The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature

The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature
Author :
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Total Pages : 168
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780253059420
ISBN-13 : 0253059429
Rating : 4/5 (20 Downloads)

Synopsis The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature by : Marina Zilbergerts

The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature argues that the institution of the yeshiva and its ideals of Jewish textual study played a seminal role in the resurgence of Hebrew literature in modern times. Departing from the conventional interpretation of the origins of Hebrew literature in secular culture, Marina Zilbergerts points to the practices and metaphysics of Talmud study as its essential animating forces. Focusing on the early works and personal histories of founding figures of Hebrew literature, from Moshe Leib Lilienblum to Chaim Nachman Bialik, The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature reveals the lasting engagement of modern Jewish letters with the hallowed tradition of rabbinic learning.

American Hebrew Literature

American Hebrew Literature
Author :
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
Total Pages : 0
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0815632517
ISBN-13 : 9780815632511
Rating : 4/5 (17 Downloads)

Synopsis American Hebrew Literature by : Michael Weingrad

Over the last one hundred years, the story of Jews in the United States has been, by and large, one of successful and enthusiastic Americanization. Hundreds of thousands of Jews began the twentieth century as new arrivals in a foreign land yet soon became shapers and definers of American culture itself. One of the clearest expressions of this transformation has been the quick linguistic march of immigrant Jews and their children from Yiddish to English. In this book, Michael Weingrad presents a counter history of American Jewish culture, one that tells the story of literature written by a group whose core identity was neither American nor Jewish American. These writers were ardently and nationalistically Jewish and, despite adopting a new country, their linguistic and cultural allegiance was to the Hebrew language. Producing poetry, short fiction, novels, essays, and journals, these writers sought to express a Jewish cultural nationalism through literature. Weingrad explores Hebrew literature in the United States from the emergence of a group of writers connected with the Hebraist movement in the early twentieth century to the present. Radically expanding and challenging our conceptions of American and Jewish identities in literature, the author offers wide-ranging cultural analyses and thoughtful readings of key works. American Hebrew Literature restores a lost piece of the canvas of Hebrew literature and Jewish culture in the twentieth century and invites readers to reimagine Jewish American writers of our own time.

The Hebrew Bible as Literature: A Very Short Introduction

The Hebrew Bible as Literature: A Very Short Introduction
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Total Pages : 129
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780199910472
ISBN-13 : 0199910472
Rating : 4/5 (72 Downloads)

Synopsis The Hebrew Bible as Literature: A Very Short Introduction by : Tod Linafelt

The Hebrew Bible, or Christian Old Testament, contains some of the finest literature that we have. This biblical literature has a place not only in the synagogue or the church but also among the classics of world literature. The stories of Jacob and David, for instance, present the earliest surviving examples of literary characters whose development the reader follows over the length of a lifetime. Elsewhere, as in the books of Esther or Ruth, readers find a snapshot of a particular, fraught moment that will define the character. The Hebrew Bible also provides quite a few high points of lyric poetry, from the praise and lament of the Psalms to the double entendres in the love of poetry of the Song of Songs. In short, the Bible can be celebrated not only as religious literature but, quite simply, as literature. This book offers a thorough and lively introduction to the Bible's two primary literary modes, narrative and poetry, foregrounding the nuances of plot, character, metaphor, structure and design, and intertextual allusions. Tod Linafelt thus gives readers the tools to fully experience and appreciate the Old Testament's literary achievement. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The Object of Jewish Literature

The Object of Jewish Literature
Author :
Publisher : Yale University Press
Total Pages : 278
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780300234114
ISBN-13 : 0300234112
Rating : 4/5 (14 Downloads)

Synopsis The Object of Jewish Literature by : Barbara E. Mann

A history of modern Jewish literature that explores our enduring attachment to the book as an object With the rise of digital media, the "death of the book” has been widely discussed. But the physical object of the book persists. Here, through the lens of materiality and objects, Barbara E. Mann tells a history of modern Jewish literature, from novels and poetry to graphic novels and artists’ books. Bringing contemporary work on secularism and design in conversation with literary history, she offers a new and distinctive frame for understanding how literary genres emerge. The long twentieth century, a period of tremendous physical upheaval and geographic movement, witnessed the production of a multilingual canon of writing by Jewish authors. Literature’s objecthood is felt not only in the physical qualities of books—bindings, covers, typography, illustrations—but also through the ways in which materiality itself became a practical foundation for literary expression.

The Anthology in Jewish Literature

The Anthology in Jewish Literature
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Total Pages : 361
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780195350241
ISBN-13 : 0195350243
Rating : 4/5 (41 Downloads)

Synopsis The Anthology in Jewish Literature by : David Stern

The anthology is a ubiquitous presence in Jewish literature--arguably its oldest literary genre, going back to the Bible itself, and including nearly all the canonical texts of Judaism: the Mishnah, the Talmud, classical midrash, and the prayerbook. In the Middle Ages, the anthology became the primary medium in Jewish culture for recording stories, poems, and interpretations of classical texts. In modernity, the genre is transformed into a decisive instrument for cultural retrieval and re-creation, especially in works of the Zionist project and in modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature. No less importantly, the anthology has played an indispensable role in the creation of significant fields of research in Jewish studies, including Hebrew poetry, folklore, and popular culture. This volume is the first book to bring together scholarly and critical essays that investigate the anthological character of these works and what might be called the "anthological habit" in Jewish literary culture--the tendency and proclivity for gathering together discrete, sometimes conflicting traditions and stories, and preserving them side by side as though there were no difference, conflict, or ambiguity between them. Indeed, The Anthology in Jewish Literature is the first book to recognize this habit and genre as one of the formative categories in Jewish literature and to investigate its manifold roles. The seventeen essays, each of which focuses on a specific literary work, many of them the great classics of Jewish tradition, consider such questions as: What are the many types of anthologies? How have anthologists, editors, even printers of anthologies been creative shapers of Jewish tradition and culture? What can we learn from their editorial practices? How have politics, gender, and class figured into the making of anthologies? What determinative role has the anthology played in creating the Jewish canon? How has the anthology served, especially in the modern period, to create and recreate Jewish culture. This landmark volume will interest educated laypersons as well as scholars in all areas of Jewish literature and culture, as well as students of world literature and cultural studies.

Hurban

Hurban
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 308
Release :
ISBN-10 : STANFORD:36105011818437
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (37 Downloads)

Synopsis Hurban by : Alan L. Mintz

A study of the history of Jewish exiles and genocide, and the literary expressions that attempt to make sense of these catastrophes. In this book Alan Mintz devotes a chapter each to selected catastrophic events and the literary response to them: for example, the destruction of the First Temple in 587 B.B.E. and the resulting biblical literature; the massacre of the Rhineland Jewish community by the Crusades in 1096 and synagogue poetry; and the pogroms in Russia and modern Hebrew poetry. These earlier responses are then compared to the treatment of the Holocaust in the Hebrew literature of the State of Israel with special attention given to the works of Uri Zvi Greenberg and Aharon Appelfeld. Deeply felt and highly original, Hurban is a revealing study of an exceptionally rich literature in the context of an unavoidably tragic history.

Modern Hebrew Literature

Modern Hebrew Literature
Author :
Publisher : Behrman House, Inc
Total Pages : 420
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0874412358
ISBN-13 : 9780874412352
Rating : 4/5 (58 Downloads)

Synopsis Modern Hebrew Literature by : Robert Alter

"Mendele Mocher Sforim. Shem and Japheth on the train.--Peretz, Y. L. Scenes from Limbo.--Feierberg, M. Z. In the evening.--Ahad Ha-Am. Imitation and assimilation.--Bialik, H. N. The short Friday. Revealment and concealment in language.--Brenner, Y. H. The way out.--Barash, A. At heaven's gate.--Agnon, S. Y. Agunot. The lady and the peddler. At the outset of the day. Forevermore.--Hazaz, H. Rahamim. The sermon.--Yizhar, S. The prisoner.--Amichai, Y. The times my father died.--Oz, A. Before his time.--Yehoshua, A. B. Facing the forests."

Hebrew Gothic

Hebrew Gothic
Author :
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Total Pages : 328
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780253042293
ISBN-13 : 0253042291
Rating : 4/5 (93 Downloads)

Synopsis Hebrew Gothic by : Karen Grumberg

“Makes a persuasive argument” that gothic ideas “play a vital role in how Hebrew writers have confronted history, culture, and politics.” —Robert Alter, author of Hebrew and Modernity 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 earlier; a man recounts the act of incest that would shape a trajectory of personal and national history. Reading these works together with central British and American gothic texts, Karen Grumberg illustrates that modern Hebrew literature has regularly appropriated key gothic ideas to help conceptualize the Jewish relationship to the past and, more broadly, to time. She explores why these authors were drawn to the gothic, originally a European mode associated with antisemitism, and how they use it to challenge assumptions about power and powerlessness, vulnerability and violence, and to shape modern Hebrew culture. Grumberg provides an original perspective on Hebrew literary engagement with history and sheds new light on the tensions that continue to characterize contemporary Israeli cultural and political rhetoric.

The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature

The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 339
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781317420880
ISBN-13 : 1317420888
Rating : 4/5 (80 Downloads)

Synopsis The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature by : Neta Stahl

Demonstrating the pervasive presence of God in modern Hebrew literature, this book explores the qualities that twentieth-century Hebrew writers attributed to the divine, and examines their functions against the simplistic dichotomy between religious and secular literature. The volume follows both chronological and thematic paths, offering a panoramic and multilayered analysis of the various strategies in which modern Hebrew writers, from the turn of the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century pursued in their attempt to represent the divine in the face of metaphysical, theological, and representational challenges. Modern Hebrew literature emerged during the nineteenth century as part of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) movement, which attempted to break from the traditional modes of Jewish intellectual and social life. The Hebrew literature that arose in this period embraced the rebellious nature of the Haskalah and is commonly characterized as secular in nature, defying Orthodoxy and rejecting God. Nevertheless, this volume shows that modern Hebrew literature relied on traditional narratological and poetic norms in its attempt to represent God. Despite its self-declared secularity, it engaged deeply with traditional problems such as the nature of God, divine presence, and theodicy. Examining these radical changes, this volume is a key text for scholars and students of modern Hebrew literature, Jewish studies and the intersection of religion and literature.

The Oxford Handbook of the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible

The Oxford Handbook of the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages : 610
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780190261160
ISBN-13 : 0190261161
Rating : 4/5 (60 Downloads)

Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible by : Brad E. Kelle

"The Oxford Handbook of the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible offers 36 essays on the so-called "Historical Books": Joshua, Judges, 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings, Ezra-Nehemiah, and 1-2 Chronicles. The essays are organized around four nodes: contexts, content, approaches, and reception. Each essay takes up two questions: (1) what does the topic/area/issue have to do with the Historical Books?" and (2) how does this topic/area/issue help readers better interpret the Historical Books?" The essays engage traditional theories and newer updates to the same, and also engage the textual traditions themselves which are what give rise to compositional analyses. Many essays model approaches that move in entirely different ways altogether, however, whether those are by attending to synchronic, literary, theoretical, or reception aspects of the texts at hand. The contributions range from text-critical issues to ancient historiography, state formation and development, ancient Near Eastern contexts, society and economy, political theory, violence studies, orality, feminism, postcolonialism, and trauma theory-among others. Taken together, these essays well represent the variety of options available when it comes to gathering, assessing, and interpreting these particular biblical books"--