American Jewish Writers and the Breakup of Old Faiths

1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 452
Author(s):  
Elaine M. Kauvar ◽  
Harold Bloom ◽  
Grace Farrell Lee ◽  
Sanford Pinsker ◽  
Mark Shechner
Keyword(s):  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Writers

Omri Asscher, Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. 256 pp.

2021 ◽  
pp. 281-283
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Writers

This chapter studies Omri Asscher's Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews (2020). This book employs translation to think about how two groups — American and Israeli Jews — understand and relate to one another. It stresses how adoption of different everyday languages and residence in distinct territories produced two collectives possessing divergent modern Jewish identities: when Jewish people and institutions came to mediate, manage, and regulate the social meanings of translated texts in the United States and Israel, they employed translations to define their center in contradistinction to its perceived antipode. Asscher also convincingly demonstrates how Israeli critics of the 1950s through the 1980s took pride in the literary successes of American Jewish writers, while dismissing the contents of their writing on ideological grounds. In contrast with his points about American Jewish translations of Israeli literature and Israeli translations of American Jewish literature from the 1950s to the 1980s, Asscher's broader claim about translation lacks effective substantiation.

Louis Finkelstein, Mordecai Kaplan, and American ‘Jewish contributions to Civilization’

2007 ◽  
pp. 185-198
Author(s):  
David Biale
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Moses Mendelssohn ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Writers

This chapter compares three twentieth and twenty-first century overviews of Jewish culture and civilization through the works of Mordecai Kaplan, Louis Finkelstein, and David Biale. It addresses criticisms to some of the treasured dichotomies of what might be called “Judaism”. It also discusses exile versus sovereignty, Jewish versus non-Jewish culture, elite versus popular culture, and Jewish distinctiveness versus cultural hybridity and pluralism. The chapter reveals the modern topos of the Jewish contribution to civilization that can be traced back to Moses Mendelssohn, who argued that the Jews had anticipated modernity by removing coercion from religion. It mentions Jewish writers who strove to persuade that the Jews deserved to enter Western civilization.

scholarly journals Maurice Sendak’s Jewish Mother(s)

2017 ◽  
pp. 149-168
Author(s):  
Jodi Eichler-Levine
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
American Jewish Life ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Limited Power ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Mother ◽  
Jewish Writers

This chapter explores the power of Jewish writers to use mothers in their work in order to subvert culture. It offers an analysis of bestselling children's author Maurice Sendak's images of Jewish mothers that are destabilizing because of their complexity. It also reviews the work Sendak, which constructs Jewish mothers who dwell outside the typically Jewish legal constructions of motherhood and the gendered institutional confines of American Jewish life. The chapter reflects on Sendak's own American experience against the backdrop of the post-Holocaust world of his mother, drawing and writing mothers with all of the complexities he experienced. It investigates Sendak's stories that echo the overbearing Jewish mother and convey the limited power and emotional absence of his own mother.

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