Discusses medieval poetry in Hebrew (plus one example in Old French) dealing with martyrdom in the face of forced conversion. Deals with the ideal of Jewish resistance to persecution, but notes also the influence of Christian culture on Jewish literature. Focuses on Jewish martyrs in Blois, Troyes, and Paris. Notes how Talmud burnings impacted on the literature, reflected in the idea of the immortality of both the Jews and their books. Elucidates how the literature, often directed at the educated Jewish elite (the Tosafists and their pupils), reflected ideals of Jewish life as well as death. Suggests the latter ideal may have led most Ashkenazi Jews to prefer "Kiddush Hashem" or exile to conversion, when faced with that choice.

Born in the United States, Shirley Kaufman has lived for the past 20 years in Jerusalem, a city split by cultural and religious fault lines. In direct, sensitive language, Kaufman's poems occupy the shifting border between ordinary life and violence, Palestinian and Jew, young love and aging companionship. They grapple with the meaning of routine, of family, and of life among a daily existence punctured with bombs. Sometimes I need to be nowhere. A place without history. "Kaufman's poems flourish in the spaces between what is familiar and unfamiliar, between life in Israel and life in the U.S., and in those moments when the differences between Palestinians and Jews, mothers and daughters, history and the immediate moment play themselves out." -- American Book Review "Kaufman is adept at revealing the human face behind politics, carefully accumulating familiar details to make a large portrait." -- Publishers Weekly Shirley Kaufman is the author of seven books of poetry and several translations from the Hebrew. Her awards include the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. A native of Seattle, Kaufman now lives in Jerusalem.

65 poems that incorporate enigmatic symbolism from the Book of Ezekiel into themes of exile and emigration.

[Poems form] a tale of Jewish assimilation and its discontents: a sweeping exposition on Jewish American culture in all its bawdy, contradictory, inventive, glory. Exploring -- in his own family and in culture and politics at large -- how Jews have shed their minority status in the United States, poet Kevin Coval show us a people's transformation out of diaspora, landing on bothe sides of the color line--From back cover.

Discusses the Russian Jewish poet (born Eduard Dzyubin, 1895-1934), including the role that antisemitism played in regard to the publication (or non-publication) of his works and to their interpretation. Mentions, in particular, the Russian ultra-nationalist Stanislav Kunyayev, who viewed Bagritskii both as an "alien trespasser in the fields of Russian poetry" and as a self-hating Jew. Focuses on the poems "Origin" and "February" and their relation to the poet's Jewishness, which contemporary and later Soviet criticism minimized. Examines the Jewish trauma of rejection depicted in "February" and the protagonist's reactions to it. Denies the antisemitic view that the Jew in the poem rapes a Russian woman. Rejects the image of Bagritskii as a self-hating Jew, as well as the allegation that he has no place in Russian culture. Bagritskii was hoping for a synthesis, a utopia where a Russian-Jewish identity was possible and welcome. The fate of his works, as well as those of Soviet Jews who outlived him, proved otherwise.

Book by Kaufman, Shirley

"Ulysses, a book-length poem, details Fondane's voyages and various parts of his life, including an Atlantic passage, the experience of living as a cultural and linguistic exile, the precarity of growing up Jewish in early 20th-century Romania, and the desperate streams of emigrants and refugees searching new lives across the ocean" --

הספר כולל אוסף צילומים בנושא יהודים בגלות מביתם. בנוסף לכך הספר מלווה בשירים של יהודה עמיחי.

Analyzes the works of Canadian Jewish poet A.M. Klein (1909-1972) written in the late 1920s-early 1950s, reading them as a combative poetic response to history. Klein's early poetry in "Hath Not a Jew, " composed against the background of the rise of antisemitism in Europe and in Montreal, his hometown, reveals his deep identification with Jewish tradition and his disillusionment with the humanist inability to confront Nazism. Deeply affected by news of the Holocaust, he wrote his mock epic "The Hitleriad" in 1942, in which he presented Hitler's ugliness, mediocrity, and meanness of spirit. This seems an attempt to demystify Hitler, paralleled perhaps by Arendt's concept of the banality of evil. "The Rocking Chair, " a collection of poems, and the novel "The Second Scroll" represent Klein's attempt to come to terms with the post-Holocaust world. Ch. 4 (pp. 61-80), "The Hitleriad: Against the Silence of the Apocalypse, " appeared in "Studies in American Jewish Literature" 9 (1990).

"Thoroughly readable....A fascinating introduction to the world of the Jew in 19th-century Europe, viewed through the eyes of a brilliant and perceptive artist."--AB Bookman's Weekly. "A first-rate eye-opener, a fascinating compendium of the profound struggle toward a more integrated humanity."--Choice. The work of the great 19th-century German poet Heine is rich with verbal portraits of men and women, real and imaginary, contemporary and historical, ranging from Karl Marx and the Rothschilds to Spinoza and characters from the Bible. Drawing on material only recently made available, as well as letters and recorded conversations, Prawer has produced a work which is at once a study of the technique of literary portraiture, and a panorama of the Jewish world throughout the ages.