Academic literature on the topic 'First modern Hebrew female author'

Johanna Charlotte Unzer (1725–1782), born Ziegler, is the author of the first metaphysical treatise intended specifically for women. In the preface of this treatise, published in 1751, she justifies her ‘unhabitual’ enterprise, emphasizing that her intention is not to instruct but only to please her female readership. A closer glance, however, reveals a genuine philosophical intention and an active participation in the debate on popular philosophy and aesthetics in Halle. Challenging an all-too narrow and all-too mathematical conception of practical philosophy, Unzer advocates a dynamic model of philosophy as a love of wisdom, and a philosophy of beauty, poetry, and aesthetics. Fundamentally, these are ancient and mostly Platonic ideas, and among her intellectual circle Unzer stands out as a modern Diotima. But on account of their distinctively modern premises, these ideas likewise take a particularly modern shape, and they illustrate a certain Platonic reversal incipient in Wolffianism itself.

This chapter describes how the first author, Rong, has experienced stereotyping as a Chinese female immigrant and doctoral student in America, as her experiences typify the experiences of the model minority. Drawing from Rong's personal journal reflections, the authors use autoethnography as the methodology to present her lived experiences as research. Through reflections on Rong's own understandings, this writing seeks to connect individual experiences to larger social, cultural, and political conditions of the United States (Ellis, 2004). The authors recount four different personal encounters with stereotyping in Rong's local community and in the process of pursuing higher education, and discuss the psychosocial impacts resulting from this type of discrimination. Through this work, the authors seek to contribute to the discourse of the social problem of stereotyping for the so-called “model minority.”

Within popular Western interpretative traditions, as well as the majority of modern works on the reception history of Adam and Eve, the first woman’s role as a mother has ultimately been eclipsed by her action in the garden. Nonetheless, Eve is, according to the Bible, the first female to give birth to a child and begin the cycle of human procreation, thus representing a potent symbol of female creative power. Furthermore, some of the most poignant aspects of Eve’s story are bound up in her maternity; she is mother to all living but her children will know mortality because of her actions; she will suffer pain and anguish in order to bring about new life; and she will experience the death of her second son Abel at the hands of her firstborn, Cain. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which Eve’s motherhood is represented by a number of different trajectories growing out from the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish and Christian interpretations, visual art, and the work of pre-twentieth-century women writers. Each of these categories of interpretation offers their own unique insight into mother Eve, while also sharing considerable imagery and themes between them.