The scientific achievements of the modern world failed to impress the leading writers of this century, leaving them instead profoundly disturbed by a sense of lost values and of the insignificance of the individual in a universe seemingly indifferent to human concerns. In The Search for Selfhood in Modern Literature Roston explores the strategies adopted by such mid-century authors as Greene, Salinger, Osborne, Baldwin and others in their attempt to cope with the spiritual vacuity - strategies including the emergence of the anti-hero and of literary existentialism - and offer in the course of the investigation fascinatingly new insights into their work.

What, if any, is the relationship between Charles Dickens and the decorative arts? Between Henry James and Art Nouveau? Between the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the paintings of the Impressionists? Recent trends in scholarship have begun to reassess the assumption that the arts of painting and literature are too fundamentally disparate to permit a fruitful comparison between the two. In Victorian Contexts, Murray Roston puts that assumption to rest with imaginative and refreshing essays on the similarities and shared themes of the literature, painting, architecture, and crafts of the nineteenth century. Explaining the value of such an intertextual approach, he argues that in every generation there is a central complex of inherited assumptions and urgent contemporary concerns to which each creative artist responds in his or her individual way. Eminently readable, Victorian Contexts is accessible to general readers as well as scholars of literature, the visual arts, and nineteenth-century culture.

When King Philip VI expelled the Jews in 1306, some 100,000 men, women, and children were driven from royal France into the neighboring lands of Spain, Provence, Italy, and North Africa. The great expulsion of 1306 was arguably one of the most traumatic moments of medieval Jewish history and would prove to be the harbinger of a series of recalls and expulsions, local and general, culminating in King Charles VI's expulsion decree of 1394. Despite the upheavals of the fourteenth century, the literary productivity of Jews was astonishing. Yet there are few direct references to the catastrophic events of 1306, even in Jewish liturgical and historiographic texts, where one would expect to find them. In No Place of Rest , Susan Einbinder coaxes out the literary traces of this traumatic expulsion. Why did the memory of this proud and vibrant Jewish community fade from historical memory? Where do its remnants reside among later communities and readers? From the lyrics of the supposed "Jewish troubadour" Isaac HaGorni to medical texts and astronomical charts, Einbinder studies a range of writings she reveals to be commemorative. Her careful readings uncover the ways in which medieval Jews asserted their identity in exile and, perhaps more important, helped to preserve or efface their history.

Jacob Neusner is Research Professor of Religion and Theology at Bard College and Senior Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Theology at Bard. He has published more than 900 books and unnumbered articles, both scholarly and academic and popular and journalistic, and is the most published humanities scholar in the world. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees, including seven US and European honorary doctorates. He received his AB from Harvard College in 1953, his PhD from Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary in 1961, and rabbinical ordination and the degree of Master of Hebrew Letters from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1960. Neusner is editor of the 'Encyclopedia of Judaism' (Brill, 1999. I-III) and its Supplements; Chair of the Editorial Board of 'The Review of Rabbinic Judaism, ' and Editor in Chief of 'The Brill Reference Library of Judaism', both published by E. J. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands. He is editor of 'Studies in Judaism', University Press of America. Neusner resides with his wife in Rhinebeck, New York. They have a daughter, three sons and three daughters-in-law, six granddaughters and two grandsons.

ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW (1959), which stars Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan, Ed Begley, and Gloria Graham, is written by blacklisted screenwriter Abraham Polonsky and directed by Robert Wise. The last great film noir of the black & white era, ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW reflects the author's strong social conscience--as racial conflict is portrayed as central to the failure of a bank robbery. This publication of the complete script of ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW blends the shooting script (written before the film was shot) and the continuity script (the elements which are contained in the finished film). The critical analysis draws extensively on specially conducted interviews with Robert Wise, Harry Belafonte, and Abraham Polonsky. Discussed din depth are the significance of a black protagonist within the film noir genre; the film's staus with African-American related cinema; the adaptation from William McGivern's novel; and the critically celebrated jazz score by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Glory and Agony is the first history of the shifting attitudes toward national sacrifice in Hebrew culture over the last century. Its point of departure is Zionism's obsessive preoccupation with its haunting "primal scene" of sacrifice, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, as evidenced in wide-ranging sources from the domains of literature, art, psychology, philosophy, and politics. By placing these sources in conversation with twentieth-century thinking on human sacrifice, violence, and martyrdom, this study draws a complex picture that provides multiple, sometimes contradictory insights into the genesis and gender of national sacrifice. Extending back over two millennia, this study unearths retellings of biblical and classical narratives of sacrifice, both enacted and aborted, voluntary and violent, male and female—Isaac, Ishmael, Jephthah's daughter, Iphigenia, Jesus. Glory and Agony traces the birth of national sacrifice out of the ruins of religious martyrdom, exposing the sacred underside of Western secularism in Israel as elsewhere.

Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer on hysteria, J.A. Symonds and Havelock Ellis on sexuality, a novel by Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot (and Ezra Pound), even the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge: men making books together. Wayne Koestenbaum's startling interpretation of literary collaboration focuses on homosexual desire: men write together, he argues, in order either to express or to evade homosexual feelings. Their writing becomes a textual intercourse, the book at once a female body they can share and the child of their partnership. These man-made texts steal a generative power that women's bodies seem to represent. Seen as the site of a struggle between homosexual and homophobic energies, the texts Koestenbaum explores - works of psychoanalysis, sexology, fiction, and poetry - emerge as more complex, more revealing. They crystallize and refract the anxiety of male sexuality at the end of the last century, and open up a deeper understanding of connections today between the erotic and the literary. Drawing upon the work of feminist critics, Koestenbaum connects male collaboration and the exchange of women within patriarchy: he peers into both medical texts and imaginative literature, disturbing our ready acceptance of the co-authored work. This strong and unsettling book transforms our understanding of the creative process, providing a new sense of what both collaborative and solitary artistry mean.

"Subversion and Sympathy : Gender, Law, and the British Novel brings new energy and perspective to the law-and-literature movement. Focusing on the position of women in British novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - a period during which literature played a creative role in legal reform - the book illustrates the many ways in which the investigation of legal matters sheds new light on major literary works. At the same time, it shows that attention to literary representations of legal issues illuminates developments in the law by bringing to life matters at stake in legal reforms. In fourteen essays, the volume spans a range of gender-related issues, including inheritance, money lending, illegitimacy, marriage, and rape. At the same time, it makes a methodological contribution, displaying (and discussing) a range of perspectives that exemplifies the breadth and range of this interdisciplinary area of scholarship, which links history, gender studies, philosophy, literary studies, and law. The volume seeks to reinvigorate the methodology of the law-and-literature movement by provoking a cross-disciplinary conversation among legal scholars, judges, literary scholars, and feminist philosophers. Participants include those already known for their work on law and literature but also, crucially, legal leading lights who have not previously written about literature. Subversion and Sympathy shows that the conversation between law and literature can enrich our understanding not just of the fields in question but also of the deeper human issues at the heart of a given period - and beyond"--Unedited summary from book jacket.

Haunting and enigmatic, these nine loosely connected stories are evidence of the growing field of Jewish-Latin American fiction. "A Heaven Without Crows," structured as a letter from Kafka to his friend Max Brod, details the labyrinthine paths of his tortured soul. "The Invention of Memory," awarded the Gamma Literature Prize, is also a tribute to Eastern European letters, in which a Czech man with a portentous memory is diagnosed with a deteriorating illness. He travels to Mexico to look for his past and fight against oblivion by carefully staging his vanishing reminiscences. "Three Nightmares" proves that fantasy and reality, people and things, are form-shifting aspects of one another. And the title story is a bizarre tale, a succinct and tangential homage to Felisberto Hernandez's piano narratives and to Oliver Sacks's neurological anecdotes, in which a young woman loses touch with one of her hands. The volume concludes with an autobiographical essay, "Lost in Translation," in which Stavans comments on his experience growing up Jewish in Mexico. Told with wit and precision, these stories are at once a meditation on politics and the imagination in the Hispanic world, compelling allegories on the nature of freedom and individuality, a study of guilt, and a savage satire on the rigorous banality of life. The delicious secrets of Stavans's imagination unfold in these endearing tales with the authority of dreams, questioning our philosophical assumptions and portraying the universe as a vast, mysterious theater where everything is sacred but nothing is absolute.

Dan Miron's erudite and rich essay chronicles and analyzes the rise and fall of the prophetic poem in modern Hebrew literature. While focusing on H. N. Bialik's contribution to the rise and decline of the prophetic poem, Miron analyzes the historical, literary, and artistic factors influencing the fate of the prophetic poem from its ascendancy during the period of Hebrew Romanticism of the late 1890s and early 1900s to its decline in the post-World War I era and its eventual demise with the rise of the new poetics and the establishment of the State of Israel. In addition to Bialik, Miron discusses the works of Avraham Mapu, M.L. Lilienblum, Issac Irter, Shaul Tchernikhovsky, A. Shlonsky, U. Z. Greenberg, Yonatan Ratosh, Haim Gouri, and Amir Gilboa, among others.

This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

WCW, The Embodiment of Knowledge. Early essays.

The story of how Tomasina and Periwinkle, the scarecrows, meet and what happens when they do.

First published in 1994. This volume takes as its theme Jewish education and learning throughout the ages. The essays explore the nature and function of the 'Jewish Academies' in the broadest sense, the leading personalities associated with them and their social, cultural and moral effect on the Jewish communities of their day.

"A wave of plague ravaged the cities of northern Italy in 1630-31, ravaging Christian and Jewish communities alike. In Writing Plague Susan L. Einbinder explores the Hebrew texts that lay witness to the event. These Jewish sources on the Great Italian Plague have never been treated together as a group, Einbinder observes, but they can contribute to a bigger picture of this major outbreak and how it affected people, institutions, and beliefs; how individuals and institutions responded; and how they did or did not try to remember and memorialize it"-- Provided by publisher.

Book by Louvish, Simon

There was something similar to the depraved beginning of Theodora, Empress of Byzantine, who had been a dancer, and the beginning of Miriam the woman from Magdala. And by a similar fate, they were both later considered saints... Here is the gripping, suspenseful story of Lili, a prostitute from nowadays Jaffa, as told by Adon, the unlikely passer-by who saved her life. It is a razor-sharp story of love and fateful struggles, set against the raw and vibrant human landscape of Jaffa. A stark and riveting account of the human experience in its many moving parts. Author Shlomo Kalo delivers another thought-provoking masterpiece that richly explores the zeniths of man's compassion, and the depths of his depravity. A master of craft, Kalo employs honesty in conveying the rich layers of human lives and the delicacy by which their various struggles paint the city of Jaffa in vibrant hues of struggle and hope. Scroll up and Grab your copy of LILI today