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| ruth wisse daniel deronda: If I Am Not For Myself Ruth R. Wisse, 1992 For over a century, Jews have been identified with liberalism. Not only have they been a driving force behind the spread of liberal politics; they have also been steadfastly loyal to a doctrine that promised them both safety and political acceptance. Recent evidence suggests that their commitment has not waned. But while Jews continue to stand up for other groups and vote their conscience, contends Ruth Wisse, the liberal commitment to the Jews is not nearly so strong. Whenever Jews have been attacked - from the trial of Captain Dreyfus to the sustained military and political war against Israel - liberals have been slow to defend Jewish rights and have preferred instead to hold the Jews responsible for the persistence of their enemies. The explanation for this liberal default, Wisse argues, is the survival and success of anti-Semitism. This irrational idea continues to flourish throughout the world, despite the destruction of the fascist and communist regimes that were its deadliest twentieth-century allies. Wisse points out that anti-Semitism's astonishing resilience has put liberals - including liberal Jews - in an impossible position. The only reasonable response to such a doctrine, Wisse insists, is not appeasement or avoidance, but steadfast confrontation and rejection. Yet such opposition is alien to liberal ideas of open-mindedness and strikes many as intolerant. Unwilling to suspend their optimistic view of man as a benevolent and rational being in order to combat a mortal enemy, most liberals - including many Jews - conclude that Jews themselves must be responsible for the continuing wars against them - thus implicitly condoning their sacrifice. Wisse's book, inspired by afriend's emigration to Israel, traces the Jewish romance with liberalism from its discovery by Jewish integrationists and Zionists to the acceptance today by many Jews of a moral equivalence between Zionism and the war against it. She also explores, among the many contradictions of modern Jewish politics, the ambiguous question of Jewish chosenness, and the Jewish longing for acceptance in a larger human family; the successful Arab war of ideas against Israel; and the dilemma of Jewish writers and intellectuals who wish to transcend their parochializing siege. Above all, she shows how and why anti-Semitism became the twentieth century's most successful ideology and reveals what people in liberal democracies would have to do to prevent it from once again achieving its goal. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: The State of the Jews Edward Alexander, 2017-07-28 The State of the Jews examines the current predicament of the Jewish people and the land of Israel, both of which still stand at the storm center of history, because Jews can never take the right to live as a natural right.The volume comprises celebrations and attacks. Edward Alexander celebrates writers like Abba Kovner, Cynthia Ozick, Ruth Wisse, and Hillel Halkin, who recognized in the foundation of Israel shortly after the destruction of European Jewry one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame. He attacks Israel's external enemies—busy planners of boycotts, brazen advocates of politicide, professorial apologists for suicide bombing—and also its internal enemies. These are anti-Zionist Jews, devotees of lost causes willfully blind to the fact that Israel's creation was an event of biblical magnitude. Indifference to Jewish survival during World War II was the admitted moral failure of earlier American-Jewish intellectuals, but today's progressives and New Diasporists call indifference virtue, and mistake cowardice for courage.Because the new anti-Semitism, tightening the noose around Israel's throat, emanates mainly from liberals, Alexander analyzes both antisemitic and philosemitic strains in three prominent Victorian liberals: Thomas Arnold, his son Matthew, and John Stuart Mill. The main body of Alexander's book is divided generically into history, politics, and literature. At a deeper level, its chapters are integrated by the book's pervasive concern: the interconnectedness between the state of Israel and the spiritual state of contemporary Jewry. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot Gertrude Himmelfarb, 2010-09 It is my sincere desire that this simple and elegant practice of the Five Warrior Syllables, which is based on the highest teachings of the Tibetan Bn Buddhist tradition of which I am a lineage holder, will benefit many beings in the West. Please receive it with my blessing, and bring it into your life. Let it support you to become kind and strong and clear and awake. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche One of the world's oldest unbroken spiritual traditions is the Bon Buddhist tradition of Tibet. This wisdom path has survived, thanks to the efforts of a handful of dedicated lamas such as Bn lineage holder Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. Now, with Tibetan Sound Healing, you can connect to the ancient sacred sounds of the Bn practiceand through them, activate the healing potential of your natural mind. The Bn healing tradition invokes the Five Warrior Sylla blessed sounds that bring us to the essential nature of mind and release the boundless creativity and positive qualities that are fundamental to it. Through the medicine of sound, you can clear obstacles of your body, your energy and emotions, and the subtle sacred dimensions of your being. In this integrated book-and-CD learning program, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche gives you the tools to access wisdom and compassion and use the vibration of sacred sound to cultivate the healing power within your body s subtle channels. It is my sincere desire that this simple and elegant practice of the Five Warrior Syllables, which is based on the highest teachings of the Tibetan Bn Buddhist tradition of which I am a lineage holder, will benefit many beings in the West. Please receive it with my blessing, and bring it into your life. Let it support you to become kind and strong and clear and awake. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche One of the world's oldest unbroken spiritual traditions is the Bn Buddhist tradition of Tibet. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture Ruth R. Wisse, 2015-07-01 I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), the father of modern Yiddish literature, was a master storyteller and social critic who advocated a radical shift from religious observance to secular Jewish culture. Wisse explores Peretz’s writings in relation to his ideology, which sought to create a strong Jewish identity separate from the trappings of religion. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: The Routledge History of Literature in English Ronald Carter, John McRae, 2001 This is a guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, charting some of the main features of literary language development and highlighting key language topics. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Free as a Jew Ruth R. Wisse, 2021-09-21 First came parents with the good sense to flee Europe in 1940 and the good fortune to reach the land of freedom. Their daughter, Ruth, grew up in the shadow of genocide—but in tandem with the birth of Israel, which remained her lodestar. She learned that although Jewishness is biologically transmitted, democracy is not, and both require intensive, intelligent transmission through education in each and every generation. They need adults with the confidence to teach their importance. Ruth tried to take on that challenge as dangers to freedom mounted and shifted sides on the political spectrum. At the high point of her teaching at Harvard University, she witnessed the unraveling of standards of honesty and truth until the academy she left was no longer the one she had entered. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: The Modern Jewish Canon Ruth R. Wisse, 2003-04-15 What makes a great Jewish book? In fact, what makes a book Jewish in the first place? Ruth R. Wisse eloquently fields these questions in The Modern Jewish Canon, her compassionate, insightful guide to the finest Jewish literature of the twentieth century. From Isaac Babel to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elie Wiesel to Cynthia Ozick, Wisse's The Modern Jewish Canon is a book that every student of Jewish literature, and every reader of great fiction, will enjoy. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: No Joke Ruth R. Wisse, 2015-03 Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking--as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth. At the same time, Wisse draws attention to the precarious conditions that call Jewish humor into being--and the price it may exact from its practitioners and audience-- |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Brief History of English and American Literature Henry Augustin Beers, 1897 |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Antiquities Cynthia Ozick, 2021 From one of our most pre eminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past, and how our experience colors those meanings. Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven surviving trustees of the now defunct (for 34 years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with a description of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and his fascination with his own family history-in particular, his illustrious cousin, the renowned archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie (check out his Wikipedia entry!), the source of his interest in antiquity-he reconstructs the story of his encounter from his school days with a younger student named Ben-Zion Elefantin, who seems to belong to a lost ancient Jewish sect. From this seed emerges one of Ozick's most wondrous tales, one that displays her delight in Jamesian irony and the mythical flavor of a Kafka parable, woven into her own distinct voice-- |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Bewilderments Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, 2015-02-24 The newest book in Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s award-winning series of commentaries on the hebrew bible. The book of Numbers is the narrative of a great failure. What should have been for the Israelites a brief journey from Mount Sinai to the Holy Land becomes a forty-year death march. Both before and after the devastating report of the Spies, the narrative centers on the people’s desire to return to Egypt, to undo the miraculous work of the Exodus. At its heart are speeches of complaint and lament, expressing a profound existential skepticism. But by contrast, in the narrative of the book of Numbers that is found in mystical and Hasidic sources, the generation of the wilderness emerges as one of extraordinary spiritual experience, receivers of the Torah to the fullest extent, fed on miracles and nurtured directly by God: a generation of ecstatic faith, human partners in an unprecedented conversation with the Deity. Drawing on kabbalistic sources, the Hasidic commentators on the book of Numbers depict a people who transcend prudent considerations in order to follow God into the wilderness, where their spiritual yearning comes to full expression. This view of the wilderness history invites us into a different kind of listening to the many cries of distrust, lament, and resentment that issue from the Israelites throughout the book of Numbers. Is there a way to integrate this narrative of dark murmurings, of obsessive fantasies of return to Egypt, with the celebration of a love-intoxicated wilderness discourse? The question touches not only on the language the Israelites speak but also on the very nature of human utterance. Who are these people? Who are we who listen to them? What effect does the cumulative trauma of slavery, the miracles of Exodus, the revelation at Sinai, have on a nation that is beginning to speak? In Bewilderments, one of the most admired biblical commentators at work today posits fascinating answers to these questions through the magnificent literary, scholarly, and psychological analysis of the text that is her trademark. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1921 |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: The Glatstein Chronicles Jacob Glatstein, 2013-10-15 In 1934, with World War II on the horizon, writer Jacob Glatstein (1896–1971) traveled from his home in America to his native Poland to visit his dying mother. One of the foremost Yiddish poets of the day, he used his journey as the basis for two highly autobiographical novellas (translated as The Glatstein Chronicles) in which he intertwines childhood memories with observations of growing anti-Semitism in Europe. Glatstein’s accounts “stretch like a tightrope across a chasm,” writes preeminent Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse in the Introduction. In Book One, Homeward Bound, the narrator, Yash, recounts his voyage to his birthplace in Poland and the array of international travelers he meets along the way. Book Two, Homecoming at Twilight, resumes after his mother’s funeral and ends with Yash’s impending return to the United States, a Jew with an American passport who recognizes the ominous history he is traversing. The Glatstein Chronicles is at once insightful reportage of the year after Hitler came to power, a reflection by a leading intellectual on contemporary culture and events, and the closest thing we have to a memoir by the boy from Lublin, Poland, who became one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: The Anti-Journalist Paul Reitter, 2020-10-09 In turn-of-the-century Vienna, Karl Kraus created a bold new style of media criticism, penning incisive satires that elicited both admiration and outrage. Kraus’s spectacularly hostile critiques often focused on his fellow Jewish journalists, which brought him a reputation as the quintessential self-hating Jew. The Anti-Journalist overturns this view with unprecedented force and sophistication, showing how Kraus’s criticisms form the center of a radical model of German-Jewish self-fashioning, and how that model developed in concert with Kraus’s modernist journalistic style. Paul Reitter’s study of Kraus’s writings situates them in the context of fin-de-siècle German-Jewish intellectual society. He argues that rather than stemming from anti-Semitism, Kraus’s attacks constituted an innovative critique of mainstream German-Jewish strategies for assimilation. Marshalling three of the most daring German-Jewish authors—Kafka, Scholem, and Benjamin—Reitter explains their admiration for Kraus’s project and demonstrates his influence on their own notions of cultural authenticity. The Anti-Journalist is at once a new interpretation of a fascinating modernist oeuvre and a heady exploration of an important stage in the history of German-Jewish thinking about identity. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories Sholem Aleichem, 2011-08-17 Of all the characters in modern Jewish fiction, the most beloved is Tevye, the compassionate, irrepressible, Bible-quoting dairyman from Anatevka, who has been immortalized in the writings of Sholem Aleichem and in acclaimed and award-winning theatrical and film adaptations. And no Yiddish writer was more beloved than Tevye’s creator, Sholem Rabinovich (1859–1916), the “Jewish Mark Twain,” who wrote under the pen name of Sholem Aleichem. Beautifully translated by Hillel Halkin, here is Sholem Aleichem’s heartwarming and poignant account of Tevye and his daughters, together with the “Railroad Stories,” twenty-one tales that examine human nature and modernity as they are perceived by men and women riding the trains from shtetl to shtetl. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: American Jewish Fiction Josh Lambert, 2010-01-01 This new volume in the JPS Guides series is a fiction reader?s dream: a guide to 125 remarkable works of fiction. The selection includes a wide range of classic American Jewish novels and story collections, from 1867 to the present, selected by the author in consultation with a panel of literary scholars and book industry professionals. Roth, Mailer, Kellerman, Chabon, Ozick, Heller, and dozens of other celebrated writers are here, with their most notable works. Each entry includes a book summary, with historical context and background on the author. Suggestions for further reading point to other books that match readers? interests and favorite writers. And the introduction is a fascinating exploration of the history of and important themes in American Jewish Fiction, illustrating how Jewish writing in the U.S. has been in constant dialogue with popular entertainment and intellectual life. Included in this guide are lists of book award winners; recommended anthologies; title, author, and subject indexes; and more. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: A Little Love in Big Manhattan Ruth R. Wisse, 1988 |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: In the Heart of the Seas Shmuel Yosef Agnon, 2004 In the Heart of the Seas follows Hananiah, along with many rabbis and their wives, on a spiritual journey to Palestine. The trip is a test of courage and mirrors the daily trials and experiences of modern existence, yet yields renewed faith. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Art as an Interface of Law and Justice Frans-Willem Korsten, 2021-02-25 This book looks at the way in which the 'call for justice' is portrayed through art and presents a wide range of texts from film to theatre to essays and novels to interrogate the law. 'Calls for justice' may have their positive connotations, but throughout history most have caused annoyance. Art is very well suited to deal with such annoyance, or to provoke it. This study shows how art operates as an interface, here, between two spheres: the larger realm of justice and the more specific system of law. This interface has a double potential. It can make law and justice affirm or productively disturb one another. Approaching issues of injustice that are felt globally, eight chapters focus on original works of art not dealt with before, including Milo Rau's The Congo Tribunal, Elfriede Jelinek's Ulrike Maria Stuart, Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends and Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives. They demonstrate how through art's interface, impasses are addressed, new laws are made imaginable, the span of systems of laws is explored, and the differences in what people consider to be just are brought to light. The book considers the improvement of law and justice to be a global struggle and, whilst the issues dealt with are culture-specific, it argues that the logics introduced are applicable everywhere. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: A History of English Literature Michael Alexander, 2000 This text provides a comprehensive survey of one of the richest and oldest literatures in the world. Presented as a narrative, and usable as a work of reference, this text offers an account of literature from the beginnings of English until the year 2000. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: The Memory Monster Yishai Sarid, 2020-09-08 The controversial English-language debut of celebrated Israeli novelist Yishai Sarid is a harrowing, ironic parable of how we reckon with human horror, in which a young, present-day historian becomes consumed by the memory of the Holocaust. Written as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, our unnamed narrator recounts his own undoing. Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II and guides tours through the sites for students and visiting dignitaries. He hungrily devours every detail of life and death in the camps and takes pride in being able to recreate for his audience the excruciating last moments of the victims’ lives. The job becomes a mission, and then an obsession. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate. He resents the students lost in their iPhones, singing sentimental songs, not expressing sufficient outrage at the genocide committed by the Nazis. In fact, he even begins to detect, in the students as well as himself, a hint of admiration for the murderers—their efficiency, audacity, and determination. Force is the only way to resist force, he comes to think, and one must be prepared to kill. With the perspicuity of Kafka’s The Trial and the obsessions of Delillo’s White Noise, The Memory Monster confronts difficult questions that are all too relevant to Israel and the world today: How do we process human brutality? What makes us choose sides in conflict? And how do we honor the memory of horror without becoming consumed by it? Praise for The Memory Monster: “Award-winning Israeli novelist Sarid’s latest work is a slim but powerful novel, rendered beautifully in English by translator Greenspan…. Propelled by the narrator’s distinctive voice, the novel is an original variation on one of the most essential themes of post-Holocaust literature: While countless writers have asked the question of where, or if, humanity can be found within the profoundly inhumane, Sarid incisively shows how preoccupation and obsession with the inhumane can take a toll on one’s own humanity…. it is, if not an indictment of Holocaust memorialization, a nuanced and trenchant consideration of its layered politics. Ultimately, Sarid both refuses to apologize for Jewish rage and condemns the nefarious forms it sometimes takes. A bold, masterful exploration of the banality of evil and the nature of revenge, controversial no matter how it is read.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “[A] record of a breakdown, an impassioned consideration of memory and its risks, and a critique of Israel’s use of the Holocaust to shape national identity…. Sarid’s unrelenting examination of how narratives of the Holocaust are shaped makes for much more than the average confessional tale.” —Publishers Weekly “Reading The Memory Monster, which is written as a report to the director of Yad Vashem, felt like both an extremely intimate experience and an eerily clinical Holocaust history lesson. Perfectly treading the fine line between these two approaches, Sarid creates a haunting exploration of collective memory and an important commentary on humanity. How do we remember the Holocaust? What tolls do we pay to carry on memory? This book hit me viscerally, emotionally, and personally. The Memory Monster is brief, but in its short account Sarid manages to lay bare the tensions between memory and morals, history and nationalism, humanity and victimhood. An absolute must-read.” —Julia DeVarti, Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI) “In Yishai Sarid’s dark, thoughtful novel The Memory Monster, a Holocaust historian struggles with the weight of his profession…. The Memory Monster is a novel that pulls no punches in its exploration of the responsibility—and the cost—of holding vigil over the past.” —Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Trials of the Diaspora Anthony Julius, 2012-02-09 The first ever comprehensive history of anti-Semitism in England, from medieval murder and expulsion through to contemporary forms of anti-Zionism in the 21st century. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition Edward Alexander, 2017-10-24 The incongruence if not antagonism between modern liberalism and the Jewish sense of the world has been most notably articulated by Lionel Trilling. Certainly the imaginative limitations and intellectual smugness he discerned in his own ideological party found a parallel, in his view, in the embrace of liberalism by the American Jewish community. The consequences of that embrace entail both a superficial intellectual and religious culture and a misunderstanding of the social and political dimensions of Judaism. In Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition, Edward Alexander engages in a wide-ranging exploration of the roots of the fundamental antagonism between liberalism and Jewish tradition from the nineteenth century to the present day. Central to Alexander's arguments is his incisive critique of the distortion of modern Judaism as a child of the Enlightenment and the notion that specifically Jewish concerns, whether with Zionism, the Holocaust, or sacred and secular writings, constitute a narrow and parochial betrayal of liberal interests. The chapters are divided among political, religious, and literary subjects. The opening chapter on Mill's ambivalent attitude toward the Jews establishes terms of conflict between Judaism and liberal secularism and universality as do chapters on the antisemitism of Thomas Arnold and Marx and the more ambiguous Jewish self-identification of Disraeli. Alexander examines such disparate topics as the hostility to the idea of a Jewish state on the part of numerous Israeli intellectuals, the disdain among liberals toward the specifically Jewish dimension of the Holocaust, and the capitulation of the Modern Language Association to the anti-Zionism of Edward Said. Turning to the uneasy status of Jewish religious texts and secular literature as sources of cultural revitalization, Alexander deals with the attempt by the Israeli scholar Adin Steinsaltz to bring the Talmud to the attention of contemporary Jewish readers and includes a chapter on his nineteenth-century precursor Emanuel Deutsch and his relationship to George Eliot. An analysis of Ruth Wisse's efforts to establish a modern Jewish literary canon is rounded out by chapters on two of the major figures of that canon: Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Roth. While diverse in subject matter, Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition is consistent in its unapologetic advocacy of a Jewish point of view and in its depth of scholarship in tracing the historical roots of contemporary attitudes and ideologies. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature Benjamin Schreier, 2020-09-18 Benjamin Schreier argues that Jewish American literature's dominant cliché of breakthrough—that is, the irruption into the heart of the American cultural scene during the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley—must also be seen as the critically originary moment of Jewish American literary study. According to Schreier, this is the primal scene of the Jewish American literary field, the point that the field cannot avoid repeating and replaying in instantiating itself as the more or less formalized academic study of Jewish American literature. More than sixty years later, the field's legibility, the very condition of its possibility, remains overwhelmingly grounded in a reliance on this single ethnological narrative. In a polemic against what he sees as the unexamined foundations and stagnant state of the field, Schreier interrogates a series of professionally powerful assumptions about Jewish American literary history—how they came into being and how they hardened into cliché. He offers a critical genealogy of breakthrough and other narratives through which Jewish Studies has asserted its compelling self-evidence, not simply under the banner of the historical realities Jewish Studies claims to represent but more fundamentally for the intellectual and institutional structures through which it produces these representations. He shows how a historicist scholarly narrative quickly consolidated and became hegemonic, in part because of its double articulation of a particular American subject and of a transnational historiography that categorically identified that subject as Jewish. The ethnological grounding of the Jewish American literary field is no longer tenable, Schreier asserts, in an argument with broad implications for the reconceptualization of Jewish and other identity-based ethnic studies. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Werner Sollors Reader Werner Sollors, 2025-01-31 Born in Silesia, raised in the Frankfurt area and educated in Berlin, Werner Sollors has spent most of his career at Harvard University in the United States and is regarded, in Cornel West's words, 'as one of the finest scholars that we have on race and cultural hybridity in both this country and the world'. This Reader offers the first comprehensive overview of the work of a central figure in the field of ethnic studies. The pieces collected here range from Puritan New England to contemporary Germany, from 'Exodus' to Mary Antin's Promised Land, from the 'Curse of Ham' to Teju Cole. They attest to Sollors' deep historical sensibilities, his attention to textual detail and his awareness of the costs and opportunities of both cosmopolitan ideals and particularist commitments, whilst addressing a central question: why does modernisation take the form of ethnicisation in many places around the globe?The collected essays are complemented by a detailed introduction by Daniel G. Williams which foregrounds some of the key emphases and tensions in Sollors' writings. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language Eva Hoffman, 2019-07-31 The late poet and memoirist Czeslaw Milosz wrote, I am enchanted. This book is graceful and profound. Since its publication in 1989, many other readers across the world have been enchanted by Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, a classic of exile and immigrant literature, as well as a girl’s coming-of-age memoir. Lost in Translationmoves from Hoffman's childhood in Cracow, Poland to her adolescence in Vancouver, British Columbia to her university years in Texas and Massachusetts to New York City, where she becomes a writer and an editor at the New York Times Book Review. Its multi-layered narrative encompasses many themes: the defining power of language; the costs and benefits of changing cultures, the construction of personal identity, and the profound consequences, for a generation of post-war Jews like Hoffman, of Nazism and Communism. Lost in Translation is, as Publisher's Weekly wrote, a penetrating, lyrical memoir that casts a wide net, challenges its reader to reconsider their own language, autobiography, cultures, and childhoods. Lost in Translation was first published in the United States in 1989. Hoffman’s subsequent books of literary non-fiction include Exit into History, Shtetl, After Such Knowledge, Time and two novels, The Secret and Appassionata. Nothing, after all, has been lost; poetry this time has been made in and by translation. — Peter Conrad, The New York Times Handsomely written and judiciously reflective, it is testimony to the human capacity not merely to adapt but to reinvent: to find new lives for ourselves without forfeiting the dignity and meaning of our old ones. — Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post As a childhood memoir, Lost in Translation has the colors and nuance of Nabokov'sSpeak, Memory. As an account of a young mind wandering into great books, it recalls Sartre's Words. … As an anthropology of Eastern European émigré life, American academe and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, it's every bit as deep and wicked as anything by Cynthia Ozick. … A brilliant, polyphonic book that is itself an act of faith, a Bach Fugue. — John Leonard, Harper’s Magazine |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: History of Zionism Nahum Sokolow, 2020-07-10 This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Antonio’s Devils Jeremy Dauber, 2004-06-02 Antonio's Devils deals both historically and theoretically with the origins of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature by tracing the progress of a few remarkable writers who, for various reasons and in various ways, cited Scripture for their own purpose, as Antonio's devil, Shylock, does in The Merchant of Venice. By examining the work of key figures in the early history of Jewish literature through the prism of their allusions to classical Jewish texts, the book focuses attention on the magnificent and highly complex strategies the maskilim employed to achieve their polemical and ideological goals. Dauber uses this methodology to examine foundational texts by some of the Jewish Enlightenment's most interesting and important authors, reaching new and often surprising conclusions. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: The New American Judaism Jack Wertheimer, 2020-03-31 Winner of the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies—an engaging firsthand portrait of American Judaism today American Judaism has been buffeted by massive social upheavals in recent decades. Like other religions in the United States, it has witnessed a decline in the number of participants over the past forty years, and many who remain active struggle to reconcile their hallowed traditions with new perspectives—from feminism and the LGBTQ movement to do-it-yourself religion and personally defined spirituality. Taking a fresh look at American Judaism today, Jack Wertheimer, a leading authority on the subject, sets out to discover how Jews of various orientations practice their religion in this radically altered landscape. Which observances still resonate, and which ones have been given new meaning? What options are available for seekers or those dissatisfied with conventional forms of Judaism? And how are synagogues responding? Offering new and often-surprising answers to these questions, Wertheimer reveals an American Jewish landscape that combines rash disruption and creative reinvention, religious illiteracy and dynamic experimentation. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature Ranen Omer-Sherman, 2002 An in-depth exploration of the work of four major writers confronting Jewish nationalism and the fate of the diaspora. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: The Wall John Hersey, 1950 |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: The Israeli Century Yossi Shain, 2021-11-02 “The Israeli Century is one of the most important books of our generation, emphasizing how Israel is becoming the center of the Jewish People’s existence and is laying the solid foundations for its future.” —Isaac Herzog, President of Israel In this important breakthrough work, Yossi Shain takes us on a sweeping and surprising journey through the history of the Jewish people, from the destruction of the First Temple in the sixth century B.C.E. up to the modern era. Over the course of this long history, Jews have moved from a life of Diaspora, which ultimately led to destruction, to a prosperous existence in a thriving, independent nation state. The new power of Jewish sovereignty has echoed around the world and gives Israelis a new and significant role as influential global players. In the Israeli Century, the Jew is reborn, feeling a deep responsibility for his tradition and a natural connection to his homeland. A sense of having a home to return to allows him to travel the wider world and act with ease and confidence. In the Israeli Century, the Israeli Jew can fully express the strengths developed over many generations in the long period of wandering and exile. As a result, Shain argues, the burden of preserving the continuity of the Jewish people and defining its character is no longer the responsibility of Diaspora communities. Instead it now falls squarely on the shoulders of Israelis themselves. The challenges of Israeli sovereignty in turn require farsighted leaders with a clear-eyed understanding of the dangers that confront the Jewish future, as well as the incredible opportunities it offers. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Impressions of Theophrastus Such George Eliot, 1994 Yet I have often been forced into the reflection that even the acquaintances who are as forgetful of my biography and tenets as they would be if I were a dead philosopher are probably aware of certain points in me which may not be included in my most active suspicion. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Two Worlds Exist Yehoshua November, 2016 Finalist for the 2016 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry Yehoshua November's second poetry collection, ''Two Worlds Exist,'' movingly examines the harmonies and dissonances involved in practicing an ancient religious tradition in contemporary America. November's beautiful and profound meditations on work and family life, and the intersections of the sacred and the secular, invite the reader--regardless of background--to imaginatively inhabit a life of religious devotion in the midst of our society's commotion. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Halakhah Chaim N. Saiman, 2018-09-04 How the rabbis of the Talmud transformed everything into a legal question—and Jewish law into a way of thinking and talking about everything Though typically translated as “Jewish law,” the term halakhah is not an easy match for what is usually thought of as law. This is because the rabbinic legal system has rarely wielded the political power to enforce its many detailed rules, nor has it ever been the law of any state. Even more idiosyncratically, the talmudic rabbis claim that the study of halakhah is a holy endeavor that brings a person closer to God—a claim no country makes of its law. In this panoramic book, Chaim Saiman traces how generations of rabbis have used concepts forged in talmudic disputation to do the work that other societies assign not only to philosophy, political theory, theology, and ethics but also to art, drama, and literature. In the multifaceted world of halakhah where everything is law, law is also everything, and even laws that serve no practical purpose can, when properly studied, provide surprising insights into timeless questions about the very nature of human existence. What does it mean for legal analysis to connect humans to God? Can spiritual teachings remain meaningful and at the same time rigidly codified? Can a modern state be governed by such law? Guiding readers across two millennia of richly illuminating perspectives, this book shows how halakhah is not just “law” but an entire way of thinking, being, and knowing. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon Justin Daniel Cammy, 2008 Wisse is a leading scholar of Yiddish and Jewish literary studies and a fearless public intellectual on issues relating to Jewish society and culture. In this celebratory volume, her colleagues pay tribute with a collection of critical essays whose subjects break new ground in Yiddish, Hebrew, Israeli, American, European, and Holocaust literature. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: God's Country Samuel Goldman, 2018-02-02 The United States is Israel's closest ally in the world. The fact is undeniable, and undeniably controversial, not least because it so often inspires conspiracy theorizing among those who refuse to believe that the special relationship serves America's strategic interests or places the United States on the right side of Israel's enduring conflict with the Palestinians. Some point to the nefarious influence of a powerful Israel lobby within the halls of Congress. Others detect the hand of evangelical Protestants who fervently support Israel for their own theological reasons. The underlying assumption of all such accounts is that America's support for Israel must flow from a mixture of collusion, manipulation, and ideologically driven foolishness. Samuel Goldman proposes another explanation. The political culture of the United States, he argues, has been marked from the very beginning by a Christian theology that views the American nation as deeply implicated in the historical fate of biblical Israel. God's Country is the first book to tell the complete story of Christian Zionism in American political and religious thought from the Puritans to 9/11. It identifies three sources of American Christian support for a Jewish state: covenant, or the idea of an ongoing relationship between God and the Jewish people; prophecy, or biblical predictions of return to The Promised Land; and cultural affinity, based on shared values and similar institutions. Combining original research with insights from the work of historians of American religion, Goldman crafts a provocative narrative that chronicles Americans' attachment to the State of Israel. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: An Outline Sketch of English Literature Henry Augustin Beers, 1886 |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Motherhood and Representation E. Ann Kaplan, 2013-07-23 From novels of the nineteenth century to films of the 1990s, American culture, abounds with images of white, middle-class mothers. In Motherhood and Representation, E. Ann Kaplan considers how the mother appears in three related spheres: the historical, in which she charts changing representations of the mother from 1830 to the postmodernist present; the psychoanalytic, which discusses theories of the mother from Freud to Lacan and the French Feminists; and the mother as she is figured in cultural representations: in literary and film texts such as East Lynne, Marnie and the The Handmaid's Tale, as well as in journalism and popular manuals on motherhood. Kaplan's analysis identifies two dominant paradigms of the mother as `Angel' and `Witch', and charts the contesting and often contradictory discourses of the mother in present-day America. |
| ruth wisse daniel deronda: Jewish Literatures and Cultures Anita Norich, Yaron Z. Eliav, 2008 Jewish literatures and cultures : context and intertext / Anita Norich -- From continuity to contiguity : thoughts on the theory of Jewish literature / Dan Miron -- Beyond influence : toward a new historiographic paradigm / Michael L. Satlow -- Hellenistic Judaism : myth or reality? / Gabriele Boccaccini -- He was renowned to the ends of the earth (1 Maccabees 3:9) : Judaism and Hellenism in 1 Maccabees / Martha Himmelfarb -- Roman statues, rabbis, and Greco-Roman culture / Yaron Z. Eliav -- The ghetto and Jewish cultural formation in early modern Europe : towards a new interpretation / David Ruderman -- Hybrid with what? : the variable contexts of Polish Jewish culture : their implications for Jewish cultural history and Jewish studies / Moshe Rosman -- Idols of the cave and theater : a verbal or visual Judaism? / Kalman P. Bland -- Reverse marranism, translatability, and practice of secular Jewish culture in Russian / Gabriella Safran -- Intertextuality, Rabbinic literature, and the making of Hebrew modernism / Shachar Pinsker -- Brooklyn am Rhein? : the German sources of Jewish-American literature / Julian Levinson -- Diaspora and translation : the migrations of Jewish meaning / Naomi Seidman. |
The Story of Ruth - Biblical Archaeology Society
Jul 30, 2024 · Thanks to Ruth, the family of Naomi (strangely, the text does not put it in terms of Elimelech or Mahlon) survives. The child born to Ruth and Boaz is “a son…born to Naomi” who …
Widows in the Bible - Biblical Archaeology Society
Sep 19, 2024 · The case of the widow Naomi, however, has a twist because her redemption comes unexpectedly through her widowed daughter-in-law Ruth, rather than her own sons (Ruth 2–4). …
How Bad Was Jezebel? - Biblical Archaeology Society
Mar 16, 2025 · See Ruth Hestrin, “Understanding Asherah—Exploring Semitic Iconography,” BAR, September/October 1991. b. In the Septuagint, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings are all included …
Who Were the Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites in the Bible?
Dec 31, 2024 · In the Bible, the Edomites are the descendants of Esau, Jacob’s twin and Isaac’s oldest son (Genesis 36). ). The Edomites controlled an area east of the Arabah, from the Zered to …
book of ruth Archives - Biblical Archaeology Society
book of ruth. book of ruth Latest. Apr 15 Blog. Seth in the Bible . By: Elie Wiesel. With Adam’s death ...
Was Jesus a Jew? - Biblical Archaeology Society
May 20, 2025 · Was Jesus a Jew? This late-15th-century painting by the Spanish artist known as the Master of Perea depicts a Last Supper of lamb, unleavened bread and wine—all elements of …
Rachel and Leah in the Bible - Biblical Archaeology Society
Oct 5, 2022 · Rachel and Leah in the Bible. This watercolor, titled Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah, depicts the biblical matriarchs Rachel (left) and Leah (right) at a fountain.
Deborah in the Bible - Biblical Archaeology Society
Feb 27, 2025 · Deborah calls herself a mother in Israel (5:7). Probably one of the highest designations in scripture, it indicates authority. 15 Centuries afterward, the wise woman of Abel …
Ziony Zevit - Biblical Archaeology Society
May 31, 2015 · The Story of Ruth: Examining the Missing Pieces The story of Ruth (Ruth 1–4) is interpreted as being about comeliness, kindness and grace. What is left unexplained is why …
Who Were the Hittites? - Biblical Archaeology Society
Apr 25, 2024 · Who were the Hittites? At one time the Hittites were one of three superpowers in the ancient world. Tudhaliya IV (1237–1209 B.C.E.) ruled over the Hittite Kingdom during its heyday …
The Story of Ruth - Biblical Archaeology Society
Jul 30, 2024 · Thanks to Ruth, the family of Naomi (strangely, the text does not put it in terms of Elimelech or Mahlon) survives. The child born to Ruth and Boaz is “a son…born to Naomi” …
Widows in the Bible - Biblical Archaeology Society
Sep 19, 2024 · The case of the widow Naomi, however, has a twist because her redemption comes unexpectedly through her widowed daughter-in-law Ruth, rather than her own sons …
How Bad Was Jezebel? - Biblical Archaeology Society
Mar 16, 2025 · See Ruth Hestrin, “Understanding Asherah—Exploring Semitic Iconography,” BAR, September/October 1991. b. In the Septuagint, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings are …
Who Were the Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites in the Bible?
Dec 31, 2024 · In the Bible, the Edomites are the descendants of Esau, Jacob’s twin and Isaac’s oldest son (Genesis 36). ). The Edomites controlled an area east of the Arabah, from the …
book of ruth Archives - Biblical Archaeology Society
book of ruth. book of ruth Latest. Apr 15 Blog. Seth in the Bible . By: Elie Wiesel. With Adam’s death ...
Was Jesus a Jew? - Biblical Archaeology Society
May 20, 2025 · Was Jesus a Jew? This late-15th-century painting by the Spanish artist known as the Master of Perea depicts a Last Supper of lamb, unleavened bread and wine—all elements …
Rachel and Leah in the Bible - Biblical Archaeology Society
Oct 5, 2022 · Rachel and Leah in the Bible. This watercolor, titled Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah, depicts the biblical matriarchs Rachel (left) and Leah (right) at a fountain.
Deborah in the Bible - Biblical Archaeology Society
Feb 27, 2025 · Deborah calls herself a mother in Israel (5:7). Probably one of the highest designations in scripture, it indicates authority. 15 Centuries afterward, the wise woman of …
Ziony Zevit - Biblical Archaeology Society
May 31, 2015 · The Story of Ruth: Examining the Missing Pieces The story of Ruth (Ruth 1–4) is interpreted as being about comeliness, kindness and grace. What is left unexplained is why …
Who Were the Hittites? - Biblical Archaeology Society
Apr 25, 2024 · Who were the Hittites? At one time the Hittites were one of three superpowers in the ancient world. Tudhaliya IV (1237–1209 B.C.E.) ruled over the Hittite Kingdom during its …
