Academic literature on the topic 'Jewish religious poetry, American'

“Black” themes held a substantial place in twentieth-century American Yiddish poetry and prose, as well as in Yiddish journalism. As Hasia Diner notes in her work on Jews and blacks in the United States in the twentieth century, Jews sympathized with the plight of American blacks and their fight for civil rights. However, this had not always been the case, as evidenced by the many staunch Jewish supporters of slavery and Jewish slave owners and traders. Jonathan Schorsch claims that “under the sign of theHaskala…little changed” in this respect. In discussing a reference by Isaac Satanov to black slavery, Schorsch notes:One cannot gauge from this brief comment whether Satanov knew about the abolitionist movements beginning to agitate in England and France at the time. Satanov's reportage was remarkably non-committal, betraying little, if any, sympathy for these developments.

Abstract Although mentioned only twice in Genesis (19:17, 26), Lot’s wife has been a topic of much discussion amongst both traditional and modern commentators and exegetes. However, as opposed to the androcentric traditional midrash, the Jewish American women poets, who write midrashic-poetry, re-read the biblical story with a feminine/feminist lens, making what Alicia Ostriker calls ‘revisionist mythmaking.’ In this article, I shall focus on seven poems written from the 1980s through to 2014. I shall endeavor to evince the way(s) in which they make use of the biblical text, dealing with themes raised in the traditional midrash or re-reading the latter. I will show how by adducing to her emotions, longings and memories and even fear of the future, the poets portray Lot’s wife first and foremost as a woman.

In his epilogue to The Politics of Canonicity, Michael Gluzman has aptly delineated the parameters of this book, by writing that it “originates from the American debate on canon formation and cultural wars that predominated academic discourse during my years at University of California, Berkeley” (p. 181). This statement firmly sets its author within a critical context that auspiciously brings a wider literary discourse, such as that sustained by Chana Kronfeld and Hannan Hever, into the realm of modern Hebrew poetry. In particular, The Politics of Canonicity is identified by its publication in the series entitled Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences, which has a primary interest in the ongoing redefinition of Jewish identity and culture, specifically involving issues of gender, modernity, and politics. The Politics of Canonicity is effectively divided into two parts. In the first, comprising Chapters 1 and 2, Gluzman provides the intellectual and historical context for the interwoven formation of national identity and the literary canon in modern Hebrew literature. In particular, in Chapter 1 he relates the story of the 1896–1897 debate between Ahad Ha'am and Mikha Yosef Berdichevsky, arguing that it produced a dominant and regulative paradigm of Hebrew literature that integrates the private and public, the aesthetic and the national. In the second chapter, Gluzman discusses the way in which Hebrew modernism created a counterpoint to international modernism's glorification of exile. He discusses a full range of premodernist and modernist Hebrew poets—Shaul Tchernichovsky, Avigdor Hameiri, Avraham Shlonsky, Noach Stern, and Leah Goldberg—in order to underline their resistance to “the idea of exile as a literary privilege or as an inherently Jewish vocation” (p. 37), a resistance which Gluzman determines as calling into question “the critical tendency to read modernist practices as essentially antinationalist” (p. 37).

This thesis examines how poetic responses to the Holocaust in America, when they emerged, have differed from the novels addressing the same subject; how the Second World War has challenged, in a way the First World War did not, basic humanistic assumptions regarding the image of man, the role of God, the benefits of civilisation & culture, and the humanising power of art or reason; and how this impact has influenced modern trends in poetry. After an extensive background section documenting the impact the Holocaust and Second World War have made upon the literary imagination, an extensive review is conducted of the varied critical positions and criteria, both aesthetic and ethical, from which American literary responses have been evaluated. Among the major critical positions is the belief that there should be no literary response to the Holocaust; that this literary response must primarily serve to document and testify; that the Holocaust should not be addressed imaginatively by non-victims; and that the Holocaust should not be used as a metaphor to convey some other subject or theme. These and other critical standpoints are discussed in relation to works by ten American poets whose poetry is representative of the ways in which the Holocaust has impacted on the poetic imagination, the breadth of poetic responses to this atrocity, and the range of difficulties and corresponding criticisms which are associated with almost all attempts to respond creatively to the Holocaust. The poets examined are Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Stephen Berg, Van Brock, W.D. Snodgrass, William Heyen and Charles Reznikoff. Where illustrative, comparisons to relevant European poets have been made, including Nellie Sachs and Paul Celan. It was concluded that certain poets (Levertov, Rich, Heyen), as well as certain critical standpoints (Ezrahi, Langer, James Young) did more justice to the reality of the Holocaust and the challenges it poses to the literary and poetic imagination. Bibliography: p. 135-140.

This dissertation, “Towards a Poetics of I/Eye-Witness: Documentary Expression and Jewish American Poetry of the 1930s,” explores the ways in which a lens of witnessing can shed light on the ethical and aesthetic concerns embedded in the work of three Jewish-American poets. The study begins with the English writing and verse of Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) and Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), and continues to the Yiddish poetry of Berish Weinstein (1905-1967). It situates their poetry and ancillary writings from the early thirties within the culture of documentary expression that permeated artistic creation, social action and public discourse throughout the Depression era. By focusing on poetry that deals with human catastrophe, including historical and contemporary contexts of racial injustice, Jewish persecution, personal loss and animal slaughter, my analysis weighs the burden of representation on personal and universal levels. Transcending the visual and moral divide between the “eye” and the “I,” the poets in this study use verse to document the memories, experiences, histories and testimonies of Others; in doing so, they uphold their own ethical ideals of reparation, truth and justice. In the prologue, I set the stage for the dissertation by examining the link between lynching photography and Jewish poetry embodied by the famous Jazz song “Strange Fruit.” The introduction presents the theoretical framework and historical background central to the literary analysis of the dissertation. I offer an overview of the Great Depression and the American documentary scene and demonstrate how the visual and ethical ideas of “documentary” and “witness” have been utilized in various contexts. Chapter One builds a case for a Jewish poetics of I/eye-witness in the work of Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff. I trace the intersections of documentary form, historical consciousness, personal rectitude and justice through a selection of poetic texts and archival materials, including two long works published by The Objectivist Press in 1934, Testimony and In Memoriam: 1933. Chapter Two reflects on the emerging sense of poetic witness in Muriel Rukeyser’s early poetry and documentary writing. I locate her ideas about responsibility, utility and truth in her Jewish upbringing and education at the Ethical Culture-Fieldston School. I then offer a comparative reading of the three genres Rukeyser utilized to represent her experiences as a witness to the second Scottsboro Trial: diary entry, reportage and poetry. Chapter Three contributes new translations and an in-depth analysis of a selection of Yiddish poems from Berish Weinstein’s first published collection, Brukhvarg (1936). I focus on Weinstein’s representation of the slaughterhouse as the symbolic locus of modern suffering, and the relevance of such a trope for the historical barbarism against African Americans, as well as Jews.

This study seeks to explore the little known story of the Sephardi Jewish Orphans of São Tomé. Not much is known about the children who were taken from Portugal to the western coasts of Africa. The story of these 600 Sephardic Jewish children is unique and enigmatic. However, it has been subjected to an unusual interpretation. Notably, many African-Americans have appropriated this portion of Sephardi Jewish history. For some, they have traced their Jewish ancestry to this historical event, and clearly self-identify as Jews based on this narrative. Why do they do this? The theory of Afrocentricity and collective memory is applied to this case study of African-Americans; to consider how they are able to adopt this story as their own. Finally, it is said that nature abhors a vacuum; the lacuna inherent with this story is akin to the historical fate of many African Americans. This study attempts to explore how these two communities, from the past and the present, have come together in the making of history, imagined or real.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 1999.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 356-371). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users. Address: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p9947971.

One of the most fundamental ways of understanding the struggles and delights of an ethnic group is to study the art the group produces. Art –visual, literary, auditory– functions as an expression of the history of the group. Often, what is considered great art in one culture is disparaged in many others. In my thesis, I will be examining how comics function as an expression of simultaneous pride and shame among Ashkenazi Jews, particularly comics created in the 20th century. Perhaps comics do not seem like an obvious expression of Eastern European Judaism. After all, there are far more renowned, and even sophisticated works to look at, such as the whimsical art of Marc Chagall and stately rabbinical paintings of Isidor Kauffman, or even the heady philosophical work of Theodor W. Adorno. “Ashkenazi expression” and “comics” do not seem intuitively connected. This disconnect is precisely why I want to explore the relationship between comics and Ashkenazi Jewry. In addition to many of the most prominent comic creators being Jewish, I posit that there is something inherently yiddish, Jewish, about American comics. The purpose of this essay is not to name individual comic artists in an attempt to prove the Jewishness of the the comic-book industry. Rather, I will explore why Jews of Eastern European descent gravitated toward the comic-book industry in the early to mid 20th century. I posit that American comics acted as an expression of a pride-shame tension found in American Jews of Eastern European descent. To explore this connection, I will first examine the origins of simultaneous Jewish pride and shame by tracing the roots of Eastern European Jewish self-hatred. Next, I will delve into why comics encapsulate this balance of self-deprecation and self-glorification. I will analyze both the nature of the medium itself, and the circumstances grounding the formation of American comics. Ashkenazi Jews, or Jews of Eastern European, specifically German descent, have been at the center of much scholarly literature. Although an extremely small percentage of the world's population, the bulk of Jews are Ashkenazi, as opposed to Sefardic. Much literature has been devoted to Ashkenazi Judaism, as the ethnic division has produced an impressive body of scientific and literary accomplishment. Although the countries from which Ashkenazi Jews originate are diverse, the key words surrounding Ashkenazi discourse are reoccurring. Concepts such as “exile,” “self-hatred,” and “Jewish humor” all arise. Another central concept is Yiddishkeit. Yiddishkeit literally translates to “Jewishness” in none other but the language of Yiddish. Yiddish has been the subject of both outward Ashkenazi expression –there is a great deal of Yiddish literature and art– and scholarly examination. Perhaps most recently, Michael Wex published a book called Born to Kvetch, an in-detail study of the history of Yiddish, and how it embodies Ashkenazi culture. Within this book, a particular theme appears: the theme of simultaneously occuring pride and shame. Jews created Yiddish as a result of the primary culture's rejection. However, after this initial dismissal, great pride emerged out of Yiddish, manifesting itself in rich Yiddish culture. Other scholars have explored the concept of Jewish self-hatred, and the fine line this self-hatred straddles between bona fide self-hatred and isolationist pride. Sander Gilman, who writes extensively about the topic, discusses how language and literature embody this dichotomous tension of pride and shame. While conducting research for the connection between comics and class in 20th century American, I came to the understanding that many of the founders of and participants in the American comic industry were Jewish. I dug up analyses of specific comics/graphic novels (usually Maus) exploring certain Jewish themes in comics, yet I had a hard time finding extensive research asking the question as to why comics and Jews have such a strong connection. In my thesis, I hope to further this question by not only investigating the circumstances surrounding comics that made Jews turn to the industry, but why comics themselves embody Jewish pride and shame. On a much humbler scale, I hope to accomplish what Wex has in Born to Kvetch, a linguistic analysis that provides insight into the greater ethnic group engaging with it. In chapter one, I will establish the pride-shame dichotomy found in Ashkenazi Judaism. I will first explore several biblical passages, including Lamentations, Micah, and Isaiah. By exploring these instances in the tanach, I will try to establish the uniqueness the Jews feel due to their personal and punitive relationship with God. Throughout these passages, we will see the Jews taking pride in the punishment God doles out for them, because such pain is indicative of the Jews' superiority among other nations. Next, I will provide a brief explanation of why I am choosing to focus on the act of conversion in the Medieval time period as an indicator of Jewish pride and shame. In specific, I will focus on infamous Johannes Pfefferkorn, who converted from Judaism to Christianity. Pfefferkorn is the perfect example of a Jew who both detested his Judaism, yet used it to his advantage to speak authoritatively about Judaism to Christians, as his professed textual knowledge gave him clout. Next, I will give an introduction on the connection between Otherness and language, explaining how Hebrew and the Talmud spurred both fascination and disgust toward Jews from their surrounding neighbors. After segueing into the origins of Yiddish as a language created out of exile, I will explain how though Yiddish originated out of spurning, the language became a source of pride of its rejected roots. I will consider the statements of various Yiddish authors, in particular American immigrant Isaac Bashevis Singer. Through both an analysis of Singer's self-reflection of his own life and an analysis of his short story, Gimpel the Fool, I will establish the pride Ashkenazi Judaism takes in its outsider status. Singer himself remarks of the positivity of being lonely and different. His character, Gimpel, is a foolish outcast. Much like the Jews in the biblical passages explored earlier in the chapter, he suffers constant misfortune and mockery, yet his very pain is what lends him favor in God's eyes. In chapter two, I will explore how 20th century American comics reflect the Ashkenazi dichotomy of pride and shame. Much like Yiddish is not a mainstream language, the idea of comics as mainstream art or literature has been greatly contested. I will try to determine which circumstances surrounding 20th century comics, and the comics themselves, connect with this pride-shame tension. I will use Paul Buhle's Jews and American Comics as a frame of reference, since the book often links comics and Yiddish. I will first give a brief history of the American comic-book, starting with the Hogan's Alley comics strip, and exploring up until the mid 20th century. By understanding the working-class origins of comics, we can better understand the low-brow perception of them from the standpoint of both their readers and their critics. I will then explain how American comics in the 20th century contained Jewish themes of pride and shame, despite their characters not being explicitly Jewish. I will more closely explore this idea through an analysis of the character Superman, drawing on both the commentary from the character's creators and the content clues of the character himself. A true foreigner, Superman masks his real identity, his superhuman powers. While his alias is what makes him exceptional, it is also the thing he abhors the most. Will Eisner, a giant in the world of comics, denies inserting Jewish identity in his own characters. However, his assistant, Jules Feiffer, half-jokingly claimed that his character, Denny Colt, featured in Eisner's The Spirit series, is in actuality a secret Jew. Instead of focusing on Colt and The Spirit, I will do a close reading of one of Eisner's other works, A Contract with God, which is an exemplary work of Jewish pride and shame. Contract contains a motif that is similar to that of the biblical passages analyzed in chapter one. The protagonist, Russian-American immigrant Frimme Hershe, has a personal relationship with God that leaves him demoralized and punished. I will then explore the use of visual stereotype in Contract, comparing it to that of Art Spiegelman's Maus, and contrasting it with that of the film Inglorious Basterds. I will argue that through engaging with Jewish visual stereotypes, the first two reveal them as falsehoods. Thus, through an admittance of these shamed images, the comics mock them. The latter film chooses to ignore stereotypes, thus leaving them extant. I will conclude the chapter by positing that Jews have coped with their constant exile through through the self-deprecation of comics. Buhle mentions that comics about Jewish-American gangsters turned into a source of pride, presumably for Ashkenazi American Jews. The trope, hated by others, was lauded by those it was forced upon. Much like Yiddish, comics may have been born out of exclusion, but they came to be a source of pride among Ashkenazi Jews.

This thesis examines how women negotiate their identification within and as a group when engaging in interreligious dialogue. It is an in-depth case study of the women’s interfaith book groups, the Daughters of Abraham, located in the Greater Boston Area. This focus facilitates an in-depth understanding of the dynamics of relationships within one group, between different groups, and as situated in the American sociocultural context. I explore the tensions arising from religious diversity, and the consequences of participating in an interreligious dialogue group for understandings of religious self and others. Categories such as boundary, power, sameness, difference, self and other serve to explore the complexities and fluidity of identity constructions. I answer the following questions: How do members of the Daughters of Abraham engage with the group’s religious diversity? How does their participation in the Daughters of Abraham affect their self-understanding and understanding of the “other?” What can we learn about power dynamics and boundary drawing from the women’s accounts of their participation in the Daughters of Abraham and from their group interactions? Two interrelated arguments guide this thesis. One, I show that Daughters members arrive at complex and fluid understandings of what it means to identify as an American Jewish, Christian, and Muslim woman by negotiating various power dynamics arising from ideas of sameness and difference of religion, gender, and sociopolitical values. Two, I contend that the collective emphasis on commonalities in the Daughters of Abraham is a double-edged sword. Explicitly, this stress intends to encourage engagement with the group’s religious diversity by excluding those deemed too different. However, whilst this emphasis can generate nuanced understandings of religious identity categories, at times it highlights differences detrimental to facilitating such understanding. Moreover, this stress on commonalities illuminates the power dynamics and tensions characterizing this women’s interfaith book group. Scholarship has by and large overlooked women’s interreligious engagements with explicit ethnographic studies of such being virtually non-existent. This thesis addresses this gap by using ethnographic methods to advance knowledge about women’s interreligious dialogue. Furthermore, it pushes disciplinary discourses by speaking to the following interlinked areas: Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations, formalized interreligious dialogue, interreligious encounters on the grassroots level, women’s interreligious dialogue, a book group approach to engaging with religious diversity, and interreligious encounters in the American context post-September 11th 2001.