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Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2009 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2, University of Frankfurt (Main), language: English, abstract: In der Magisterarbeit handelt es sich um die Rolle der Religion in der modernen jüdisch-amerikanischen Literatur. Die Suche nach den Wurzeln ist ein Trend in der amerikanischen Gesellschaft geworden. Dieser Trend widerspiegelt sich auch in Kunst und Literatur. Die Gesellschaft wandelt sich von einem “Schmelztiegel” in eine multiethnische und multikulturelle Gesellschaft. Viele Autoren wenden sich in ihren Werken an die Kultur ihrer Vorfahren. Die jüdisch-amerikanische Literatur ist auch ein Beispiel hierfür. Es ist fast unmöglich, die Kultur von der Religion zu trennen, denn wenn es sich um jüdische Themen handelt, geht es um die Kultur, die eng mit der jüdischen Religion verbunden ist. Judentum ist eine Religion, die mit Zeit und Geschichte eng verbunden ist. Selbst wenn Autoren sich mit säkularen Themen beschäftigen, gibt es trotzdem eine Anbindung an die religiöse Problematik. Viele moderne Werke sind von Autoren geschrieben, die fundiertes Wissen vom Judentum haben, sie benutzen oft jüdische Sprachen, Figuren aus der Folklore und religiöse Ideen. Es gibt einen großen Unterschied zwischen den frühen Werken von Immigranten und den modernen Werken der amerikanisch-jüdischen Autoren der dritten Generation. Während die Immigrantenautoren sich bemüht haben, sich so schnell wie möglich zu assimilieren und die Welt der Väter hinter sich zu lassen, haben die jüngsten Autoren in ihren Werken die jüdischen Themen neu entdeckt. Für die Autoren der ersten Generation war das Erlernen der englischen Sprache sehr wichtig. Die Autoren von heute haben Englisch als Muttersprache. Sie schreiben zwar auf Englisch, benutzen aber sehr häufig Begriffe oder Ausdrücke, die nicht erklärt oder übersetzt sind aus den jüdischen Sprachen Hebräisch und Jiddisch. Jüdische Literatur war immer multilingual. Hebräisch ist die Sprache der Liturgie und Jiddisch ist die Sprache des Europäischen Judentums. Nach dem Holocaust wurden die meisten Sprecher des Jiddischen ausgerottet. Das ist der Grund, warum Jiddisch heute eine Rolle der “heiligen Sprache” spielt und in dieser Hinsicht an die Stelle des Hebräischen rückt. Das moderne Hebräisch ist die Staatssprache Israels und hat die Position der Alltagssprache genommen.
Bringing together leading Jewish historians, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and liturgists, Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity offers a collective view of a historically and culturally significant issue that will be of interest to Jewish scholars of many disciplines.
I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), the father of modern Yiddish literature, was a master storyteller and social critic who advocated a radical shift from religious observance to secular Jewish culture. Wisse explores Peretz’s writings in relation to his ideology, which sought to create a strong Jewish identity separate from the trappings of religion.
A multilingual, transnational literary tradition, Jewish American writing has long explored questions of personal identity and national boundaries. These questions can engage students in literature, writing, or religion; at Jewish, Christian, or secular schools; and in or outside the United States. This volume takes an expansive view of Jewish American literature, beginning with writing from the earliest colonies in the Americas and continuing to contemporary Soviet-born authors in the United States, including works that engage deeply with religious concepts and others that embrace assimilation. It invites readers to rethink the nature of American multiculturalism, suggests pairings of Jewish American texts with other ethnic American literatures, and examines the workings of whiteness and privilege. Contributors offer varied perspectives on classic texts such as Yekl, Bread Givers, and "Goodbye, Columbus," along with approaches to interdisciplinary topics including humor, graphic novels, and musical theater. The volume concludes with an extensive resources section.
A new approach to understanding Jewish thought since the eighteenth century Is Judaism a religion, a culture, a nationality—or a mixture of all of these? In How Judaism Became a Religion, Leora Batnitzky boldly argues that this question more than any other has driven modern Jewish thought since the eighteenth century. This wide-ranging and lucid introduction tells the story of how Judaism came to be defined as a religion in the modern period—and why Jewish thinkers have fought as well as championed this idea. Ever since the Enlightenment, Jewish thinkers have debated whether and how Judaism—largely a religion of practice and public adherence to law—can fit into a modern, Protestant conception of religion as an individual and private matter of belief or faith. Batnitzky makes the novel argument that it is this clash between the modern category of religion and Judaism that is responsible for much of the creative tension in modern Jewish thought. Tracing how the idea of Jewish religion has been defended and resisted from the eighteenth century to today, the book discusses many of the major Jewish thinkers of the past three centuries, including Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Zvi Yehuda Kook, Theodor Herzl, and Mordecai Kaplan. At the same time, it tells the story of modern orthodoxy, the German-Jewish renaissance, Jewish religion after the Holocaust, the emergence of the Jewish individual, the birth of Jewish nationalism, and Jewish religion in America. More than an introduction, How Judaism Became a Religion presents a compelling new perspective on the history of modern Jewish thought.
This History offers an unparalleled examination of all aspects of Jewish American literature. Jewish writing has played a central role in the formation of the national literature of the United States, from the Hebraic sources of the Puritan imagination to narratives of immigration and acculturation. This body of writing has also enriched global Jewish literature in its engagement with Jewish history and Jewish multilingual culture. Written by a host of leading scholars, The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature offers an array of approaches that contribute to current debates about ethnic writing, minority discourse, transnational literature, gender studies, and multilingualism. This History takes a fresh look at celebrated authors, introduces new voices, locates Jewish American literature on the map of American ethnicity as well as the spaces of exile and diaspora, and stretches the boundaries of American literature beyond the Americas and the West.
The French tradition: 1789 and the Jews -- The German tradition: capitalism and the Jews -- The American tradition: the city and the Jews
For more than two hundred years, Jews have played important roles in the development of American literature. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature addresses a wide array of themes and approaches to the distinct yet multifaceted body of Jewish American literature. Essays examine writing from the 1700s to major contemporary writers such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Topics covered include literary history, immigration and acculturation, Yiddish and Hebrew literature, popular culture, women writers, literary theory and poetics, multilingualism, the Holocaust, and contemporary fiction. This collection of specially commissioned essays by leading figures discusses Jewish American literature in relation to ethnicity, religion, politics, race, gender, ideology, history, and ethics, and places it in the contexts of both Jewish and American writing. With its chronology and guides to further reading, this volume will prove valuable to scholars and students alike.
The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields. Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldúa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. But this is only part of the story. Liberal-leaning literary writers responding to the resurgence were sometimes confused by the Christian Right’s strange entanglement with the contemporary paradigms of multiculturalism and postmodernism —leading to complex emergent phenomena that Douglas terms "Christian multiculturalism" and "Christian postmodernism." Ultimately, If God Meant to Interfere shows the value of listening to our literature for its sometimes subterranean attention to the religious and social upheavals going on around it.
This book examines how Israeli and American Jewish literatures share commonalities and affinities.