"An essential exploration of a rich literary tradition from the Bible to modern times, by a "rare literary authority" (New York Times Book Review). Jews have long embraced their identity as "the people of the book." But outside of the Bible, much of the Jewish literary tradition remains little known. The People and the Books shows how central questions and themes of our history and culture are reflected in the Jewish literary canon: the nature of God, the right way to understand the Bible, the relationship of the Jews to their Promised Land, and the challenges of living as a minority in Diaspora. Adam Kirsch explores eighteen classic texts including the biblical books of Deuteronomy and Esther, the philosophy of Maimonides, the autobiography of the medieval businesswoman Gluckel of Hameln, and the Zionist manifestos of Theodor Herzl. From the Jews of ancient Rome to the mystical devotees of Hasidism in Eastern Europe, The People and the Books brings the treasures of Jewish literature to life and offers new ways to think about their enduring power and influence"--

What Is Jewish Literature? is a richly thoughtful analysis and comprehensive overview of what defines Jewish literature. It is an international collection, featuring authors and scholars who write in different languages from different literary, spiritual, and personal perspectives.The book explores long-standing What are the criteria for identifying Jewish literature? Are they language, religious affiliation of the author, religious sensibility, a distinctive Jewish imagination, or literary tradition?If the writer is the criterion, do Sholem Aleichem and Nathanael West really inhabit a shared universe? Is a text by S.Y. Agnon part of the same literary tradition as a play by Arthur Miller?Is Yiddish or Hebrew or Ladino the defining element? If so, where do we place Franz Kafka, Primo Levi, Elie Weisel, Saul Bellow, Nellie Sachs?Is tradition the yardstick? Do we then classify Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet as a Jewish novel... as Holocaust literature... as American fiction?What Is Jewish Literature? debates all these possibilities. It is a landmark collection that encourages the reader to participate in the quest for answers that defy simple responses.The contributors reflect the multilingual and multicultural nature of any discussion of Jewish literature. Their voices range from polemical to speculative, from scientific to lyrical.What Is Jewish Literature? is an enduring contribution to the literary resource for the scholar, the teacher, and the student and for any individual who strives to appreciate, evaluate, and understand the varied riches of Jewish writing.

Text: English, Yiddish (translation)

Pardes Rimonim is a classic work of authentic Kabbalah penned by the preeminent scholar, Rabbi Moshe Cordevero (Ramak). A powerful intellect, fertile writer, and gigantic figure in Kabbalah, Ramak (circa 1520-1570) distinguished himself first in Talmudic studies while under the tutelage of Rabbi Yosef Caro. However, he began his Kabbalah studies at age 20 with Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz, who was both his brother-in-law and composer of Lecha Dodi. In the Pardes, Ramak also displays a marked philosophical influence by the Rambam (Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon, i.e. Maimonides). Indeed, Ramak's encyclopedic work in Kabbalah heralded the renaissance of kabbalistic genius that emerged after him in Safed. A comprehensive work collecting the kabbalistic learning of that time, the original Hebrew version of the Pardes was a single volume composed of 32 parts and was written in both Hebrew and Aramaic.

Jewish women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lived with a sense of painful connection to a culture that rejected their aspirations. Raised in a Jewish environment wary of female aspirations and in a wider world that was only marginally more sympathetic to their ambitions, this diverse group often found that a life devoted to literary expression required sacrifices and painful choices. Writing, however, enabled them to reclaim and explore their Jewish heritage. Responding to a variety of Jewish women's voices in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, and Spanish, this collection of seventeen essays surveys the achievements of Jewish women writers from the Middle Ages to the present. Scholars of Jewish literature chronicle the Jewish encounter with modernity and document female strategies for constructing intellectual and emotional identities amidst the competing demands of traditional norms, familial obligations, and economic survival. The themes of repression and equivocal liberation resonate throughout, as the authors reflect on the silencing of the female voice in a traditional Jewish culture that most often denied women the education and the empowerment requisite for recording their thoughts and feelings. While individual essays reveal literary discoveries of self and forgings of identity by women rising to the opportunities and challenges of drastically altered Jewish social realities, a significant number also show the sad decline of women writers upon whom silence was reimposed. Several chapters consider how Jewish women were depicted by male writers from the Middle Ages through the mid-nineteenth century. A final essay documents the ways in which memory, testimony, and survival affect the writing of women who survived the Holocaust, a perspective frequently marginalized in studies of Holocaust literature. Women of the Word is part of an emerging effort to listen to the voices of Jewish women both past and present. Written in a period when Jewish women writers internationally are creating a wealth of diverse literary works, these essays take note of the short time during which Jewish women's writing has flourished and inspire readers with the richness of the literature that such writers have already produced.

From Mesopotamia to Modernity is a one volume introduction to both Jewish history and literature from its earliest times up to the present. Leading experts in each field of Jewish history and literature contribute original and comprehensive essays introducing their subjects. Beginning readers will learn the rudiments for further study, and scholars will be refreshed by the balanced, yet challenging treatments found here.These introductory essays cover most major aspects of Jewish studies from the Bible and its time up to modern Judaism. The work is designed to serve undergraduate and graduate courses in Judaism as well as Church and Synagogue adult study courses. Ideal for reading groups, this work will lead readers to further study of the varied subjects considered. Each essay covers the basic field, be it in a given era of Jewish history or in a defined area of Jewish literature. Suggestions for further reading will assist the reader in moving beyond this volume to explore a given area in further detail. The introductions range from encyclopedic detail through elegiac essay and enthusiastic appreciation of the field considered. The authors hold positions in major academic institutions throughout the United States and Israel.

Gruen (history and classics, Berkeley) explores four centuries of Jewish life within the dominant classical civilization, from Alexander the Great's conquest of the Near East to the Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 C.E. He begins with an investigation of "the conspicuous absence of a philosophy of Diaspora" and attempts very capably to identify the traces of the concept among Jews ... More under Roman rule. He looks at the cultures of the Jews living in Rome, Asia, and Alexandria, finding very vibrant communities in all three places. In exploring Jewish views of the Diaspora, Gruen offers up two chapters on Diaspora humor, one about the way biblical tales were retold and the lessons they could convey and the other about creating fanciful yet didactic stories. Then the author looks at the evidence about the Jewish image of the Greeks and Romans, a subject usually investigated from the opposite viewpoint. This leads into his final chapter on the Jewish view of the homeland during the period, a view not much different from today's. Gruen admits that his work is far from exhaustive, but it is certainly substantial, fascinating, and scholarly

Reimagining the Bible collects a dozen essays by Howard Schwartz. Together the essays present a coherent theory of the way in which each successive phase of Jewish literature has drawn upon and reimagined the previous ones. The book is organized into four sections: The Ancient Models; The Folk Tradition; Mythic Echoes; Modern Jewish Literature and the Ancient Models. Within these divisions, each of the essays focuses on a specific genre, ranging from Torah and Aggadah to Kabbalah, fairy tales, and the modern Yiddish stories of S.Y. Agnon and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Arguing the important thesis that there is a continuity in Jewish literature which extends from the Biblical era to our own times, over a period of more than 3,000 years, this collection also serves as a guide to the history of that literature, and to the genres it comprises.

The Universal Jew analyzes literary images of the Jewish nation and the Jewish national subject at Zionism’s formative moment. In a series of original readings of late nineteenth-century texts—from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda to Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland to the bildungsromane of Russian Hebrew and Yiddish writers—Mikhal Dekel demonstrates the aesthetic and political function of literary works in the making of early Zionist consciousness. More than half a century before the foundation of the State of Israel and prior to the establishment of the Zionist political movement, Zionism emerges as an imaginary concept in literary texts that create, facilitate, and naturalize the transition from Jewish-minority to Jewish-majority culture. The transition occurs, Dekel argues, mainly through the invention of male literary characters and narrators who come to represent "exemplary" persons or "man in general" for the emergent, still unformed national community. Such prototypical characters transform the symbol of the Jew from a racially or religiously defined minority subject to a "post-Jewish," particularuniversal, and fundamentally liberal majority subject. The Universal Jew situates the "Zionist moment" horizontally, within the various intellectual currents that make up the turn of the twentieth century: the discourse on modernity, the crisis in liberalism, Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment, psychoanalysis, early feminism, and fin de siècle interrogation of sexual identities. The book examines the symbolic roles that Jews are assigned within these discourses and traces the ways in which Jewish literary citizens are shaped, both out of and in response to them. Beginning with an analysis of George Eliot’s construction of the character Deronda and its reception in Zionist circles, the Universal Jew ends with the self-fashioning of male citizens in fin de siècle and post-statehood Hebrew works, through the aesthetics oftragedy. Throughout her readings, Dekel analyzes the political meaning of these nascent images of citizens, uncovering in particular the gendered arrangements out of which they are born.

The authors offer translations of significant passages from the most important works of Jewish ethical literature. accompanying these selections are essays explaining the relevance of the concepts presented in this literature.

From Mesopotamia to Modernity is a one volume introduction to both Jewish history and literature from its earliest times up to the present. Leading experts in each field of Jewish history and literature contribute original and comprehensive essays introducing their subjects. Beginning readers will learn the rudiments for further study, and scholars

"This volume assembles twenty-three essays by Erich S. Gruen, who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. Twenty-two of the articles have previously been published, and one new one was composed for the volume"--Back cover.

This outstanding volume of 26 essays represents a cross-section of the writings of Arnold Band on Jewish literature. Band, a renowned Jewish studies and humanities scholar, writes on such topics as: literature in historic context, interpretations of Hasidic tales and other traditional texts, Zionism, S.Y. Agnon and other important Israeli writers, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, Jewish studies, and the Jewish community. Scholars and students of Jewish studies and literature—particularly Jewish literature—won’t want to miss this remarkable collection.

As Library Journal notes: This massive anthology celebrates the 3000-year anniversary of the founding of the city of Jerusalem. It describes, from a Jewish perspective, the history and sociology of the city. Lavishly illustrated, the volume contains biblical quotations, rabbinic literature, travel writings, poems, songs, and fiction excerpts, the majority dating from the last 100 years. The living city amid a world of war is a theme present throughout. In the excerpts by S.Y. Agnon and Amos Oz, we are brought close to the modern dilemma and the eternal. This anthology shows and tells us how Jerusalem has lived in the hearts of the Jewish people.

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.

The Black Death of 1348-50 devastated Europe. With mortality estimates ranging from thirty to sixty percent of the population, it was arguably the most significant event of the fourteenth century. Nonetheless, its force varied across the continent, and so did the ways people responded to it. Surprisingly, there is little Jewish writing extant that directly addresses the impact of the plague, or even of the violence that sometimes accompanied it. This absence is particularly notable for Provence and the Iberian Peninsula, despite rich sources on Jewish life throughout the century. In After the Black Death , Susan L. Einbinder uncovers Jewish responses to plague and violence in fourteenth-century Iberia and Provence. Einbinder's original research reveals a wide, heterogeneous series of Jewish literary responses to the plague, including Sephardic liturgical poetry; a medical tractate written by the Jewish physician Abraham Caslari; epitaphs inscribed on the tombstones of twenty-eight Jewish plague victims once buried in Toledo; and a heretofore unstudied liturgical lament written by Moses Nathan, a survivor of an anti-Jewish massacre that occurred in Tàrrega, Catalonia, in 1348. Through elegant translations and masterful readings, After the Black Death exposes the great diversity in Jewish experiences of the plague, shaped as they were by convention, geography, epidemiology, and politics. Most critically, Einbinder traces the continuity of faith, language, and meaning through the years of the plague and its aftermath. Both before and after the Black Death, Jewish texts that deal with tragedy privilege the communal over the personal and affirm resilience over victimhood. Combined with archival and archaeological testimony, these texts ask us to think deeply about the men and women, sometimes perpetrators as well as victims, who confronted the Black Death. As devastating as the Black Death was, it did not shatter the modes of expression and explanation of those who survived it--a discovery that challenges the applicability of modern trauma theory to the medieval context.

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.

"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.

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.