{"title":"From Jewish Jesus to Black Christ: Race Violence in Leftist Yiddish Poetry","authors":"A. Glaser","doi":"10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.34.1.0044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.34.1.0044","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines shared metaphors in Yiddish poems about lynchings and pogroms in the 1930s. Leftist Yiddish poets in particular often equated lynching victims, as well as pogrom victims, with Jesus. The poet Berish Weinstein serves as a case study, for he used strikingly similar motifs in his poems about anti-Semitic and anti-Black violence. It is no coincidence that a rise in poems about race violence occurred during the most heated years of the Scottsboro trial, an event that became a symbol of American racism for the Communist Party. Yiddish writing about violence against African Americans reveals the commitment of many Jews in the 1930s to move from ethnic particularism toward leftist universalism. However, this examination of shared poetic motifs shows that in writing about racism in America, many Jews were also implicitly responding to the rise of Nazism in Europe.","PeriodicalId":41533,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Jewish Literature","volume":"34 1","pages":"44 - 69"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2015-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.34.1.0044","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70897197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Thinking in Butler","authors":"Dean J. Franco","doi":"10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.2.0229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.2.0229","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41533,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Jewish Literature","volume":"33 1","pages":"229 - 236"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.2.0229","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70897282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Frank Bidart’s Voice and the Erasure of Jewish Difference in “Ellen West”","authors":"D. Morris","doi":"10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.2.0202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.2.0202","url":null,"abstract":"In “Ellen West” (1977) Frank Bidart engages with an intertextual poetics by including “found” prose from the English translation of Lionel Binswanger’s case history to lend historical veracity to lyric passages spoken by West, a European Jew who died in 1921. In his representation of Binswanger’s text, however, Bidart omits key points that connect West’s disgust with her “Jewish” body type to her internalization of an anti-Semitic discourse. Instead of focusing on the anti-Semitic discourse that animates West’s body hatred, Bidart reads West’s devaluation of the body and her wish for its erasure as in line with German idealism and an aesthetic sublime.","PeriodicalId":41533,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Jewish Literature","volume":"31 1","pages":"202 - 228"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.2.0202","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70897025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Blood, Tradition, and the Distortion of Ritual in Philip Roth’s Indignation","authors":"M. Mckinley","doi":"10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.2.0186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.2.0186","url":null,"abstract":"The persistence of blood imagery throughout Philip Roth’s Indignation is undeniable, yet surprisingly few critics have offered a sustained interpretation of its meaning. I suggest here that what has been overlooked in recent criticism of the novel is that these images of blood are inseparable from the novel’s representation of and commentary on ritual. Drawing from Catherine Bell’s theories of ritual and ritualization, I propose that Roth uses blood imagery to emphasize those moments where occasions of ritualization profane the sacred ritual from which they arise. Specifically, I argue that the novel’s subversions of both religious and secular ritual point to the consequences of an overextension of ritual, as the blood-marked scenes highlight instances in which ritualization serves to imbue actions and events with an exaggerated cultural meaning that is often constructed on a false sense of tradition or authority.","PeriodicalId":41533,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Jewish Literature","volume":"33 1","pages":"186 - 201"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.2.0186","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70896641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Magical Transports and Transformations: The Lessons of Children’s Holocaust Fiction","authors":"Phyllis Lassner, D. M. Cohen","doi":"10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.2.0167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.2.0167","url":null,"abstract":"Holocaust fiction and film for young audiences constitute a representational and pedagogical dilemma. Such narrative conventions as fantasy and fairy tale elements offer accessibility for young audiences to learn about the brutal and incomprehensible extremes of the Holocaust. However, they may also undermine the catastrophe’s grim historicity. Examining Jane Yolen’s Holocaust novel The Devil’s Arithmetic and its film adaptation alongside her novel Briar Rose, we address the following question: do uses of fantasy techniques such as magical transports and transformations soften, sanitize, and inevitably sentimentalize Holocaust history, or do those techniques express important historical knowledge?","PeriodicalId":41533,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Jewish Literature","volume":"33 1","pages":"167 - 185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.2.0167","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70896575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Seventh Angel Woke Me","authors":"J. Levinson","doi":"10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.1.0147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.1.0147","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the development of a “prophetic” poetic mode in the writings of self-proclaimed Jewish poet Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–1868). Although Menken laid claim to a Jewish identity, it now appears all but certain that she was neither born Jewish nor underwent any sort of formal conversion. Nevertheless, her self-positioning is highly instructive, since it reveals how the symbolic meanings associated with Jewishness in nineteenth-century America could be pressed into the service of an experimental and culturally subversive literary project. I argue that Menken's “prophetic” or “Israelite” texts of the 1860s drew upon and mediated between two broader cultural trends: the resurgent apocalyptic strain in antebellum American Protestantism and the post-denominational naturalism and experimental poetics of Walt Whitman. Her idiosyncratic engagements with these trends enabled her to break free of the codes of literary sentimentalism that shaped her early poems and delimited her cultural role as a wom...","PeriodicalId":41533,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Jewish Literature","volume":"33 1","pages":"147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.1.0147","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70896521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The First Reform Liturgy: Penina Moise’s Hymns and The Discourses of American Identity","authors":"Shira Wolosky","doi":"10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.1.0130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.1.0130","url":null,"abstract":"Penina Moise, when discussed at all, has been placed in the context of a nineteenth-century women’s domestic sphere. Her main body of work, however, is in fact specifically public and was vital and central to the development of the first Reform Jewish movement in America, in Charleston during the 1840s. Moise wrote close to two hundred hymns for this movement, the first Reform liturgy in America, shaping community worship for the next hundred years. Her hymns combine many different contemporary discourses—Jewish, republican, evangelical, and liberal theological—in ways that reflect, enact, and generate the complex identities of Jewish Americans.","PeriodicalId":41533,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Jewish Literature","volume":"33 1","pages":"130 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.1.0130","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70896505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“The Seventh Angel Woke Me”: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Return of Israelite Prophecy","authors":"J. Levinson","doi":"10.1353/AJL.2014.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/AJL.2014.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the development of a “prophetic” poetic mode in the writings of self-proclaimed Jewish poet Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–1868). Although Menken laid claim to a Jewish identity, it now appears all but certain that she was neither born Jewish nor underwent any sort of formal conversion. Nevertheless, her self-positioning is highly instructive, since it reveals how the symbolic meanings associated with Jewishness in nineteenth-century America could be pressed into the service of an experimental and culturally subversive literary project. I argue that Menken’s “prophetic” or “Israelite” texts of the 1860s drew upon and mediated between two broader cultural trends: the resurgent apocalyptic strain in antebellum American Protestantism and the post-denominational naturalism and experimental poetics of Walt Whitman. Her idiosyncratic engagements with these trends enabled her to break free of the codes of literary sentimentalism that shaped her early poems and delimited her cultural role as a woman in American culture.","PeriodicalId":41533,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Jewish Literature","volume":"33 1","pages":"147 - 165"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66867820","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Against the Tide: Re-discovering Early Jewish American Literary History","authors":"M. P. Kramer","doi":"10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.1.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.1.0001","url":null,"abstract":"A brief overview of the earliest scholarship on early Jewish American history and literature (including Cyrus Adler, Mayer Kayserling, Max J. Kohler, George Alexander Kohut, Isaac Markens, Oscar Straus, and Simon Wolf) is offered as an introduction to “Before the Flood,” a special issue of SAJL that presents recent, innovative scholarship on early Jewish American literature.","PeriodicalId":41533,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Jewish Literature","volume":"5 5 1","pages":"1 - 12"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.5325/STUDAMERJEWILITE.33.1.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70896468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}