Delve into the profound spiritual journey of Elie Wiesel through this comprehensive study of his fiction. From the depths of despair to the celebration of life, Wiesel's fifteen novels offer a poignant reflection on the human condition, with his personal experiences as a Holocaust survivor serving as a backdrop. Spanning from Dawn (1961) to Hostage (2010), this unique exploration is the only one of its kind, encompassing Wiesel's entire fictional oeuvre originally penned in French. With insightful commentary by Lé onard Rosmarin, readers will gain a deep understanding of Wiesel's literary genius and his ability to illuminate penetrating truths through the power of storytelling.

There's a book you won't hear a word about on the radio. There's a book the right-thinking newspapers will not speak about, except to refer to it prim and reproachful terms. There's a book about which the tabloids of the left will say nothing, except the most inept of them, which only have words of scorn. There's a book the sale and distribution of which is quite possibly forbidden. There's a book against which there will be more a conspiracy of silence than of attack. Isn't it a crying shame that, before any reservations, we cannot praise boldness, courage, ardor?

There is a rather striking phrase in C line's book, this book that we will be prevented from discussing. He announces his invectives as a kind of revolt of the natives. And I think of those Arab towns-always situated next to a Jewish one-which, from time to time, in a fit of popular anger, throw themselves in fury on the Jewish quarter and plunder it.

We do not want any violence. But when one has a Jewish Prime Minister, when one sees, clearly and simply, France dominated by the Jews, it also should be understood how this violence is prepared, and what explains it. I do not even say what legitimates it, I say what explains it. Have any opinion you want. On the Jews and on C line. We do not agree with him on all points. But I am telling you: this enormous book, this splendid book, is the first sign of the revolt of the natives. Perhaps this revolt is excessive, more instinctive than reasonable: after all, the natives are us... Robert Brasillach.

A critique of the discourse of language revival in modern Hebrew literature

On Revival is a critique of one of the most important tenets of Zionist thinking: Hebrew revival, or the idea that Hebrew--a largely unspoken language before the twentieth century--was revitalized as part of a broader national revival which ultimately led to the establishment of the Israeli nation-state. This story of language revival has been commemorated in Israeli popular memory and in Jewish historiography as a triumphant transformation narrative that marks the success of the Zionist revolution. But a closer look at the work of early twentieth-century Hebrew writers reveals different sentiments.

Roni Henig explores the loaded, figurative discourse of revival in the work of Hebrew authors and thinkers working roughly between 1890 and 1920. For these authors, the language once known as the holy tongue became a vernacular in the making. Rather than embracing revival as a neutral, descriptive term, Henig takes a critical approach, employing close readings of canonical texts to analyze the primary tropes used to articulate this aesthetic and political project of reviving Hebrew. She shows that for many writers, the national mission of language revival was entwined with a sense of mourning and loss. These writers perceived--and simultaneously produced--the language as neither dead nor fully alive. Henig argues that it is this figure of the living-dead that lies at the heart of the revival discourse and which is constitutive of Jewish nationalism.

On Revival contributes to current debates in comparative literary studies by addressing the limitations of the national language paradigm and thinking beyond concepts of origin, nativity, and possession in language. Informed by critical literary theory, including feminist and postcolonial critiques, the book challenges Zionism's monolingual lens and the auto-Orientalism involved in the project of revival, questioning charged ideological concepts such as native speaker and mother tongue.

Since the nation's founding, Israel has existed in a state of near perpetual warfare. Despite this, Hebrew novels that deal with the experience of contemporary conflict are surprisingly rare. In War Lives, Nitza Ben-Dov argues that Israeli writers employ the freedoms granted by fiction to challenge the heroic myth of war. She suggests that these writers do so not only by turning inwards, towards the home front and the psyches of individuals marked by post-trauma, but also by unsettling the relationship between historical fact and fiction, between purported reliability and representation.

Through close readings of a range of novels by authors such as S. Y. Agnon, Yehuda Amichai, and Amos Oz, Ben-Dov foregrounds war as a coordinate from which Israeli novels are driven and to which they return in equal measure. While each chapter focuses on a different theme--from mourning to battleground camaraderie to vengeance--Ben-Dov's literary analyses demonstrate how these canonical works afford an in-depth view of the symbiosis between civilian and military life, the comorbidity of life living under the constant threat of war.

A unique compilation of contemporary women's midrashim.

Dirshuni: Contemporary Women's Midrash, is the first-ever English edition of a historic collection of midrashim composed by Israeli women, which has been long-anticipated by multiple American audiences, including synagogues, rabbinical seminaries, adult learning programs, Jewish educators, and scholars of gender and religion. Using the classical forms developed by the ancient rabbis, the contributors express their religious and moral thought and experience through innovative interpretations of scripture. The women writers, from all denominations and beyond, of all political stripes and ethnic backgrounds, contribute their Torah to fill the missing half of the sacred Jewish bookshelf. This book reflects dramatic changes in the agency of women in the world of religious writings. The volume features a comprehensive introduction to Midrash for the uninitiated reader by the distinguished scholar Tamar Kadari and extensive annotation and commentary by Tamar Biala.

New Perspectives on Jewish Law combines the detailed work characteristic of scholarship on Jewish law with an orientation towards its broader academic and cultural significance. It shifts the study of Jewish law from its focus on legal doctrine and history to legal theory, achieving in the process a more sophisticated understanding of law that will benefit both the legal academy and Jewish studies. By employing the framework of legal theory, it similarly corrects an over-emphasis on the metaphysical presuppositions and philosophical implications of Jewish law, which has tended to cast it as exceptional relative to other legal systems. Moreover, it answers to old-new anxieties about law, often symbolized by Judaism, raised by contemporary feminists and by philosophers who are animated by recent interpretations of Paul through actual engagement with the Jewish legal tradition.

The volume consists of three parts. The first focuses on the critique of positivism, its implications, and the new directions that it opens up for the analysis of Jewish law. The second part takes stock of recent methodological developments in the study of Jewish legal texts and investigates the relation between Jewish law and the disciplines, including history, literary theory, ritual studies, the digital humanities, as well as traditional approaches to Jewish learning. It concludes with a reflection on these interdisciplinary contributions from the perspective of legal theory. The third part explores the connections among Jewish law, philosophy, and culture critique. It assesses the relation or lack thereof between Jewish law and modern Jewish thought, and examines specific issues of philosophical interest, including truth and normativity. It also investigates the image of Jewish law in the contemporary critique of law as well as how Jewish law could productively contribute to that debate. It concludes with a reflection on these studies from the perspective of philosophy of law.

Between the Kaiser's and Hitler's Reichs, the genre of die Groteske, or the German literary grotesque, sold out cabarets, drew droves of radio listeners, and created bestsellers with its irreverent comedy and critique. At the same time, its authors were ruthlessly censored for their satire of society, leaving die Groteske virtually unknown today.

As the first full-length study of the genre, Animal, Vegetal, Marginal recovers this short prose form, which draws on the perspectives of marginalized animals, plants, and individuals to challenge what it means to be human. Author Joela Jacobs traces the development of the genre and its variations from the work of Oskar Panizza, Hanns Heinz Ewers, and Salomo Friedlaender to Franz Kafka.

Animal, Vegetal, Marginal shows how marginalized and nonhuman voices mounted resistance against the rise of the biopolitical structures underpinning nationalism, racism, and antisemitism in the decades leading up to the Second World War.

This book collects twenty two previously published essays and one new one by Erich S. Gruen who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. His many articles on this subject have, however, appeared mostly in conference volumes and Festschriften, and have therefore not had wide circulation. By putting them together in a single work, this will bring the essays to the attention of a much broader scholarly readership and make them more readily available to students in the fields of ancient history and early Judaism. The pieces are quite varied, but develop a number of connected and related themes: Jewish identity in the pagan world, the literary representations by Jews and pagans of one another, the interconnections of Hellenism and Judaism, and the Jewish experience under Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman empire.

Highlights how millennial Jewish stars symbolize national politics in US media

Jewish stars have longed faced pressure to downplay Jewish identity for fear of alienating wider audiences. But unexpectedly, since the 2000s, many millennial Jewish stars have won stellar success while spotlighting (rather than muting) Jewish identity. In Millennial Jewish Stars, Jonathan Branfman asks: what makes these explicitly Jewish stars so unexpectedly appealing? And what can their surprising success tell us about race, gender, and antisemitism in America? To answer these questions, Branfman offers case studies on six top millennial Jewish stars: the biracial rap superstar Drake, comedic rapper Lil Dicky, TV comedy duo Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, man-baby film star Seth Rogen, and chiseled film star Zac Efron.

Branfman argues that despite their differences, each star's success depends on how they navigate racial antisemitism: the historical notion that Jews are physically inferior to Christians. Each star especially navigates racial stigmas about Jewish masculinity--stigmas that depict Jewish men as emasculated, Jewish women as masculinized, and both as sexually perverse. By embracing, deflecting, or satirizing these stigmas, each star comes to symbolize national hopes and fears about all kinds of hot-button issues. For instance, by putting a cuter twist on stereotypes of Jewish emasculation, Seth Rogen plays soft man-babies who dramatize (and then resolve) popular anxieties about modern fatherhood. This knack for channeling national dreams and doubts is what makes each star so unexpectedly marketable.

In turn, examining how each star navigates racial antisemitism onscreen makes it easier to pinpoint how antisemitism, white privilege, and color-based racism interact in the real world. Likewise, this insight can aid readers to better notice and challenge racial antisemitism in everyday life.

In a major work of scholarship that explores the funny side of some very serious business (and vice versa), Jeremy Dauber examines the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from biblical times to the age of Twitter. Organizing Jewish comedy into seven strands--including the satirical, the witty, and the vulgar--he traces the ways Jewish comedy has mirrored, and sometimes even shaped, the course of Jewish history. Dauber also explores the classic works of such masters of Jewish comedy as Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart, and Larry David, among many others.

Two novellas by S. Y. Abramovitsh open this collection of the best short works by three influential nineteenth-century Jewish authors. Abra- movitsh's alter ego--Mendele the Book Peddler--introduces himself and narrates both The Little Man and Fishke the Lame. His cast of characters includes Isaac Abraham as tailor's apprentice, choirboy, and corrupt businessman; Mendele's friend Wine 'n' Candles Alter; and Fishke, who travels through the Ukraine with a caravan of beggars.

Sholem Aleichem's lively stories reintroduce us to Tevye, the gregarious dairyman, as he describes the pleasures of raising his independent-minded daughters. These are followed by short monologues in which Aleichem gives voice to unforgettable characters from Eastern Europe to the Lower East Side. Finally, I. L. Peretz's neo-hasidic tales draw on hasidic traditions in the service of modern literature.

These stories provide an unsentimental look back at Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Although nostalgia occasionally colors their prose, the writers were social critics who understood the shortcomings of shtetl life. For the general reader, these translations breathe new life into the extraordinary worlds of Yiddish literature. The introduction, glossary, and biographical essays contemporaneous to each author put those worlds into context, making the book indispensable to students and scholars of Yiddish culture.

Rabbinic literature is a complex and interwoven body of texts whose importance is extensive: it is, of course, central to studying Judaism; its texts are valuable for broad religious study and are crucial for understanding the background of early Christianity; and the history of biblical interpretation inevitably involves this quite immense and varied set of writings. There is no scholar more highly regarded as an authority on Rabbinic literature and Judaism than Jacob Neusner. And there is no educator better suited to explaining it in clear and concise terms, laying out the list of texts, their background and development, their content, the resources with which to delve more deeply into their meaning, and their importance for Judaism, biblical studies, and Christianity. This Essential Guide discusses all the texts in Rabbinic literature, including the Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmuds, and Midrash. With this Guide, students will better understand the complex and unique world of Judaism and its significance for studying the Bible, Judaism, and Christian origins. Jacob Neusner is Research Professor of Religion and Theology and Senior Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Theology at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The purpose of Abingdon Essential Guides is to fulfill the need for brief, substantive, yet highly accessible introductions to the core disciplines in theological and religious studies. Drawing on the best in current scholarship, written with the needs of students foremost in mind, and addressed to learners in a number of contexts, Essential Guides will be the first choice of those who wish to acquaint themselves or their students with the broad scope of issues, perspectives, and subject matters within the study of religion and theology.

Bernard Goldstein's memoir describes a hard world of taverns, toughs, thieves, and prostitutes; of slaughterhouse workers, handcart porters, and wagon drivers; and of fist-and gunfights with everyone from anti-Semites and Communists to hostile police, which is to say that it depicts a totally different view of life in prewar Poland than the one usually portrayed. As such, the book offers a corrective view in the form of social history, one that commands attention and demands respect for the vitality and activism of the generation of Polish Jews so brutally annihilated by the barbarism of the Nazis. In Warsaw, a city with over 300,000 Jews (one third of the population), Bernstein was the Jewish Labor Bund's enforcer, organizer, and head of their militia--the one who carried out daily, on-the-street organization of unions; the fighting off of Communists, Polish anti-Semitic hooligans, and antagonistic police; marshaling and protecting demonstrations; and even settling family disputes, some of them arising from the new secular, socialist culture being fostered by the Bund. Goldstein's is a portrait of tough Jews willing to do battle--worldly, modern individuals dedicated to their folk culture and the survival of their people. It delivers an unparalleled street-level view of vibrant Jewish life in Poland between the wars: of Jewish masses entering modern life, of Jewish workers fighting for their rights, of optimism, of greater assertiveness and self-confidence, of armed combat, and even of scenes depicting the seamy, semi-criminal elements. It provides a representation of life in Poland before the great catastrophe of World War II, a life of flowering literary activity, secular political journalism, successful political struggle, immersion in modern politics, fights for worker rights and benefits, a strong social-democratic labor movement, creation of a secular school system in Yiddish, and a youth movement that later provided the heroic fighters for the courageous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

This new volume in the JPS Guides series is a fiction reader's dream: a guide to 125 remarkable works of fiction. The selection includes a wide range of classic American Jewish novels and story collections, from 1867 to the present, selected by the author in consultation with a panel of literary scholars and book industry professionals. Roth, Mailer, Kellerman, Chabon, Ozick, Heller, and dozens of other celebrated writers are here, with their most notable works. Each entry includes a book summary, with historical context and background on the author. Suggestions for further reading point to other books that match readers' interests and favorite writers. And the introduction is a fascinating exploration of the history of and important themes in American Jewish Fiction, illustrating how Jewish writing in the U.S. has been in constant dialogue with popular entertainment and intellectual life. Included in this guide are lists of book award winners; recommended anthologies; title, author, and subject indexes; and more. Josh Lambert is a doctoral candidate in English and Jewish literature at the University of Michigan. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard in English literature, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and served as a staff writer for the Harvard Lampoon. He led the redesign and relaunch of JBooks.com, an online book review magazine, in 2003, and served as its editor until 2004. He now contributes book reviews and essays to the Forward, the San Francisco Chronicle, the two national daily newspapers in Canada (the National Post and Globe and Mail), The Jerusalem Post, and Nextbook Inc.

The book provides new perspectives on the historical context surrounding Kraus's writings during the Third Reich as well as an analysis of the Third Walpurgnis Night. The contributions place Kraus's work in dialogue with a broader spectrum of critical voices, including Adorno and Arendt. Revisiting Kraus from these new perspectives contributes to a better understanding of this major intellectual of the first half of the 20th century.

Lili Berger wrote about the most traumatic and transformative developments of the twentieth century to which she herself was an eyewitness. On the Waves of Destiny presents an anthology that reflects her early life in interwar Poland during the rise of Hitler, her Second World War activities in occupied Paris where she was active in the Communist resistance, and her sojourn in Communist Poland from 1949 to 1968.
The majority of her essays are pen portraits, often based on her own personal recollections, in which she made clear that she considered it her duty to memorialize the tens of thousands of Polish Jewish writers and artists who were murdered during the Holocaust, such as author and painter Bruno Schulz, historian Emanuel Ringelblum, and artist Gela Seksztajn, as well as to preserve their work. Even her short stories are based on actual experiences, not only her own but also those of people around her.
In her stories, her essays, and her allegorical fables, she explored issues such as equality for women, the moral responsibility of a writer, the question of Jewish identity, and the creative process in general. The translations in On the Waves of Destiny ensure that Lili Berger's legacy will continue to resonate with future generations of readers.

Between the Kaiser's and Hitler's Reichs, the genre of die Groteske, or the German literary grotesque, sold out cabarets, drew droves of radio listeners, and created bestsellers with its irreverent comedy and critique. At the same time, its authors were ruthlessly censored for their satire of society, leaving die Groteske virtually unknown today.

As the first full-length study of the genre, Animal, Vegetal, Marginal recovers this short prose form, which draws on the perspectives of marginalized animals, plants, and individuals to challenge what it means to be human. Author Joela Jacobs traces the development of the genre and its variations from the work of Oskar Panizza, Hanns Heinz Ewers, and Salomo Friedlaender to Franz Kafka.

Animal, Vegetal, Marginal shows how marginalized and nonhuman voices mounted resistance against the rise of the biopolitical structures underpinning nationalism, racism, and antisemitism in the decades leading up to the Second World War.

There is an academic cottage industry on the Jewish Freud, aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. This book takes a different approach, turning its gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to touch Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud's responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, rescue, and connect with the famous Professor from Vienna.