Jewish American Heritage Month

The anthology has been a ubiquitous presence in Jewish literature throughout its history, and has played a seminal role in the creation, transmission, and preservation of Jewish culture since ancient times. This book comprises 18 essays devoted to anthological works in Jewish literature from the Bible to the present.

In this volume--the first complete history of Aramaic from its origins to the present day--Holger Gzella provides an accessible overview of the language perhaps most well known for being spoken by Jesus of Nazareth. Gzella, one of the world's foremost Aramaicists, begins with the earliest evidence of Aramaic in inscriptions from the beginning of the first millennium BCE, then traces its emergence as the first world language when it became the administrative tongue of the great ancient Near Eastern empires. He also pays due diligence to the sacred role of Aramaic within Judaism, its place in the Islamic world, and its contact with other regional languages, before concluding with a glimpse into modern uses of Aramaic.  Although Aramaic never had a unified political or cultural context in which to gain traction, it nevertheless flourished in the Middle East for an extensive period, allowing for widespread cultural exchange between diverse groups of people. In tracing the historical thread of the Aramaic language, readers can also gain a stronger understanding of the rise and fall of civilizations, religions, and cultures in that region over the course of three millennia.  Aramaic: A History of the First World Language is visually supplemented by maps, charts, and other images for an immersive reading experience, providing scholars and casual readers alike with an engaging overview of one of the most consequential world languages in history.

Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought deals with the concept of exile on many levels--from the literal to the metaphorical. It combines analyses of predominantly Jewish authors of Central Europe of the twentieth century who are not usually connected, including Kafka, Kraus, Levi, Lustig, Wiesel, and Frankl. It follows the typical routes that exiled writers took, from East to West and later often as far as America. The concept and forms of exile are analyzed from many different points of view and great importance is devoted especially to the forms of inner exile. In Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought, Bronislava Volková, an exile herself and thus intimately familiar with the topic through her own experience, develops a unique typology of exile that will enrich the field of intellectual and literary history of twentieth-century Europe and America.

The Holocaust is inseparable from the Israeli identities even seven decades following the atrocities during World War II, Israeli daily life is shaped by the horrible crimes committed by the Nazis. This book conceptualizes the intricacies of the Israeli identity in relation to learning German as a foreign language (GFL) in Israel throughout the course of history and the changing conception of Germany.  This book includes an analysis of a selection of twenty-five GFL language books which reflect the stigmatization and tabooization of the Holocaust and also the qualitative analysis of a subject pool of 105 learners of GFL. The author finds that identities are co-constituted by four individualized Thought Styles, a concept borrowed from Ludwik Fleck. Thought Styles capture the individual perspective of the language learner's view of Germany and are categorized in this thesis as German Engineering, Cold Germany, Neo-Nazi Germany, and The Other Germany. The researchdraws from discourse theory, critical psychology, and the oft-overlooked classical theory of Ludwik Fleck. Although the relationship between Germany and Israel has been amicable for the last six decades, the choice for Israelis to learn the language that was used by a nation that once attempted to eradicate the Jewish people is emotive and infinitely complex.

This study investigates six German Jewish writers' negotiation of Jewish-German-Communist identity in post-Holocaust East Germany. This study investigates the negotiation of Jewish-German-Communist identity in post-Holocaust Germany, specifically East Germany. After an introduction to the political-historical context, it highlights the conflicted writings of six East German Jewish writers: Anna Seghers (1900-1983), Stefan Heym (1913-2001), Stephan Hermlin (1915-1997), Jurek Becker (1937-1997), Peter Edel (1921-1983), and Fred Wander (1917-2006). All were Holocaust survivors. All lost family members in the Holocaust. All were important writers who played a leading role in East German cultural life, and all were loyal citizens and committed socialists, although their definitions of and maneuvers regarding Party loyalty differed greatly. Good soldiers, they viewed their writing as contributing to the social-political revolution taking place in East Germany. Informed by Holocaust and trauma studies, as well as psychology and deconstruction, this study looks for moments when Party discipline falters and other, repressed, thoughts and emotions surface, decentering the works. Some recurring questions addressed include: What is the image of Germans? Do the works evidence revenge fantasies? How does the negotiation of ostensibly mutually exclusive identities play out? Is there acknowledgment of the insufficiency of Communist theory to explain antisemitism, as well as recognition of Stalinist or other forms of Communist antisemitism? Although these writers ultimately established themselves in East Germany, attaining positions of privilege and even power, their best works nonetheless evince an acute sense of endangerment and vulnerability; they are documents both created and marked by trauma.

Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity--and the ultimate boundary transgression. Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this pioneering study, Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.

This book details the evolution of Jewish humour, highlighting its long history from the period of the Bible to the present day, and includes a wide spectrum of styles that are expressed in various works and fields, including the Bible, the Talmud, poetry, literature, folklore, jokes, movies, and television series. It focuses upon three socio-geographic regions where the majority of Jewish people lived during the 18th to 21st centuries and where Jewish humor was created, developed and thrived: Eastern Europe, the United States and Israel. The text is a complicated mosaic based on three central components of Jewish life: historical experience, survival, and wisdom. It shows that one cannot understand Jewish humor without referring to the various factors which led the Jewish people to create their unusual sense of humor.

When do you say mazal tov? What is a get, a golem, a kibbutz, a chalutz? What four plant species are waved during prayers on the harvest festival of Sukkot? You'll find answers to these questions and hundreds of others in this remarkable collection of the best known, most loved Hebrew words and phrases in the English speaking world.; From Acharon to Zohar, this informative and often humorous dictionary features over six hundred Hebrew words and expressions arranged in alphabetical order (the Roman alphabet is used throughout, as well as Hebrew head words). The first such guide to Hebrew, this volume is more than a mere lexicon - it is a jubilant celebration of Hebrew itself, a treasure trove of Jewish wit, wisdom, culture, and tradition.

An investigation into the transformation of publishing in the United States from a field in which Jews were systematically excluded to one in which they became ubiquitous   "Readers with an interest in the industry will find plenty of insights."--Publishers Weekly   "From the very first page, this book is funnier and more gripping than a book on publishing has any right to be. Anyone interested in America's intellectual or Jewish history must read this, and anyone looking for an engrossing story should."--Emily Tamkin, author of Bad Jews   In the 1960s and 1970s, complaints about a "Jewish literary mafia" were everywhere. Although a conspiracy of Jews colluding to control publishing in the United States never actually existed, such accusations reflected a genuine transformation from an industry notorious for excluding Jews to one in which they arguably had become the most influential figures.   Josh Lambert examines the dynamics between Jewish editors and Jewish writers; how Jewish women exposed the misogyny they faced from publishers; and how children of literary parents have struggled with and benefited from their inheritances. Drawing on interviews and tens of thousands of pages of letters and manuscripts, The Literary Mafia offers striking new discoveries about celebrated figures such as Lionel Trilling and Gordon Lish, and neglected fiction by writers including Ivan Gold, Ann Birstein, and Trudy Gertler.   In the end, we learn how the success of one minority group has lessons for all who would like to see American literature become more equitable.

New perspectives on the relationship - or the perceived relationship - between the German language and the causes, nature, and legacy of National Socialism and the Shoah. There is seemingly no escaping the association of the language of Goethe with the language of Hitler: the two leaden clichés seem to be inseparable, suggesting a Sonderweg between enlightened sophistication and subtle beauty on the one hand and linguistic barbarism on the other. Victor Klemperer suggested that the Lingua Tertii Imperii was a perversion of German that needed to be purged from the language, but does the notion of "Nazi language" as an identifiably separate entity really hold water, or does it only reflect a desire to construct a clear demarcation line between "Germans" and "Nazis"? What new linguistic, literary, or historical perspectives are availableon the functioning of language during and after the Third Reich? Must German always be the "language of the perpetrators," entailing a constant state of heightened self-awareness or vigilance against contamination, or is neutral,objective speech about National Socialism possible in German? This collection provides new perspectives on the relationship - or the perceived relationship - between the German language in all its manifestations and the causes, nature, and legacy of National Socialism and the Shoah. Contributors: Ian Biddle and Beate Müller, Mary Cosgrove, Peter Davies, Sylvia Degen, Andrea Hammel, Geraldine Horan, Teresa Ludden, Dora Osborne, Marko Pajevic, James Parsons, Simone Schroth, Arvi Sepp, Simon Ward, Jenny Watson. Peter Davies is Professor of Modern German Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Andrea Hammel is Senior Lecturer in German at Aberystwyth University.

In No One's Witness Syd Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi holocaust survivor Paul Celan--"No one / bears witness for the / witness"--to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing. Drawing on black studies, continental philosophy, queer theory, experimental poetics, and work by several writers and artists, Zolf asks what it means to witness from the excessive, incalculable position of No One. In a fragmentary and recursive style that enacts the monstrous speech it pursues, No One's Witness demonstrates the necessity of confronting the Nazi holocaust in relation to transatlantic slavery and its afterlives. Thinking along with black feminist theory's notions of entangled swarm, field, plenum, chorus, No One's Witness interrogates the limits and thresholds of witnessing, its dangerous perhaps. No One operates outside the bounds of the sovereign individual, hauntologically informed by the fleshly no-thingness that has been historically ascribed to blackness and that blackness enacts within, apposite to, and beyond the No One. No One bears witness to becomings beyond comprehension, making and unmaking monstrous forms of entangled future anterior life.

This volume collects original essays on Hungarian-German playwright and screenwriter George Tabori (1914-2007) and his remarkable contributions to the stage. Tabori, a Jewish refugee and a truly transnational author, was best known for his work in New York theater that irreverently explored the Jewish experience, particularly the Holocaust. Although his illustrious career spanned a century, two continents, several languages, and a variety of literary genres, Tabori's work has received scant attention in American letters, in spite of its significance for U.S. theater and Holocaust studies. Until Tabori, most dramas about the Holocaust were either rooted in American domestic realism, striving to create a strong empathetic connection between the audience and Holocaust victims, or featured an unembellished documentary style. Tabori staked out a third position, beyond realism and documentation. The volume brings together the voices of international scholars to provide a comprehensive introduction to Tabori's theater as well as in-depth analyses of his work, discussing all of his major plays. Individual essays address Tabori's postdramatic theater in relation to sacrificial ritual, performance studies, and post-humanist approaches to the contemporary stage, as well as performance aspects of his productions, questions of ethics and aesthetics raised by his theater, and his plays' relation to Holocaust representation in popular culture.

In this comprehensive study Paul Wexler demonstrates that Yiddish is a Slavic language largely relexified to genuine and artificial German and Hebrew, as a cryptic language of trade in the Khazar Empire in the 9-10th centuries for the use of multilingual Jewish merchants, who enjoyed special privileges on the Afro-Eurasian Silk Roads until the 13th century. Other Judaized trade languages (Turkic, Chinese, Arabic) were also coined at this time in the Khazar and Iranian Empires. In both empires, Yiddish absorbed over 5,000 overt influ-ences mainly from Judaized Persian, and secondarily from Judaized Turkic and Chinese. Yiddish mainly has Hebraisms wherever Persian employs Arabisms (but has almost no overt Arabisms) and preserves Asianisms with greater accuracy and volume than most Iranianized non-Jewish target languages. Until c. 1000, almost all Jews in the world resided in the Iranian Empire and were mainly of Iranian and only partly of Palestinian Judaean descent. Conversion to Judaism was common among Iranians, Turks, Slavs and Berbers (because of a desire to participate in the lucrative Silk Road trade dominated by Jews, and to escape the status of slavery often imposed on them); conversion led to the rise of new diverse Jewish "ethnicities" and forms of Judaism. The book also examines the Iranianization of other cryptic Jewish trade languages, of Slavic and German, and the common Hebrew-like lexicon used by all Jewish merchants to overcome varied language backgrounds. Yiddish can help to reconstruct the Iranian speech of mixed Irano-Slavic confederations (such as the Galician White Croats).

From the beginning of modern intellectual history to the culture wars of the present day, the experience of assimilating Jews and the idiom of "culture" have been fundamentally intertwined with each other. Freedman's book begins by looking at images of the stereotypical Jew in the literary culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and America, and then considers the efforts on the part of Jewish critics and intellectuals to counter this image in the public sphere. It explores the unexpected parallels and ironic reversals between a cultural dispensation that had ambivalent responses to Jews and Jews who became exponents of that very tradition.

True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original. This is made possible primarily by conveying the syntax word-for-word; and this demonstrates that the word, not the sentence, is translations original element. For the sentence is the wall in front of the language of the original, and word-for-word rendering the arcade. (Walter Benjamin, The Translators Task) The book centers on Walter Benjamins revolutionary essay The Translators Task (1923) which subverts some widespread assumptions concerning translation: that it serves for communication, that it transfers meaning, that it must not distort the translators own language, and that it is inferior to the original. Benjamin overturns these assumptions by replacing the concept of translation as a merely linguistic operation with a metaphysical or theological concept of the same, derived from Jewish

In Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939, Allison Schachter rewrites Jewish literary modernity from the point of view of women. Focusing on works by interwar Hebrew and Yiddish writers, Schachter illuminates how women writers embraced the transgressive potential of prose fiction to challenge the patriarchal norms of Jewish textual authority and reconceptualize Jewish cultural belonging.   Born in the former Russian and Austro‑Hungarian Empires and writing from their homes in New York, Poland, and Mandatory Palestine, the authors central to this book--Fradl Shtok, Dvora Baron, Elisheva Bikhovsky, Leah Goldberg, and Debora Vogel--seized on the freedoms of social revolution to reimagine Jewish culture beyond the traditionally male world of Jewish letters. The societies they lived in devalued women's labor and denied them support for their work. In response, their writing challenged the social hierarchies that excluded them as women and as Jews. As she reads these women, Schachter upends the idea that literary modernity was a conversation among men about women, with a few women writers listening in. Women writers revolutionized the very terms of Jewish fiction at a pivotal moment in Jewish history, transcending the boundaries of Jewish minority identities. Schachter tells their story and in so doing calls for a new way of thinking about Jewish cultural modernity.

Why did some of the most brilliant - but often forgotten - Jewish émigre writers of the first half of the twentieth century choose to write in French as a second language, even as they faced a double exclusion as foreigners and as Jews under Vichy? Jewish writers of Eastern European origin who immigrated to France before the Second World War (including Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, Irène Némirovsky, and Elsa Triolet) switched from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, even when their Frenchness was being violently denied by the state. In this manuscript, Julia Elsky argues that these Jewish émigré writers harnessed the potential multilingualism of French to express hybrid and shifting cultural, religious, and linguistic identities before and during the Occupation.

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. 

The language of a thousand years of European Jewish civilization that was decimated in the Nazi Holocaust, Yiddish has emerged as a vehicle for young people to engage with their heritage and identity. Although widely considered an endangered language, Yiddish has evolved as a site for creative renewal in the Jewish world and beyond in addition to being used daily within Hasidic communities. Yiddish Lives On explores the continuity of the language in the hands of a diverse group of native, heritage, and new speakers. The book tells stories of communities in Canada and abroad that have resisted the decline of Yiddish over a period of seventy years, spotlighting strategies that facilitate continuity through family transmission, theatre, activism, publishing, song, cinema, and other new media. Rebecca Margolis uses a multidisciplinary approach that draws on methodologies from history, sociolinguistics, ethnography, digital humanities, and screen studies to examine the ways in which engagement with Yiddish has evolved across multiple planes.Investigating the products of an abiding dedication to cultural continuity among successive generations, Yiddish Lives On offers innovative approaches to the preservation, promotion, and revitalization of minority, heritage, and lesser-taught languages.