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Exploring how visual media presents claims to Jewish authenticity, Imagining Jewish Authenticity argues that Jews imagine themselves and their place within America by appealing to a graphic sensibility. Ken Koltun-Fromm traces how American Jewish thinkers capture Jewish authenticity, and lingering fears of inauthenticity, in and through visual discourse and opens up the subtle connections between visual expectations, cultural knowledge, racial belonging, embodied identity, and the ways images and texts work together.
How do you know when someone or something is really, authentically Jewish? This book argues that what is authentically Jewish is continually changing in response to historical and cultural developments, the shifting attributions of meaning that individuals make, and the negotiations that occur as different groups struggle for recognition.
There is something deeply problematic about the ways that Jews, particularly in America, talk about “Jewish identity” as a desired outcome of Jewish education. For many, the idea that the purpose of Jewish education is to strengthen Jewish identity is so obvious that it hardly seems worth disputing—and the only important question is which kinds of Jewish education do that work more effectively or more efficiently. But what does it mean to “strengthen Jewish identity”? Why do Jewish educators, policy-makers and philanthropists talk that way? What do they assume, about Jewish education or about Jewish identity, when they use formulations like “strengthen Jewish identity”? And what are the costs of doing so? This volume, the first collection to examine critically the relationship between Jewish education and Jewish identity, makes two important interventions. First, it offers a critical assessment of the relationship between education and identity, arguing that the reification of identity has hampered much educational creativity in the pursuit of this goal, and that the nearly ubiquitous employment of the term obscures significant questions about what Jewish education is and ought to be. Second, this volume offers thoughtful responses that are not merely synonymous replacements for “identity,” suggesting new possibilities for how to think about the purposes and desired outcomes of Jewish education, potentially contributing to any number of new conversations about the relationship between Jewish education and Jewish life.
The Apostle Paul in the Jewish Imagination is a pioneering multidisciplinary examination of Jewish perspectives on Paul of Tarsus. Here, the views of individual Jewish theologians, religious leaders, and biblical scholars of the last 150 years, together with artistic, literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytical approaches, are set alongside popular cultural attitudes. Few Jews, historically speaking, have engaged with the first-century Apostle to the Gentiles. The modern period has witnessed a burgeoning interest in this topic, however, with treatments reflecting profound concerns about the nature of Jewish authenticity and the developing intercourse between Jews and Christians. In exploring these issues, Jewish commentators have presented Paul in a number of apparently contradictory ways. The Apostle Paul in the Jewish Imagination represents an important contribution to Jewish cultural studies and to the study of Jewish-Christian relations.
This book proposes that the idea of the Jews in European cultures has little to do with actual Jews, but rather is derived from the conception of Jews as Christianity's paradigmatic Other, eternally reenacting their morally ambiguous New Testament role as the Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God. Through new readings of canonical Russian literary texts by Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, and others, the author argues that these European writers—Christian, secular, and Jewish—based their representation of Jews on the Christian exegetical tradition of anti-Judaism. Indeed, Livak disputes the classification of some Jewish writers as belonging to "Jewish literature," arguing that such an approach obscures these writers' debt to European literary traditions and their ambivalence about their Jewishness. This work seeks to move the study of Russian literature, and Russian-Jewish literature in particular, down a new path. It will stir up controversy around Christian-Jewish cultural interaction; the representation of otherness in European arts and folklore; modern Jewish experience; and Russian literature and culture.
Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God.This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. A responsive, living covenant lies at the heart of this book—a covenantal reciprocity that actively engages the dynamics of Jewish thinking and acting in dialogue with God. The contributors to this volume are committed to this form of textual reasoning, even as they all move us beyond the “text” as foundational for the imagined “people of the book.” That people, we submit, lives and breathes in and beyond the texts of poetry, narrative, sacred literature, film, and graphic mediums. We imagine the Jewish people, and the covenant they respond to, as provocative intimations of the divine. The essays in this volume seek to draw these vocal intimations out so that we can all hear their resonant call.
Jewish Women: Between Conformity and Agency examines the concepts of gender and sexuality through the primary lens of visual and material culture from antiquity through to the present day. The backbone of this transhistorical and transcontextual study is the question of Jewish women’s agency in four different geographical, chronological, and methodological contexts, beginning with women’s dress codes in Roman-Byzantine Syro-Palestine, continuing with rituals of purity in medieval Ashkenaz, worship in papal Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, and ending with marriage and divorce in Israeli film. Each of these explorations is interested in creating a dialogue between the patriarchal legacy of the traditional texts and the chronologically corresponding visual and material culture. The author challenges traditional approaches to the study of Jewish culture by employing tools from art history, archaeology, and film and media studies. In each of these different contexts, there is ample evidence that women—despite persistent overall structural discrimination—have found ways to challenge male constructs of gender norms. Ultimately, these examples from past and present times highlight women’s eminence in shaping Jewish history and culture. Bringing a new interdisciplinary lens to the study of the history of gender and sexuality, the book will be of interest to students and researchers of Jewish history and culture, art history, archaeology, and film studies.
This book analyzes the different conceptions of authenticity that are behind conflicts over who and what should be recognized as authentically Jewish. Although the concept of authenticity has been around for several centuries, it became a central focus for Jews since existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre raised the question in the 1940s. Building on the work of Sartre, later Jewish thinkers, philosophers, anthropologists, and cultural theorists, the book offers a model of Jewish authenticity that seeks to balance history and tradition, creative freedom and innovation, and the importance of recognition among different groups within an increasingly multicultural Jewish community. Author Stuart Z. Charmé explores how debates over authenticity and struggles for recognition are a key to understanding a wide range of controversies between Orthodox and liberal Jews, Zionist and diaspora Jews, white Jews and Jews of color, as well as the status of intermarried and messianic Jews, and the impact of Jewish genetics. In addition, it discusses how and when various cultural practices and traditions such as klezmer music, Israeli folk dance, Jewish yoga and meditation, and others are recognized as authentically Jewish, or not.
Imagined Israel(s) presents a nuanced image of Israel by considering multiple artistic representations of the Jewish state, stretching beyond stereotypical representations of war and conflict, while also encompassing the experience and perspective of the Jewish diaspora and other communities.
Racial passing has fascinated thousands of American readers since the end of the nineteenth century. However, the phenomenon of Jews passing as gentiles has been all but overlooked. This book examines forgotten novels depicting Jewish Americans masquerading as gentiles. Exploring two "waves" of publications of this subgenre—in the 1940s-1950s and 1990s-2000s—this book raises questions about the perceptions of Jewish difference during these periods.Looking at issues such as Whiteness, Americanness, gender, and race, it traces the changes in the representation of Jewish identity during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. Ohad Reznick’s Imagined Non-Jews is an important intervention in the scholarship on the literature of passing. This book also makes a significant contribution to Jewish American literary studies through thoughtful close readings of texts from the 1940s and 1950s, many of them little-known today, as well as multi-ethnic American fiction from the turn-of-the-21st-century, all of them featuring characters who conceal their Jewishness in order to pass for gentile. —Lori Harrison-Kahan, Boston College, author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary