Millennial Memory Perspectives In Jewish American Fiction

Diese in englischer Sprache verfasste Dissertation fußt in den Feldern englische Literaturwissenschaft/Amerikanistik, Cultural Studies und Jewish American Studies. Sie untersucht die Repräsentation von Erinnerung in Werken von Jonathan Safran Foer, Shalom Auslander und Nicole Krauss, Mitgliedern der sogenannten third generation jüdisch amerikanischer SchriftstellerInnen, welche um den Millenniumswechsel publizieren. Der Fokus liegt auf Werken von Nicole Krauss. Symbolische Charaktere und Objekte, welche in Verbindung zu Erinnerung stehen, werden herausgearbeitet und im Detail analysiert. This work is rooted in the fields of English Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, and Jewish American Studies. It examines memory representation in exemplary works published around the millennial change by third generation Jewish American writers Jonathan Safran Foer, Shalom Auslander, and Nicole Krauss. The focus lies on the latter’s work. Symbolic characters and objects connected to memory are discerned and analyzed in detail.

The Holocaust is often said to be unrepresentable. Yet since the 1990s, a new generation of Jewish American writers have been returning to this history again and again, insisting on engaging with it in highly playful, comic, and “impious” ways. Focusing on the fiction of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Nathan Englander, this book suggests that this literature cannot simply be dismissed as insensitive or improper. It argues that these Jewish American authors engage with the Holocaust in ways that renew and ensure its significance for contemporary generations. These ways, moreover, are intricately connected to efforts of finding new means of expressing Jewish American identity, and of moving beyond the increasingly apparent problems of postmodernism.

In A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History, Michael Hoberman introduces cultural geography as an alternative approach to the immigrant model. Cultural geography allows Hoberman to restore Jewish American writers to their roles as important, active members of the American literary landscape from the 1850s to the present, and to argue that Jewish history, American literary history, and the inhabitation of American geography are, and always have been, contiguous entities. A Hundred Acres of America makes its case by investigating both canonical and extra-canonical literary depictions of six geographies: the frontier, the small town, the urban, the suburban, America as seen from Europe, and Israel as seen from America. Hoberman reads dozens of representative texts closely, and analyzes a wide range of authors, from frontier-era memoirists and turn-of-the-century native-born reformers to contemporary novelists. He adroitly demonstrates that Jewish American authors are not only present throughout American literary history, but actively shaped this history with writings that often subverted or contradicted the ways their non-Jewish peers depicted these geographies"--

The parents of Jewish film producer Rachel Wallfisch, both Holocaust survivors didn't spare her any details, tales of Auschwitz being her bedtime stories. The novel describes the effect such family heritage can have on a person's daily life.

Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance confronts how Palestinians have recently felt obliged to re-think memory and resistance in response to dynamic political and regional changes in the twenty-first century; prolonged spatial and temporal dispossession; and the continued deterioration of the peace process. Insofar as the articulation of memory in (post)colonial contexts can be viewed as an integral component of a continuing anti-colonial struggle for self-determination, in tracing the dynamics of conveying the memory of ongoing, chronic trauma, this collection negotiates the urgency for Palestinians to reclaim and retain their heritage in a continually unstable and fretful present. The collection offers a distinctive contribution to the field of existing scholarship on Palestine, charting new ways of thinking about the critical paradigms of memory and resistance as they are produced and represented in literary works published within the post-millennial period. Reflecting on the potential for the Palestinian narrative to recreate reality in ways that both document it and resist its brutality, the critical essays in this collection show how Palestinian writers in the twenty-first century critically and creatively consider the possible future(s) of their nation.

Benjamin Disraeli utilizes previously ignored or little known sources to provide new insights into how one of the most famous Jewish converts was viewed by the Jewish community he ignored and by the larger Christian world that would not accept him. This book shows how a myth can take on a life of its own in the collective memory of the Jewish people, as well as in the thought processes of a variety of anti-Semitic groups. Its fresh approach to the life and lore of a colorful Victorian figure also raises the issue of ethnic identity and minority acceptance in our pluralistic society.

How do secular Jewish Israeli millennials feel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, having come of age in the shadow of the Oslo peace process, when political leaders have used ethno-religious rhetoric as a dividing force? This is the first book to analyse blowback to Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli religious nationalism among this group in their own words, based on fieldwork, interviews and surveys conducted after the 2014 Gaza War. Offering a close reading of the lived experience and generational memory of participants, Stacey Gutkowski offers a new explanation for why attitudes to Occupation have grown increasingly conservative over the past two decades. Examining the intimate emotional ecology of Occupation, this book offers a new argument about neo-Romantic conceptions of citizenship among this group. Beyond the case study, Religion, war and Israel's secular millennials also provides a new theoretical framework and research methods for researchers and students studying emotion, religion, nationalism, secularism and political violence around the world.

Focusing on the novels and films of daughters and sons of Holocaust survivors, this book sheds light on the relationship between the Holocaust and contemporary Jewish identity. It is the first systematic analysis of a body of work that introduces a new generation of Jewish writers and filmmakers, as well as revealing how the survivors' legacy is shaping--and being shaped by--the second generation. Carefully studying the work of these contemporary children of Job, Berger demonstrates how the offspring, like the survivors themselves, represent a variety of orientations to Judaism, have significant theological differences, and share the legacy of the Shoah. Berger clearly shows that members of the second generation participate fully in both the American and Jewish dimensions of their identity and articulates distinctive second-generation theological and psychosocial themes.

This volume offers a thorough introduction to Jewish world literatures in Spanish and Portuguese, which not only addresses the coexistence of cultures, but also the functions of a literary and linguistic space of negotiation in this context. From the Middle Ages to present day, the compendium explores the main Jewish chapters within Spanish- and Portuguese-language world literature, whether from Europe, Latin America, or other parts of the world. No comprehensive survey of this area has been undertaken so far. Yet only a broad focus of this kind can show how diasporic Jewish literatures have been (and are ) – while closely tied to their own traditions – deeply intertwined with local and global literary developments; and how the aesthetic praxis they introduced played a decisive, formative role in the history of literature. With this epistemic claim, the volume aims at steering clear of isolationist approaches to Jewish literatures.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “A deeply reported, deeply personal history of Zionism and Israel that does something few books even attempt: It balances the strength and weakness, the idealism and the brutality, the hope and the horror, that has always been at Zionism’s heart.”—Ezra Klein, The New York Times Winner of the Natan Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Ari Shavit’s riveting work, now updated with new material, draws on historical documents, interviews, and private diaries and letters, as well as his own family’s story, to create a narrative larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and of profound historical dimension. As he examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, Shavit asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can it survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. Shavit’s analysis of Israeli history provides a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.