How does recent scholarship on ethnicity and race speak to the Jewish dimension of James Joyce’s writing? What light has Joyce himself already cast on the complex question of their relationship? This book poses these questions in terms of models of the other drawn from psychoanalytic and cultural studies and from Jewish cultural studies, arguing that in Joyce the emblematic figure of otherness is "the Jew.” The work of Emmanuel Levinas, Sander Gilman, Gillian Rose, Homi Bhabha, among others, is brought to bear on the literature, by Jews and non-Jews alike, that has forged the representation of Jews and Judaism in this century. Joyce was familiar with this literature, like that of Theodor Herzl. Joyce sholarship has largely neglected even these sources, however, including Max Nordau, who contributed significantly to the philosophy of Zionism, and the literature on the "psychobiology” of race--so prominent in the fin de siècle--all of which circulates around and through Joyce’s depictions of Jews and Jewishness. Several Joyce scholars have shown the significance of the concept of the other for Joyce’s work and, more recently, have employed a variety of approaches from within contemporary deliberations of the ideology of race, gender, and nationality to illuminate its impact. The author combines these approaches to demonstrate how any modern characterization of otherness must be informed by historical representations of "the Jew” and, consequently, by the history of anti-Semitism. She does so through a thematics and poetics of Jewishness that together form a discourse and method for Joyce’s novel.

Nadel examines Joyce's identification with the dislocated Jew after his exodus from Ireland and analyzes the influence which Rabbinical hermeneutics and Judaic textuality had on his language. Biographical and historical information is used as well as Joyce's texts and critical theory.

Representations of 'the Jew' have long been a topic of interest in Joyce studies. Neil Davison argues that Joyce's lifelong encounter with pseudo-scientific, religious and political discourse about 'the Jew' forms a unifying component of his career. Davison offers new biographical material, and presents a detailed reading of Ulysses showing how Joyce draws on Christian folklore, Dreyfus Affair propaganda, Sinn Fein politics, and theories of Jewish sexual perversion and financial conspiracy. Throughout, Joyce confronts the controversy of 'race', the psychology of internalised stereotype, and the contradictions of fin-de-siècle anti-Semitism.

James Joyce's Leopold Bloom--the atheistic Everyman of Ulysses, son of a Hungarian Jewish father and an Irish Protestant mother--may have turned the world's literary eyes on Dublin, but those who look to him for history should think again. He could hardly have been a product of the city's bona fide Jewish community, where intermarriage with outsiders was rare and piety was pronounced. In Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce, a leading economic historian tells the real story of how Jewish Ireland--and Dublin's Little Jerusalem in particular--made ends meet from the 1870s, when the first Lithuanian Jewish immigrants landed in Dublin, to the late 1940s, just before the community began its dramatic decline. In 1866--the year Bloom was born--Dublin's Jewish population hardly existed, and on the eve of World War I it numbered barely three thousand. But this small group of people quickly found an economic niche in an era of depression, and developed a surprisingly vibrant web of institutions. In a richly detailed, elegantly written blend of historical, economic, and demographic analysis, Cormac Ó Gráda examines the challenges this community faced. He asks how its patterns of child rearing, schooling, and cultural and religious behavior influenced its marital, fertility, and infant-mortality rates. He argues that the community's small size shaped its occupational profile and influenced its acculturation; it also compromised its viability in the long run. Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce presents a fascinating portrait of a group of people in an unlikely location who, though small in number, comprised Ireland's most resilient immigrant community until the Celtic Tiger's immigration surge of the 1990s.

This dissertation attempts to extend the work of other scholars who have explored James Joyce's interest in Judaism (Ira Nadel's Joyce and the Jews, Neil Davison's James Joyce 'Ulysses' and the Construction of Jewish Identity and Marilyn Reizbaum's James Joyce's Judaic Other). I focus on aspects of his engagement with Jewish life and more especially the Jewish religion that have not received the attention they deserve by these and other scholars. To that end, I discuss his engagement with the tradition of ghetto-writing as found in German in the works of Leopold Sacher-Masoch and developed in English in those of Israel Zangwill. I offer the most detailed account to date of his knowledge of Jewish Biblical hermeneutics. Frederic Farrar's Life and Work of St. Paul (1879) is highlighted for the first time as an important source of Jewish knowledge for Joyce. The importance of midrashic hermeneutics to an understanding of Finnegans Wake and its notebooks, is discussed in detail. Particular attention is paid to his use of certain types of word play, gematriya, notarikon and multilingual punning. A particular preoccupation of this dissertation is Joyce's growing interest in Judaism and Jewish religious life as his career progressed. In exploring the reasons for this deepening engagement, I ask what Joyce's interest in Jewish festivals might tell us about his interest in ritual more generally. Here I draw on the work of the sociologist Emile Durkheim and the paediatrician turned psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott. The references to Jewish religious observances, race and the rituals of Passover and Tabernacles in Joyce's latter works are discussed in the light of recent scholarship by a range of Joyceans, including Len Platt and Vincent Cheng.

A unique, positive collection of essays profiles a number of forgotten female Jewish leaders who played key roles in various American social and political movements, from suffrage and birth control to civil rights and fair labor practices.

“Delightful and darkly magical. Julia Fine has written a beautiful modern myth, a coming-of-age story for a girl with a worrisome power over life and death. I loved it.” —Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry Finalist for the Bram Stoker Superior Achievement in a First Novel Award • Shortlisted for the Chicago Review of Books Best Novel Prize • A Bustle Unmissable Debut of the Year • A Popsugar Best Book of the Year • A Washington Post Best Fantasy Book of May • A Refinery 29 Best May Book • A Chicago Review of Books Best May Book • A Verge Gripping Fantasy Novel of May In this darkly funny, striking debut, a highly unusual young woman must venture into the woods at the edge of her home to remove a curse that has plagued the women in her family for millennia—an utterly original novel with all the mesmerizing power of The Tiger’s Wife, The Snow Child,and Swamplandia! Cursed.Maisie Cothay has never known the feel of human flesh: born with the power to kill or resurrect at her slightest touch, she has spent her childhood sequestered in her family’s manor at the edge of a mysterious forest. Maisie’s father, an anthropologist who sees her as more experiment than daughter, has warned Maisie not to venture into the wood. Locals talk of men disappearing within, emerging with addled minds and strange stories. What he does not tell Maisie is that for over a millennium her female ancestors have also vanished into the wood, never to emerge—for she is descended from a long line of cursed women. But one day Maisie’s father disappears, and Maisie must venture beyond the walls of her carefully constructed life to find him. Away from her home and the wood for the very first time, she encounters a strange world filled with wonder and deception. Yet the farther she strays, the more the wood calls her home. For only there can Maisie finally reckon with her power and come to understand the wildest parts of herself.

A collection of articles, most of them published previously. The following relate, in varying degrees, to the subject of antisemitism in literary circles and in literature: