The poems of Anna Margolin (1887?1952), appearing here both in the original Yiddish and in English translation. Winner of the 2007 Yiddish Literature and Translation from Yiddish presented by the Helen and Stan Vine Annual Canadian Jewish Book Awards 2007 Runner Up of the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry Born Rosa Lebensboym in Belarus, Anna Margolin (1887?1952) settled permanently in America in 1913. A brilliant yet largely forgotten poet, her reputation rests on her volume of poetry published in Yiddish in 1929 in New York City. Although written in the 1920s, Margolin's poetry is remarkably fresh and contemporary, dealing with themes of anxiety, loneliness, sexual tensions, and the search for intellectual and spiritual identity, all of which were clearly reflected in her own life choices. Sensitively and beautifully translated here, the poems appear both in the original Yiddish and in English translation. Shirley Kumove's fascinating critical-biographical introduction highlights Margolin's tempestuous and unconventional life. An exceptionally beautiful and gifted woman, Margolin adopted a bohemian and an eccentric lifestyle, and threw herself into both intellectual pursuits and romantic attachments beyond her two marriages.

These twenty-four lectures offer an introduction to the history, literature, and religion of ancient Israel and early Judaism as it is presented in the collection of texts called the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, and the Tanakh. Attention is given not only to the content of the biblical books but also to the debates over their meaning and the critical methods through which they have been interpreted.

In Scattered Among the Peoples, historian Allan Levine presents a vivid and distinctly human perspective on how the Jewish people survived eight hundred years of persecution and forced migration, building and rebuilding their lives and communities. Structured as a chronological series of twelve moment-in-time portraits, focusing on individuals and their interaction with their families and society, the narrative carries readers through the economic, political, social and intellectual climates of some of the world's most famous and fascinating cosmopolitan centers. From the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, to the emigration of Soviet Jews from Russia following the Six Day War in Israel in 1967, Levine's masterful account describes expulsions and scandals, false messiahs and the first ghetto, assassinations, blood libels, the learning and wealth that sprung up in distant cities, and some devastating reversals of fortune. Above all, this compelling saga chronicles the lives of a vibrant cast of characters-well-known historical figures, as well as many who have been forgotten. The successes and the failures of so many-as teachers, rabbis, merchants, writers, soldiers, and physicians-add a colorful and accessible dimension to this sprawling history of the Diaspora. Scattered Among the Peoples is an impressive and immensely readable book, one that is an important contribution to the literature of Jewish history.

"A wide-ranging exploration of spirituality, sex, travel, food, holy texts, and coming of age. Poet Alicia Jo Rabins brings a searing eye for surreal beauty in everyday life with a deep knowledge of wisdom literature, and creates a modern manual for living, a fearless investigation of how we learn to live in a human body both prism and flesh."--Publisher's description.

Ziff: A Life? is the latest tour de force by an extraordinary novelist with explosive verbal energy and intelligence, sexual sensibility, and drive, who has been acclaimed by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Wallace Stegner. Who is Arthur Ziff? One of our greatest living writers or an impertinent provocateur? A true literary master or a clever tactician who seduces the reading public? It is narrator Danny Levitan’s job to find out who Ziff really is, in a compelling novel about the writing life that is at once comic and provocative, producing a memorable reading experience. Sensational publishing and serious literature collide when Levitan, a has-been writer, is offered a hefty advance to write a biography of Ziff, the scourge of myriad Jewish-American readers and a titan among the world’s literary giants. For years, Ziff has been sharing secrets, manuscripts, and sexual escapades with his longtime and less successful friend Danny. But, old friendships aside, Ziff hardly welcomes an incendiary study of his life, and is determined to thwart Danny, with legal roadblocks and personal humiliation. Danny must decide whether to accept the advance and risk the rollercoaster of recriminations that will surely follow. He recounts with humor and often wrenching anguish his journey of discovery into the land of Ziff, and the hard-won truths he finds there—original insights into a man who has crafted his novels, often savagely, from the lives of his friends, including Danny’s life. An unabashed look at the ruthless forging of literary careers and a heady brew of books within a book, Ziff: A Life? will enthrall readers of great fiction everywhere and anyone eager for a peek through the keyhole of contemporary literary celebrity.

Holiness is a challenge for contemporary Jewish thought. The concept of holiness is crucial to religious discourse in general and to Jewish discourse in particular. "Holiness" seems to express an important feature of religious thought and of religious ways of life. Yet the concept is ill defined. This collection explores what concepts of holiness were operative in different periods of Jewish history and bodies of Jewish literature and offers preliminary reflections on their theological and philosophical import today. The contributors illumine some of the major episodes concerning holiness in the history of the development in the Jewish tradition. They are challenged to think about the problems and potential implicit in Judaic concepts of holiness, to make them explicit, and to try to retrieve the concepts for contemporary theological and philosophical reflection. Not all of the contributors push into philosophical and theological territory, but they all provide resources for the reader to do so. Holiness is elusive but it need not be opaque. This volume makes Jewish concepts of holiness lucid, accessible, and intellectually engaging.

Alan Dundes, in this casebook of an anti-Semitic legend, demonstrates the power of folklore to influence thought and history. According to the blood libel legend, Jews murdered Christian infants to obtain blood to make matzah. Dundes has gathered here the work of leading scholars who examine the varied sources and elaborations of the legend. Collectively, their essays constitute a forceful statement against this false accusation. The legend is traced from the murder of William of Norwich in 1144, one of the first reported cases of ritualized murder attributed to Jews, through nineteenth-century Egyptian reports, Spanish examples, Catholic periodicals, modern English instances, and twentieth-century American cases. The essays deal not only with historical cases and surveys of blood libel in different locales, but also with literary renditions of the legend, including the ballad “Sir Hugh, or, the Jew’s Daughter” and Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale.” These case studies provide a comprehensive view of the complex nature of the blood libel legend. The concluding section of the volume includes an analysis of the legend that focuses on Christian misunderstanding of the Jewish feast of Purim and the child abuse component of the legend and that attempts to bring psychoanalytic theory to bear on the content of the blood libel legend. The final essay by Alan Dundes takes a distinctly folkloristic approach, examining the legend as part of the belief system that Christians developed about Jews. This study of the blood libel legend will interest folklorists, scholars of Catholicism and Judaism, and many general readers, for it is both the literature and the history of anti-Semitism.

Aesthetics and Modernity brings together Agnes Heller's most recent essays around the topics of aesthetic genres such as painting, music, literature and comedy, aesthetic reception, and embodiment. The essays draw on Heller's deep appreciation of aesthetics in all its forms from the classical to the Renaissance and the contemporary periods. Heller's recent work on aesthetics explores the complex and fraught status of artworks within the context of the history of modernity. For Heller, not only does the relation between aesthetics and modernity have to be looked at anew, but also the way in which these terms are conceptualized, and this is the two-fold task that she sets for herself in these essays. She engages this task with a critical recognition of modernity's pitfalls. This collection highlights these pitfalls in the context of continuing possibilities for aesthetics and our relationship with works of art, and throws light on Heller's theory of emotions and feelings, and her theory of modernity. Aesthetics and Modernity collects the essential essays of Agnes Heller, and is a must-read for anyone interested in Heller's major contributions to philosophy.

Contains essays in which the author examines the contradictory aspects of a person's fears and desires, discussing examples from literature, fairy tales, works of art, and case studies.

The Pentateuch And The Haftaroth is a book written by Abraham Benisch in 1889. The book is a comprehensive guide to the Jewish scriptures, specifically the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Pentateuch, and the related readings from the Prophets, known as the Haftaroth. The Pentateuch, which includes the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, is considered the foundation of Jewish law and tradition. The Haftaroth, on the other hand, are selections from the books of the Prophets that are read in synagogues on Sabbaths and holidays, and are meant to complement the themes of the Torah portion.Benisch's book provides a detailed analysis of each section of the Pentateuch and the corresponding Haftarah reading, examining the historical context, literary style, and theological themes of each passage. The book also includes translations of the Hebrew text, as well as commentary and interpretation from various Jewish scholars throughout history.Overall, The Pentateuch And The Haftaroth is a valuable resource for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of Jewish scripture and tradition.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

Aaron Zeitlin was a living cruse of sacred oil saved from the Holocaust. Wracked by guilt and despair for having survived by chance, Aaron Zeitlin, a Yiddish poet of religious intensity, reconfirmed his faith while memorializing Polish Jewry and his lost family. In Poems of the Holocaust and Poems of Faith, Morris Faierstein succeeds in bringing the reader closer to the unique vision and verse of Zeitlin's afflicted existence. He masterfully illuminates the images and allusions, whether Talmudic, kabalistic or hasidic, that inform and enrich the poetry of Aaron Zeitlin. Faierstein chose the texts he translates with esthetic sensibility and brings across their delicate nuances of insight and emotional challenges. This volume throws open a wholly new area of Jewish poetry, a distinct spiritual perspective and a shared human expression of both the faith and grief of someone faced with the obliteration of his home, family and people. Seth L. Wolitz Gale Chair of Jewish Studies Professor of Comparative Literature University of Texas at Austin This edition of Aaron Zeitlin's Poems of the Holocaust and Poems of Faith introduces the English reader to the work of this remarkable author who embodies the broad culture of Polish Jewry that was virtually annihilated during the Holocaust. Morris Faierstein has done an admirable job in rendering Zeitlin's rich poetry into moving and powerful English, supplemented with annotations to the rich palette of mystical, biblical and religious allusions that illuminate Zeitlin's writing. This is a worthy introduction to the works of a prolific author who collaborated with his younger contemporary, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Prof. Robert Moses Shapiro Judaic Studies Department Brooklyn College of the City University of New York

Nathan, a blind Jewish scribe, tells the story of the coming of the Messiah in the person of one Simon Stern—from his birth on the Lower East Side, through his career as a millionaire dealer in real estate, to his building of a refuge for the Jewish remnant of World War II. "A majestic work of fiction that should stand world literature's test of time, to be read and reread. A masterpiece."— Commonweal "This book ensnares one of the most extraordinarily daring ideas to inhabit an American novel in a number of years. For one thing, it is that risky devising, dreamed of only by the Thomas Manns of the world, a serious and vastly conceived fiction bled out of the theological imagination. For another, it is clearly an 'American' novel—altogether American, despite its Jewish particularity: it is not so much about the history of the Jews as it is about the idea of the New World as haven. . . . In its teeming particularity every vein of this book runs with a brilliance of Jewish insight and erudition to be found in no other novelist. Arthur Cohen is the first writer of any American generation to compose a profoundly Jewish fiction on a profoundly Western theme."—Cynthia Ozick, New York Times Book Review "This stately, ambitious amalgam of Jewish myth, history, theology, and speculations on the Jewish soul is like an enormous Judaic archeological ruin—often hard for the uninitiated to interpret, but impressive. . . . Intelligent, inventive, fascinating."— New Yorker

The pathbreaking essays in this collection explore the history of consumption by synthesizing discrete historical literatures on consumer culture, gender, and the history of technology. Luxury hotels and the chocolate industry are among the diverse array of topics these authors use to demonstrate that consumption is both a material and a cultural process. Production and consumption become equally inextricable under close analysis. Tools from both the history of technology and gender studies illuminate how these categories intersect. Although broad social and technological trends influence the outcome of these stories, the authors emphasize the agaency of particular groups, including consumers, workers, manufacturers, and the "mediators" who communicate between producers and consumers. This volume will be of interest to historians in a wide range of fields.

A compilation of Goldmann's essays on method in the sociology of literature, such Subject and Object in the Human Science2. The Epistemology of Sociology3. The Concept of Significant Structure in the History of Culture4. The Social Structure and the CollectiveC onsciousneess of Structure5. The Subject of The Cultural Creation6. Theses on the Use of the Concept 'World View' in the history of Philosophy7. Sociological and Cultural Denunciation8. Genetic Structuralism and Stylistic Analysis

Marjorie Perloff, among our foremost critics of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language. Taking seriously Wittgenstein's remark that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry," Perloff begins by discussing Wittgenstein the "poet." What we learn is that the poetics of everyday life is anything but banal. "This book has the lucidity and the intelligence we have come to expect from Marjorie Perloff.—Linda Munk, American Literature "[Perloff] has brilliantly adapted Wittgenstein's conception of meaning and use to an analysis of contemporary language poetry."—Linda Voris, Boston Review " Wittgenstein's Ladder offers significant insights into the current state of poetry, literature, and literary study. Perloff emphasizes the vitality of reading and thinking about poetry, and the absolute necessity of pushing against the boundaries that define and limit our worlds."—David Clippinger, Chicago Review "Majorie Perloff has done more to illuminate our understanding of twentieth century poetic language than perhaps any other critic. . . . Entertaining, witty, and above all highly original."—Willard Bohn, Sub-Stance

Ilan Stavans has been a lightning rod for cultural discussion and criticism his entire career. In A Critic's Journey , he takes on his own Jewish and Hispanic upbringing with an autobiographical focus and his typical flair with words, exploring the relationship between the two cultures from his own and also from others' experiences. Stavans has been hailed as a voice for Latino culture thanks to his Hispanic upbringing, but as a Jew and a Caucasian, he's also an outsider to that culture---something that's sharpened his perspective (and some of his critics' swords). In this book of essays, he looks at the creative process from that point of view, exploring everything from the translation of Don Quixote to the Hispanic anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Latin America. Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture and Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor at Amherst College. A native of Mexico, he received his doctorate in Latin American Literature from Columbia University. Stavans's books include The Hispanic Condition, On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, Love & Language (with Verónica Albin), Resurrecting Hebrew , and Mr. Spic Goes to Washington , and he has edited books including The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories and the upcoming Norton Anthology of Latino Literature . His story "Morirse está en Hebreo" was made into the award-winning movie My Mexican Shivah . Stavans has received numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Jewish Book Award, an Emmy nomination, the Latino Book Award, Chile's Presidential Medal, the Rubén Darío Distinction, and the Cátedra Roberto Bolaño. His work has been translated into a dozen languages.

Ilan Stavans has been a lightning rod for cultural discussion and criticism his entire career. In A Critic's Journey , he takes on his own Jewish and Hispanic upbringing with an autobiographical focus and his typical flair with words, exploring the relationship between the two cultures from his own and also from others' experiences. Stavans has been hailed as a voice for Latino culture thanks to his Hispanic upbringing, but as a Jew and a Caucasian, he's also an outsider to that culture---something that's sharpened his perspective (and some of his critics' swords). In this book of essays, he looks at the creative process from that point of view, exploring everything from the translation of Don Quixote to the Hispanic anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Latin America. Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture and Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor at Amherst College. A native of Mexico, he received his doctorate in Latin American Literature from Columbia University. Stavans's books include The Hispanic Condition, On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, Love & Language (with Verónica Albin), Resurrecting Hebrew , and Mr. Spic Goes to Washington , and he has edited books including The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories and the upcoming Norton Anthology of Latino Literature . His story "Morirse está en Hebreo" was made into the award-winning movie My Mexican Shivah . Stavans has received numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Jewish Book Award, an Emmy nomination, the Latino Book Award, Chile's Presidential Medal, the Rubén Darío Distinction, and the Cátedra Roberto Bolaño. His work has been translated into a dozen languages.

Philippines is Hélène Cixous's reverie or 'true dreaming' which intertwines Freud's uneasy views on telepathy, autobiographical memories conflating Algeria and Paris, childhood and adult life, shared with her brother 'Pete', and literary evocations from Proust and George du Maurier's forgotten novel Peter Ibbetson. Amid telepathic conversations, real or imagined, and life events uncannily answering one another from a distance, Cixous's dense evocative journey ceaselessly 'returns to its starting point' and, like the twin almonds in one shell evoked by the title, reveals intimate, secret bonds between scenes and beings, real and fictional. Its interpretive sharpness delivered with stylistic elegance and candour will make this study typical of Cixous's art, which plies between literature and criticism, appealing not only to scholars and critics interested in psychoanalysis, autobiography and the act of reading, but also to a broader readership captivated by the hallucinatory coincidences between life, dream and fiction, when 'Reality is the dream. The dream is the true reality'.