Over ten years ago, Benjamin Fain, a physicist now living in Tel Aviv, attempted to hold a conference on Jewish culture in Moscow, an effort that was foiled by the KGB. Many of the participants were eventually able to flee, most emigrating to Israel. In this book, these distinguished scholars and others from around the world present their personal and professional views of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. The book explores a wide range of topics, including underground literature, religious revival, and the rise of a national Jewish consciousness. Some writers claim that the refuseniks are not the leaders of the Soviet Jews but rather an isolated minority, with most Jews being assimilated, acculturated, and uninterested in fleeing. Other essayists look at the ambivalent role traditionally played by the Soviet Union in both allowing some forms of cultural expression and suppressing any efforts at individual religious practice. Others explore the revival of Jewish culture as instanced by underground teaching of Hebrew. A major debate involves the Nature of Jewish emigration, whether the Jews will go to Israel or to America.

Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler{u2019}s Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories{u2014}an 2Austro-Modernism3 that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus{u2019}s drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti{u2019}s memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein{u2019}s notebooks and Paul Celan{u2019}s lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers

The site of a thriving literary tradition, Washington, DC, has been the home to many of our nation's most acclaimed writers. From the city's founding to the beginnings of modernism, literary luminaries including Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Henry Adams, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston have lived and worked at their craft in our nation's capital. In A Literary Guide to Washington, DC, Kim Roberts offers a guide to the city's rich literary history. Part walking tour, part anthology, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC is organized into five sections, each corresponding to a particularly vibrant period in Washington's literary community. Starting with the city's earliest years, Roberts examines writers such as Hasty-Pudding poet Joel Barlow and "Star-Spangled Banner" lyricist Francis Scott Key before moving on to the Civil War and Reconstruction and touching on the lives of authors such as Charlotte Forten Grimké and James Weldon Johnson. She wraps up her tour with World War I and the Jazz Age, which brought to the city some writers at the forefront of modernism, including the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sinclair Lewis. The book's stimulating tours cover downtown, the LeDroit Park and Shaw neighborhoods, Lafayette Square, and the historic U Street district, bringing the history of the city to life in surprising ways. Written for tourists, literary enthusiasts, amateur historians, and armchair travelers, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC offers a cultural tour of our nation's capital through a literary lens.

Not only do "modern" Jewish languages like Yiddish and Hebrew have their own Jewish writers, but every major Western tongue?from German and Russian to English and Portuguese?does as well. These writers are often at the crossroad between the two traditions: their Jewish one and their own national one. Is there such a thing as a modern Jewish literary tradition, one navigating across linguistic and national lines? If so, how should one define it? Ilan Stavans is uniquely qualified to answer these questions and to comment on the power and challenges of cultural margins and literary crossings. He has been at the forefront of an appreciation of the Jewish literary tradition that is less asphyxiating, more global. His reflections on Jewish Latin America have won him the nickname "pathfinder." This incomparable volume showcases Stavans's most insightful and provocative?and at times controversial?observations on transnational Jewish culture and literature. Stavans explores the problems and prospects of representing Jewish experiences through such media as Holocaust memoirs and Jewish museums; astutely comments on well-known intellectual figures, including Lionel Trilling, Isaac Babel, Primo Levi, Harold Bloom, and Walter Benjamin; engages in memorable conversations with Norman Manea, Joseph Brodsky, and Ariel Dorfman; and offers compelling glimpses of revelatory moments in his own life.

For almost twenty years, Ilan Stavans—described by the Washington Post as "Latin America’s liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast"—has interviewed path-breaking intellectuals and artists in a wide range of media. As host of the critically acclaimed PBS series La Plaza, he interviews guests on pressing issues that affect the Western Hemisphere today, asking hard-hitting questions on immigration, religion, bilingualism, race, and democracy. This book collects for the first time in one volume Stavans’s most provocative and enlightening interviews with Hispanics from both sides of the Rio Grande. Spontaneous and surprising, these conversations reflect Latino life in the United States in all its facets. Among the more than two dozen selections, Edward James Olmos talks about Hispanics in Hollywood; John Leguizamo describes how he shapes a stage show; author Richard Rodriguez reflects on his gang background; Esmeralda Santiago takes on the Puerto Rican stereotype; and Piri Thomas shares thoughts on the writing of Down These Mean Streets. "A conversation is a tango," writes Stavans, "for it takes two to dance it." Conversations with Ilan Stavans invites readers to catch the rhythm and enjoy these unique meetings of minds.

In the English-speaking world, it is generally believed that there are very few Jews living and thriving in Germany. Yet, there has been an unlikely postwar history 1945-2001 that has been somewhat repressed in North America and the United Kingdom. While most people are well-informed about the Holocaust and the consequences that this tragic event has had for the world, very few people know that there has been a steady increase in the population of Jews in Germany since 1945 and that there is a flourishing 'Jewish' culture, certainly a relatively strong Jewish presence, in Germany today. Does this development mean that Jews are playing a significant role in German social life? Does this mean that the great German-Jewish relationship, often referred to as a kind of symbiosis, has re-emerged despite the odds against it? The sixteen essays in this book written by the leading critics in the field cover the fascinating changes that have been made in German society since 1945 in the Jewish communities, literature, theater, film, architecture, and other areas of interest including an examination of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Austria. For anyone interested in reading about the unpredictable transformations in German-Jewish relations since 1945, Unlikely History will provide information and insights into a history that needs to be told to bring about greater understanding of Jews and Germans in contemporary Germany.

"A tribute to Abraham Cahan, founder of a prominent Yiddish language newspaper whose discussion of everything from voting rights to baseball offered crucial guidance to Jewish immigrants"--

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

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

PAPERBACK. MIT Press 1967. Clean and tight, feels new. No marks. Owner name front. Private Library. We ship daily from Wisconsin.

Book by Symons, Julian

Yiddish and Power surveys the social, linguistic and intellectual history of the Yiddish language within the traditional civilisation of Jewish Ashkenaz in central, and then in eastern Europe, and its interaction with the surrounding non-Jewish culture. It explores the various ways in which Yiddish has empowered masses and served political agendas.

Ammiel Alcalay's groundbreaking work, After Jews and Arabs, published in 1993, redrew the geographic, political, cultural, and emotional map of relations between Jews and Arabs in the Levantine/Mediterranean world over a thousand-year period. Based on over a decade of research and fieldwork in many disciplines-including history and historiography; anthropology, ethnography, and ethnomusicology; political economy and geography; linguistics; philosophy; and the history of science and technology-the book presented a radically different perspective than that presented by received opinion. Given the radical and iconoclastic nature of Alcalay's perspective, After Jews and Arabs met great resistance in attempts to publish it. Though completed and already circulating in 1989, it didn't appear until 1993. In addition, when the book was published, there wasn't enough space to include its original bibliography, a foundational part of the project. A Bibliography for After Jews and Arabs presents the original bibliography, as completed in 1992, without changes, as a glimpse into the historical record of a unique scholarly, political, poetic, and cultural journey. The bibliography itself had roots in research begun in the late 1970s and demonstrates a very wide arc. In addition to the bibliography, we include three accompanying texts here. In "Behind the Scenes: Before After Jews and Arabs, " Alcalay takes us behind the closed doors of the academic process, reprinting the original reader reports and his detailed rebuttals, and in "A Bibliography for After Jews and Arabs A Brief Introduction," Alcalay contextualizes his own path to the work he undertook, in methodological, historical, and political terms. Also included is "A Poetics of Bibliography." Poet, novelist, translator, critic, and scholar Ammiel Alcalay teaches at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. His books include After Jews and Arabs, Keys to the Garden, Memories of Our Future, Islanders, and neither wit nor gold: from then. A 10th-anniversary edition of from the warring factions, a book-length poem dedicated to Srebrenica, and a book of essays, a little history, came out in 2013. a little history also came out in a Portuguese translation with Editor Lumme, São Paolo in 2019. During the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, he was the primary translator of texts from Bosnia, and translations include Sarajevo Blues and Nine Alexandrias by poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic, as well as works by journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic, and many others. Alcalay is the General Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a series of student and guest-edited archival texts emerging from New American Poetry, and he was the recipient of a 2017 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for this work.

In Strong on Music Vera Brodsky Lawrence uses the diaries of lawyer and music lover George Templeton Strong as a jumping-off point from which to explore every aspect of New York City's musical life in the mid-nineteenth century. This third and final volume ranges across opera, orchestral and chamber music, blackface minstrels, military bands, church choirs, and even concert saloons. Among the many striking scenes vividly portrayed in Repercussions are the rapturous reception of Verdi's Ballo in maschera in 1861; the impact of the Civil War on New York's music scene, from theaters closing as their musicians enlisted to the performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at every possible occasion; and open-air concerts in the developing Central Park. Throughout, Lawrence mines a treasure trove of primary source materials including daily newspapers, memoirs, city directories, and architectural drawings. Indispensable for scholars, Repercussions will also fascinate music fans with its witty writing and detailed descriptions of the cultural life of America's first metropolis. Formerly a concert pianist, Vera Brodsky Lawrence spent the last third of her life as a historian of American music (she died in 1996). She was editor of The Piano Works of Louis Moreau Gottschalk and The Complete Works of Scott Joplin . On Volume 1: "A marvelous book. There is nothing like it in the literature of American music."—Harold C. Schonberg, New York Times Book Review On Volume 2: "A monumental achievement."—Victor Fell Yellin, Opera Quarterly

"The key methodological commitment of this book, then, is to the study of literary culture as a whole. From this follow certain other methodological consequences. Studying literary culture as a whole implies an attention to overall patterns more than to individual details. I thus regularly offer statistics and maps. While I do make many qualitative pronouncements, these are, with a few exceptions, generalizing and impressionistic, and not based on close readings. Studying the regularities of literary culture as a whole also implies adopting a perspective which need not have been available to the ancient actors themselves (they had pursued their own practices, without necessarily pausing to consider their literary culture as a whole). For this reason, I make no effort to identify the authors' concepts and am content to deploy my own observer's concepts throughout. The result is a book very different from traditional classical philology. The complex footnote with its plethora of primary and secondary sources is almost entirely avoided (my footnotes, instead, merely point to the key, recent studies with which the reader, wishing to pursue a point of detail, may begin her research ). Only rarely do I offer close readings of individual passages or reconstructions of the meanings of original terms. Fortunately for me, traditional philology now has few champions and I will not spend time arguing against the straw man of the philological critic. Instead, I will apologize to him "--

Winner, 2015 USC Book Award in Literary and Cultural Studies, for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies The Ethics of Witnessing investigates the reactions of five important Polish diaristswriters—Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Dabrowska, Aurelia Wylezynska, Zofia Nalkowska, and Stanislaw Rembek—during the period when the Nazis persecuted and murdered Warsaw’s Jewish population. The responses to the Holocaust of these prominent prewar authors extended from insistence on empathic interaction with victims to resentful detachment from Jewish suffering. Whereas some defied the dehumanization of the Jews and endeavored to maintain intersubjective relationships with the victims they attempted to rescue, others selfdeceptively evaded the Jewish plight. The Ethics of Witnessing examines the extent to which ideologies of humanism and nationalism informed the diarists’ perceptions, proposing that the reality of the Final Solution exposed the limits of both orientations and ultimately destroyed the ethical landscape shaped by the Enlightenment tradition, which promised the equality and fellowship of all human beings.

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.

Here are eighteen interviews with this novelist & historian that portray him to be both an admirable writer & spellbinding talker & reveal his evolution into a great narrative artist.

What Is plagiarism? How was it understood and judged in early modern England? This interdisciplinary study sets out at once to theorize and historicise plagiarism. The first part launches a vigorous debate about the ethical, philosophical, artistic, and legal implications of plagiarism. Individual essays in part two provide historical case studies. Variously centred on translations of the Bible, historiography, drama, poetry, dance treatises, sermons, and colonial grammars, the essays show how a nexus of concepts developed between the Renaissance and the early nineteenth century - plagiarism, imitation, forgery, copyright, and intellectual property - and how they have been defined and contested. --