Bøger i Judaic Traditions in LIterature, Music, and Art serien

This volume presents a cultural record of the Jewish folk music of Eastern Europe, through the eyes of ethnomusicologist, Moshe Beregovski. It includes contextual responses to Jewish folk music, essays on musical influences, and notes and lyrics of nearly 300 folk songs.

With little of his fiction available in English translation, David Bergelson is revealed in this book to new readers seeking a more complete picture of worldwide Yiddish literature. The collection includes two short stories and a novella, which offer a taste of Bergelson's elegiac prose style.

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.

Explores S Y Agnon's theological and philosophical attitudes toward language, attitudes that to a large extent shaped his poetics and aesthetic values. Drawing on anthologies compiled by Agnon, this book examines his theoretical orientation and the ways he integrated into his poetics ideas about language that are rooted in Jewish theology.

Examines the 1907 Yiddish play ""God of Vengeance"" by Sholem Asch, the cross-dressing films of Yiddish actress Molly Picon, and several short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. This book analyzes the English-language novels ""The Rise of David Levinsky"", ""Wasteland"", and Portnoy's ""Complaint"".

Recaptures a vanished moment of cultural history.

The emergence of Zionism in the late nineteenth century and the evolution of Zionist society in Palestine were profoundly influenced by the Hebrew literature of the day. This book traces the tensions between the extraliterary - the historical, social, and political - and the literary - the aesthetic, formal, and stylistic - in Hebrew fiction.

According to traditional narratives of immigrant assimilation, Jews freely surrendered Yiddish language and culture in their desire for an American identity. This book offers a challenge to this conventional literary history, returning readers to a threshold where Americanization also meant ambivalence and resistance.