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Studies in American Jewish Literature
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.1

Number of Followers: 8

Full-text available via subscription

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ISSN (Print) 0271-9274 - ISSN (Online) 1948-5077
Published by Penn State University Press

[34 journals]

Pre/Occupied Longing: Toward a Definition of Postnostalgia in Jonathan
Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated
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  Abstract: A number of literary critics and cultural theorists have discussed the children of Holocaust survivors and what has been described as their "nostalgia" for life before the Shoah. Most notable among this group of scholars are Sara Horowitz, Eva Hoffman, and Marianne Hirsch. Horowitz (2010), in "Nostalgia and the Holocaust," offers cursory observations on children of survivors' "nostalgia" for prewar life, but she largely examines those who seemingly (and enigmatically) adopt "nostalgic" attachments for life during the Holocaust. As daughters of survivors themselves, Hoffman (1990, 4; 2004, 204–5) and Hirsch (1997, 226, 243) each provide accounts of their own "nostalgic" affections for their families' homeland from ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
Yekl to Jake: Reading Cahan with Arendt
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  Abstract: Hannah Arendt's writings on cliché and her 1943 essay "We Refugees" offer theoretical tools for a critical rereading of Abraham Cahan's 1896 novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. Arendt's critique of assimilative self-narrative and fabricated speech adds important nuance to Cahan's characterization of the main character Yekl/Jake. Further, Arendt's concerns align with and illuminate a critique throughout Cahan's literary works, in which he resists an assimilative exchange of identity in favor of dynamic, particularistic, and multiform approaches to adapting. In particular, the protagonist of Yekl exemplifies a type of performance that Arendt observed among Jewish refugees displaced from one country to ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
"Love, Alex": Queering Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated
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  Abstract: Scott Heller identified in 1999 the intersection of queer theory with what he called "the new Jewish studies"—a field that had evolved to become interested in questions of gender, ethnicity, and cultural production. In the more than two decades that followed, a number of works considering the interactions of Jewish studies with gender studies and queer theory appeared, refocusing elements of Jewish identity and culture around questions of masculinity, femininity, and the performance of idealized gender identities. These nuanced interrogations of a wide range of texts, from Biblical exegesis to contemporary queer Jewish culture, now form a rich field which has productively explored a variety of modes of gender ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist by Sarah Imhoff
(review)
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  Abstract: Like most good pieces of feminist life-writing, Sarah Imhoff's The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist turns on questions of scale. Sampter is a wonderfully minor historical figure who is best remembered as the author of A Course in Zionism, an American primer on Zionism that Hadassah published in 1915. Born in New York to secular, second-generation German Jews, Sampter settled in Palestine in 1919 and eventually gave up her U.S. citizenship. Yet Sampter was not the character one might have expected to author a text so self-consciously mainstream and doctrinaire as A Course in Zionism. Neither a typical kibbutznik nor a powerful Zionist leader, Sampter was a person of somewhat exceptional means who ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History by Barbara E. Mann
(review)
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  Abstract: This is an exquisitely written, field-changing book. Scholarship on Jewish material culture tends to employ one of three methods: text-driven, object-centered, or object-driven approaches. Long known as one of the leading figures of the textdriven approach, Barbara E. Mann demonstrates in The Object of Jewish Literature how viewing literature through a material culture lens illuminates not only the way twentieth-century Jewish literature is shaped by a dialogue with historical circumstances, but also how that literature has been used to memorialize and re-member worlds fractured by war and social change. Mann is interested in both books as objects as well as the depiction of objects within the texts she explores. ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
How the Soviet Jew Was Made by Sasha Senderovich (review)
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  Abstract: In a season 13 episode of The Simpsons, the family travels to Brazil. At one very inopportune moment, Homer proclaims he has to urinate because he has a bladder the size of a Brazil nut. "Uhh," demurs his kidnapper, "we just call them nuts here." I thought of this joke while reading the introduction to Sasha Senderovich's wonderful new book, How the Soviet Jew Was Made, when he reminds us that in the Soviet Union what we call "Soviet Jews" were just Jews. The term itself, therefore, inherently implies a view from the outside, such as in the encounter that began in the 1970s when Western Jews rallied to "save Soviet Jews." Today, such a view from the outside is possible even for those who were once on the inside. ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
Mordecai Richler's Imperfect Search for Moral Values by Shana Rosenblatt
Mauer (review)
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  Abstract: Shana Rosenblatt Mauer's Mordecai Richler's Imperfect Search for Moral Values is a long-overdue critical assessment of the provocative and humorous author's entire corpus of novels, spanning 1954 to 1997. Despite multiple biographies of Richler and decades of scattered scholarship about his novels, Mauer's is the first scholarly book-length study of its kind. Her study places the novels into the context of Richler's other output: not only his scripts and nonfiction publications, but also, importantly, his public interviews. Richler and his writings often provoked considerable reaction from the Canadian public, and Mauer incorporates this context as well, examining common claims made about Richler: that he was an ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
Holy Envy: Writing in the Jewish Christian Borderzone by Maeera Y.
Shreiber (review)
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  Abstract: A new book by Maeera Shreiber is a significant critical event. Shreiber's first book, Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics (Stanford University Press, 2007), remains one of the few definitive works on the subject of modern Jewish American poetry; it is a deep, theoretically sophisticated, but highly readable exploration of some of the field's most important themes, styles, and individual figures. It focuses particularly on provocative questions of identity and diaspora. Holy Envy is equally provocative, especially in regard to Jewish American identity. Although it deals mainly with modern poetry, demonstrating once again Shreiber's brilliantly synthetic scholarship, interpretive acumen, and warm ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
The Border and the Line: Race, Literature and Los Angeles by Dean Franco
(review)
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  Abstract: Neighborhoods and their boundaries, to paraphrase the old song, are a sometimes thing. The section of Washington, DC, I knew growing up as the "West End" has now been rechristened "Georgetown Extended" by real estate interests, much to the confusion of visitors to the West End Cinema. The ghetto neighborhood where I lived in my student days has now been similarly awarded the name of "Capitol Hill Extended," and is listed by Forbes as one of the nation's hottest neighborhoods. Each of these shifts has come with a shifting of populations. The park that we all called Malcolm X Park in my day was never officially given that name. (I suspect because the city didn't want to go to the expense of removing and replacing the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00