaped "Jewish American poetry"; and, through analyses of important poems by significant Jewish American poets, how they shape Jewish American cultural identity.

CHOICE 1997 Outstanding Academic Books Analyzing a wide array of Jewish-American fiction on Israel, Andrew Furman explores the evolving relationship between the Israeli and American Jew. He devotes individual chapters to eight Jewish-American writers who have "imagined" Israel substantially in one or more of their works. In doing so, he gauges the impact of the Jewish state in forging the identity of the American Jewish community and the vision of the Jewish-American writer. Furman devotes individual chapters to Meyer Levin, Leon Uris, Saul Bellow, Hugh Nissenson, Chaim Potok, Philip Roth, Anne Roiphe, and Tova Reich. To chart the evolution of the Jewish-American relationship with Israel from pre-statehood until the present, he considers works from 1928 to 1995, examining them in their historical and political contexts. The writers Furman examines address the central issues which have linked and divided the American and Israeli Jewish communities: the role of Israel as both safe haven and spiritual core for Jews everywhere pitted against its secularism, militarism, and entrenched sexism. While the writers Furman examines depict contrasting images of the Middle East, the very persistence of Israel in occupying that imagination reveals, above all, how prominent a role Israel played and continues to play in shaping the Jewish-American identity.

This History offers an unparalleled examination of all aspects of Jewish American literature. Jewish writing has played a central role in the formation of the national literature of the United States, from the Hebraic sources of the Puritan imagination to narratives of immigration and acculturation. This body of writing has also enriched global Jewish literature in its engagement with Jewish history and Jewish multilingual culture. Written by a host of leading scholars, The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature offers an array of approaches that contribute to current debates about ethnic writing, minority discourse, transnational literature, gender studies, and multilingualism. This History takes a fresh look at celebrated authors, introduces new voices, locates Jewish American literature on the map of American ethnicity as well as the spaces of exile and diaspora, and stretches the boundaries of American literature beyond the Americas and the West.

For more than two hundred years, Jews have played important roles in the development of American literature. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature addresses a wide array of themes and approaches to the distinct yet multifaceted body of Jewish American literature. Essays examine writing from the 1700s to major contemporary writers such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Topics covered include literary history, immigration and acculturation, Yiddish and Hebrew literature, popular culture, women writers, literary theory and poetics, multilingualism, the Holocaust, and contemporary fiction. This collection of specially commissioned essays by leading figures discusses Jewish American literature in relation to ethnicity, religion, politics, race, gender, ideology, history, and ethics, and places it in the contexts of both Jewish and American writing. With its chronology and guides to further reading, this volume will prove valuable to scholars and students alike.

This remarkable volume introduces what is probably the most coherent segment of twentieth-century American literature not written in English. Includes a bilingual facing-page format, notes and biographies of poets, and selections from Yiddish theory and criticism.

In this splendid poetry collection, Reading the Infinite, the Mexican Jewish poet Jenny Asse Chayo meditates on the relationships among God, man and the written word. From ever-changing vantage points: this poetry is focused on the acts of reading and writing about the Jewish Bible; God writes; Man reads what God has written. Man writes; and here, God reads what Man has written. The eternal themes of Jewish existence are reconfigured through Jenny Asse Chayo's verse. She ponders the nature of God, faith, light and darkness, the wandering in the wilderness, exile, life in the Diaspora, return and redemption. In some poems, well-known stories from Genesis are reworked and become like Midrashim or biblical interpretations in the style of the Talmudists, but always with a modern twist. This is a book about reading and writing about the divine; the reader, whether religious or not, is drawn in, feeling the need to meditate on or argue with a premise, a line or even the use of an individual word. Reading the Infinite promotes a deeper spiritually among the devout of any religion and even provokes those who usually don't think about these topics. Many poems here should be read as prayers, be they by an individual or in a synagogue service. Some would not be out of place in a church or a mosque.The English translations are by Stephen A. Sadow and J. Kates. The poetry, in the original Spanish.is also included