"Movie-Made Jews focuses on a rich, usable American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation, as well as through the unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. By selectively revisiting canonical pre-1990 films and amply representing films of the new millennium, Movie-Made Jews illuminates an American Jewish film tradition that includes jazz singers, pawnbrokers, and serious men. It also features those who tremble before G-d, who commit crimes and misdemeanors, who declare Hineini, Here I Am, who do whatever works, who leave and then return to Delancey Street and Liberty Heights. In these pages, those who might be identified as "just Jews" reside alongside those who are traditionally-and sometimes untraditionally-observant. Helene Meyers shows that as we go to our local theater, attend a Jewish film festival, play a DVD, watch streaming videos, Jewishness becomes part of the multicultural mosaic rather than collapsing into a generic whiteness or being represented as a life apart. This engagingly-written book demonstrates that a Jewish movie is neither just a movie nor for Jews only. With incisive analysis of what appears onscreen as well as what happens behind the scenes during production and how audiences respond to what they view, Movie-Made Jews challenges the assumption that American Jewish cinema is a cinema of impoverishment and assimilation. While it's a truism that Jews make movies, this book brings into focus the diverse ways movies make Jews"--

"...this definitive anthology of major nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, nonfiction and poetry by eighty Jewish-Russian writers explores both timeless themes and specific tribulations of a people's history"--Publisher's info.

Leib Goldkorn, aged musician, first appeared almost a quarter-century ago in The Steinway Quintet. Now Leib has replaced his magic flute with his phallus: it is love, longing, and the quest for sexual fulfillment that must stave off both his own death and the imminent destruction of the Jews. In Ice he rescues the celebrated skater Sonja Henie from Hitler's clutches. In Fire his paramour is Carmen Miranda. And in Water he engages in a South Sea Island intrigue with a famous swimming star of the 1940s. Meanwhile, in the present, Leib seeks consummation with three other inamoratas: Clara, his wife; Hustler model Miss Crystal Knight; and the critic Michiko Kakutani (causing a real-life literary scandal). In this "wickedly funny" (Elle) and no less heartbreaking novel, Leib Goldkorn emerges as one of American literature's most enduring, and endearing, creations. A New York Times Notable Book; a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.

340 pages.

In 1931 Worcester, Massachusetts, Joey Singer, the teenaged son of Jewish immigrants, suffers with his family through the early part of the Great Depression, trying to finish high school, working a milk delivery route, marching on Washington, and eventually even becoming a hobo, all the while trying to figure out how to go to college and realize his dream of becoming a writer. Includes author's note about the Depression.

In 1939 Sweden, two Jewish sisters wait for their parents to join them in fleeing the Nazis in Austria, but while eight-year-old Nellie settles in quickly, twelve-year-old Stephie feels stranded at the end of the world, with a foster mother who is as cold and unforgiving as the island on which they live.

An inventive literary account of Cixous's remarkable journey to her mother's birthplace Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation For about eighty years, the Jonas family of Osnabrück were part of a small but vibrant Jewish community in this mid-size city of Lower Saxony. After the war, Osnabrück counted not a single Jew. Most had been deported and murdered in the camps, others emigrated if they could and if they managed to overcome their own inertia. It is this inertia and failure to escape that Hélène Cixous seeks to account for in Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem. Vicious anti-Semitism hounded all of Osnabrück's Jews long before the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. So why did people wait to leave when the threat was so patent, so in-their-face? Drawn from the stories told to Cixous by her mother, Ève, and grandmother, Rosalie (Rosi), this literary work reimagines fragments of Ève's and Rosi's stories, including the death of Ève's uncle, Onkel André. Piecing together the story of Andreas Jonas from what she was told and from what she envisages, Cixous recounts the tragedy of the one she calls the King Lear of Osnabrück, who followed his daughter to Jerusalem only to be sent away by her and to return to Osnabrück in time to be deported to a death camp. Cixous wanders the streets of the city she had heard about all her life in her mother's and grandmother's stories, digs into its archives, meets city officials, all the while wondering if she should have come. These hesitations and reflections in the present, often voiced in dialogues staged with her own son or daughter, are woven with scenes from her childhood in Algeria and the half-remembered, half-invented stories of the Jonas family, making Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem one of the author's most intensely engaging books. This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

"A breathtaking journey across Iran where war and superstition, jealousy and betrayal, and passion and loyalty rage behind the impenetrable walls of mansions and the crumbling houses of the Jewish Quarter. Against the tumultuous background of World War II, Dr. Yaran will find himself caught in the thrall of the anti-Semitic Governor General, the most powerful man in the country. Dr. Yaran falls in love with the Governor General's defiant wife, Velvet, upending not only the life of the doctor's beloved daughter, but the entire community. In his quest to save everything and everyone he loves, Dr. Yaran will navigate the intersections of magic, science, lust, and treachery. His sole ally is the Governor General's servant, an exotic eunuch, who will do anything to aid his mistress in her dangerous quest to attain forbidden love." --

Now in paperback and "brimming with wondrous surprises . . . There's magic in The Pinch " ( The Boston Globe ) Steve Stern's prodigious imagination finds a wondrous home in the Pinch, a once-thriving Jewish community in Memphis. The Pinch revolves around a single enchanted day containing years, during which the antics of a group of Jewish mystics threaten to ravage the life of general store proprietor Pinchas Pin with miracles, and his nephew Muni's ardor for an alluring tightrope walker collides with his passion for chronicling the wonders of North Main Street. Their stories, gleaned by a hapless bookseller from a fabulist history book, transform the fate of the neighborhood. Now in paperback, The Pinch is a sparkling reminder that Steve Stern is one of our most talented and inimitable storytellers. "[A] big, rangy, saturated, antic new novel, a Pynchonian tragicomedy . . . Stern, an ebullient maestro of words and mayhem, wonder and conscience, orchestrates a cacophonous, whirling, gritty, tender, time-warping saga that encompasses a cavalcade of horror, stubborn love, cosmic slapstick, burlesque humor, and a scattering of miracles." -- Booklist (starred review) "Weird and wonderful . . . [ The Pinch is] a backdrop to Stern's poignant and antic drama, a playground on which his exuberant, larger-than-life characters can run wild . . . The Pinch is composed of . . . perfectly calibrated moments, all of which pulse with a dynamic inventiveness." -- Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

"Flames from the Earth is an autobiographical novel by Isaiah Spiegel, one of the most revered Yiddish authors to survive the Holocaust, depicting the complex web of relationships in and around the Łódź Ghetto"--

In this volume, Jules Chametzky has gathered his very personable stories and reminiscences of some of the many writers he has met or known as he writes, some fleetingly, a few more intensely over the course of his more than half a century in the business of reading, writing, and talking about literature, of teaching and editing. Not only do those writers emerge as the complicated and fascinating human beings they are, but we also come to know Jules himself, a warm and gracious storyteller. Praise for Out of Brownsville: NO STUDENT of American Jewish writing needs to be reminded that Jules Chametzky is one of its pioneers. A founding editor of the influential Massachusetts Review, he is perhaps especially noted for his study of the fiction of Abraham Cahan. He now caps a distinguished career as critic, editor, and teacher with this delightful volume of memoirs. It is astonishing to know how many of the shapers of literature in America Chametzky knew not merely as subjects met in passing but understood as artists. Readers and scholars will, of course, find their own favorites among the individual memoirs, but beyond the perceptiveness of the recollections and the shrewd assessments in them, there emerges Jules himself, warm, gracious, accepting, modest about his own achievements, which he scarcely mentions. One closes the book with a sense of regret that it has ended and with a feeling how good it was for those who met Jules and enjoyed, however briefly, his friendship. Joseph C. Landis, Editor, Yiddish-Modern Jewish Studies, Professor Emeritus of English, Queens College, CUNY WOVEN INTO these lively portraits and reminiscences of others are not only sudden illuminations of the characters portrayed and of the fleeting moments captured here, but also insights into the fragility of life, the power to create, and the strange magic of human encounters that make Jules Chametzky s memoir so touchingly social and pleasurable to read. Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University LEGENDARY EDITOR Jules Chametzky s book is autobiography at its cleanest: one s life through the eyes of others. His astute, personable dispatches are a map of Jewish intellectual trends in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture (Spanish), Amherst College ACCORDING TO the Jewish Midrash, the Book and the Sword came wrapped together, with a message: Regard what is written in the book, or be delivered to the sword. Jules Chametzky s love of books and their very human creators is expressed in this cultural memoir with affection and marvelous charm, yet there is also a tone of urgency, from a man who has dedicated his life to keeping the book open and the sword sheathed. Lawrence Bush, Editor, Jewish Currents About the Author: Jules Chametzky is Professor of English, emeritus, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught from 1958 until 2004. He was a founder of The Massachusetts Review, of which he is Editor, emeritus, after 27 years as senior co-Editor. Chametzky has published numerous articles and reviews on Jewish American and American literature in popular and academic journals. His major publications include From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan; Our Decentralized Literature: Cultural Mediations in Selected Jewish and Southern Writers; the Penguin edition of Abraham Cahan s The Rise of David Levinsky. He co-edited Black and White in American Culture: Ten Years of The Massachusetts Review; and Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology. Chametzky is the father of three sons and was married for 52 years to the late poet Anne Halley.

"German, Jew, Muslim, Gay offers an astonishing perspective on the history of modern Germany through the vantage point of a man with multiple identities who devoted his life to religious utopias, fought for homosexual rights, wrote gay fiction, converted from Judaism to Islam (one of the few of any faith to do so), and considered himself part of a spiritual elite that held the key to Germany's salvation. Born in Posen in 1880, the son of a Jewish industrialist, Hugo Marcus converted to Islam and chose the name Hamid; he became the most important convert in Germany while retaining his membership in the Jewish community. He was renamed Israel by the Nazis and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938, where he was in the unique position of Muslim witness to the Holocaust. The imam of his mosque gained his release and he escaped to Switzerland, where he wrote gay fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus. He died in Basel in 1966. The book challenges deeply ingrained perceptions of Muslim-Jewish relations during World War II and illuminates their interconnected histories in modern Europe. It also tells the unknown story of Marcus' orientalized Islam that, in echoing Goethe's, revitalized an essential strand of Germany's spiritual heritage"--

The tale of Lillth Zeremba, a young woman rebelling against her intellectually complex, feminist Jewish mother.

In his first collection of stories since Fabulous Small Jews , Joseph Epstein delivers all the pleasures his readers have come to expect: stories of ordinary men confronting the moments that define a life, told with the bittersweet humor and loving irony encompassed in the title of the book. These fourteen tales map a very particular world--Jews whose lives are anchored in Chicago--in rich, revealing detail even as they brim with universal longings: complex love affairs and unspoken rivalries, family triumphs and private disappointments. Epstein, who "happens to possess a standup comic's gift for punch lines" ( New York Times Book Review ), brings his emphatically grown-up characters to witty, rueful, and charming life. The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff is a marvelous collection from a master of the short form and one of the most distinctive writers working in America today.

A reading of African American and Jewish American writers from Henry Roth and Ralph Ellison to Philip Roth and David Bradley. Reading the work of such writers alongside and through one another, Newton's book offers an original way of juxtaposing two major traditions in modern American literature, and rethinking the sometimes vexed relationship between two constituencies ordinarily confined to sociopolitical or media commentary alone. Newton combines Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy and Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory in shaping an innovative kind of ethical-political criticism. Through artful, dialogical readings of Saul Bellow and Chester Himes, David Mamet and Anna Deavere Smith, and others, Newton seeks to represent American Blacks and Jews outside the distorting mirror of 'Black-Jewish Relations', and restrictive literary histories alike. A final chapter addresses the Black/Jewish dimension of the O. J. Simpson trial.

One of America's most popular Jewish writers, Chaim Potok (b. 1929) is the author of such novels as The Chosen (1967), The Promise (1969), The Book of Lights (1981), and Davita's Harp (1985). Each of his novels explores the tension between tradition and modernity, and the clash between Jewish culture and contemporary Western civilization, which he calls "core-to-core culture confrontation." Although primarily known as a novelist, Potok is an ordained Conservative rabbi and a world-class Judaic scholar who has also published children's books, theological discourses, biographies, and histories. Conversations with Chaim Potok presents interviews ranging from 1976 to 1999. Potok discusses the broad range of his writing and the deep influence of non-Jewish novels-in particular, Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -on his work. Interviews bear witness to Potok's many other influences-Orthodox Jewish doctrine, Freudian psychoanalytical theory, Picasso's Guernica, and Jewish kabbalah mysticism. Though labeled an American Jewish writer, Potok argues that Flannery O'Connor should then be called an American Catholic writer and John Updike an American Protestant writer. "In his mind," editor Daniel Walden writes, "just as Faulkner was a writer focused on a particular place, Oxford, Mississippi, . . . so Potok's territory was a small section of New York City." Potok often explores conflict in his writings and in his interviews. Strict Jewish teachings deem fiction an artifice and therefore unnecessary, yet since the age of sixteen Potok has been driven to write novels. At the root of all of these conversations is Potok's intense interest in the turmoil between Jewish culture, religion, and tradition and what he calls "Western secular humanism." As he discusses his work, he continually includes broader issues, such as the state of Jewish literature and art, pointing out with pride and enthusiasm his belief that Jewish culture, in the twentieth century, has finally begun to have a significant role in producing and shaping the world's art and literature. Whether discussing the finer details of Talmudic textual analysis or his period of chaplaincy during the Korean War, Potok is articulate and philosophical, bringing deep consideration into what may seem small subjects. Although his novels and histories take place primarily in the recent past, the Chaim Potok that emerges from this collection is a writer deeply rooted in the tensions of the present. Daniel Walden is Professor Emeritus of American Studies, English and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. He has written or edited several books, including On Being Jewish (1974), Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers (1984), The World of Chaim Potok (1985), and American Jewish Poets: The Roots and the Stems (1990).

Discusses Jewish identity in America as reflected in the culture of immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Self-hatred or, at least, ambivalence about oneself in the face of native American values is one theme. Ch. 5 (pp. 98-125), "To Make 'a Jew': Projecting Antisemitism in Post-War America", analyzes two novels - Arthur Miller's "Focus" and Saul Bellow's "The Victim" - that explore the psychosocial dimensions of postwar antisemitism. They raise the question whether possibilities of Jewish-Gentile relations might lead to personal and social renovation. In "Focus", a crypto-fascist antisemite who has internalized racist stereotypes finally identifies symbolically as a Jew. In "The Victim", both Jew and Gentile partially overcome their mutual stereotyping. The main Jewish protagonist also overcomes some negative aspects of his self-image.

The storm of controversy over Helen Demidenko and her novel, 'The Hand that Signed the Paper,' raised huge cultural and political questions. Robert Manne, the influential historian and commentator, was a key participant in that debate. In 'The Culture of Forgetting, Manne tells the fascinating story of Demidenko's triumphal march into the honors list of Australian literature, the furious argument she provoked, and her astonishing unmasking as Helen Darville, the daughter of English immigrants. In his pursuit of the truth, Manne is driven by one inescapable question: what is the relationship between 'The Hand that Signed the Paper' and the greatest tragedy of twentieth-century Europe, the Holocaust? 'The Culture of Forgetting' is a powerful and moving book about fiction and free speech, a deeply personal response to the Demidenko puzzle, and a brilliant account of the history at the heat of the affair.

The agendas of three European men with dubious political histories converge in the aftermath of an 1989 death linked to the fates of myriad Hungarians, Jews, Germans and Gypsies across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century.