A collection of essays, all published previously. The following deal with antisemitism:

A collection of essays, all published previously. The following deal with antisemitism:

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.

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.

Eminent Anglo-Saxonist Nicholas Howe explores how the English, in the centuries before the Norman Conquest, located themselves both literally and imaginatively in the world. His elegantly written study focuses on Anglo-Saxon representations of place as revealed in a wide variety of texts in Latin and Old English, as well as in diagrams of holy sites and a single map of the known world found in British Library, Cotton Tiberius B v. The scholar's investigations are supplemented and aided by insights gleaned from his many trips to physical sites. The Anglo-Saxons possessed a remarkable body of geographical knowledge in written rather than cartographic form, Howe demonstrates. To understand fully their cultural geography, he considers Anglo-Saxon writings about the places they actually inhabited and those they imagined. He finds in Anglo-Saxon geographic images a persistent sense of being far from the center of the world, and he discusses how these migratory peoples narrowed that distance and developed ways to define themselves.

Françoise Massardier-Kenney’s translation of Antoine Berman’s Toward a Translation Criticism makes available for the first time in the English-speaking world one of the twentieth-century’s foundational texts in translation studies. Berman’s book, published posthumously in France, develops an original concept of “criticism of translation” and a methodology to anchor the practice of this criticism. He demonstrates how the work of translation is a critical process as well as a creative one. Moving away from nonsystematic evaluative approaches that focus on the shortcomings of translations or the normative approaches that study the cultural and literary systems into which the translations are inserted, Berman applies the notion of ethics he developed in his earlier works, calling for a translation that is nonethnocentric and stipulating that the creativity required by translation be focused on the re-creation of the original in the other language without being over-determined by the personal poetics of the writer-translator. Berman achieves a rare combination of hermeneutic and stylistic analysis, of commentary on the original and analysis of its translations, giving the reader access both “to the language of the original―to the way in which poetry and thought are deployed―and to the actual work of translation.” Toward a Translation Criticism is divided into two separate but interlinked parts, each focused on one element of the ethics of translation: theory (reflection) and practice (experience). In the first part Berman presents what he calls a general “productive criticism,” while in the second part he applies the general theoretical principles of this criticism to the analysis of the translations of John Donne’s work into French and Spanish. The translation of Berman’s text is accompanied by an introduction placing Berman’s thought in its intellectual context and by supplementary notes that complete the bibliographic material presented in the French-language version. This study is essential reading for translation studies scholars, readers interested in the creative literary process, in the nature of literary criticism, andin the philosophy of language. It will also be of interest to John Donne specialists.

The Concise Oxford History of Music, written by one of the world's most respected musicologists, remains the one-volume history for anyone seriously interested in the subject. This comprehensive work covers the whole history of music by genre from its first recorded emergence in Egypt to the death of Stravinsky.

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.

"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.

"Sonic Ruins of Modernity shows how social, cultural and cognitive phenomena interact in the making and distribution of folksongs beyond their time. Through Judeo-Spanish (or Ladino) folksongs, the author illustrates a methodology for the interplay of individual memories, artistic initiatives, political and media policies, which ultimately shape “tradition” for the past century. He fleshes out in a series of case studies how folksongs can be conceived, performed and circulated in the post-tradition era – constituting each song as a “sonic ruin,” as an imagined place. At the same time, the book overall provides a unique perspective on the history of the Judeo-Spanish folksong." -- back cover.

A collection of essays, most of them published previously. Ch. 5 (pp. 133-172), "The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania", appeared as the introduction to Herman Kruk's book of the same name, published in 2002. Describes the fate of Herman Kruk (1897-1944), a Jewish Yiddishist intellectual, a librarian, a chronicler of the Vilnius ghetto, and author of a diary, who perished in a Nazi labor camp in Estonia a day before its liberation by the Soviets. Describes also the history of Jewish Vilnius, especially of the wartime ghetto. Reflects on two Holocausts: the killing of six million Jews and the annihilation of secular Jewish culture in Europe.

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.