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Editors' Introduction: Cynthia Ozick and the Art of Nonfiction Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-16 Michèle Mendelssohn, Charlie Tyson
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Editors' Introduction:Cynthia Ozick and the Art of Nonfiction Michèle Mendelssohn (bio) and Charlie Tyson (bio) A 2016 New York Times profile of Cynthia Ozick summarized her career in the following terms: With one hand she has written some of the strangest, most intellectually daring and morally intelligent fiction of recent times, including
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Ozick's Idols Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-16 Joe Moshenska
abstract: An exploration of Ozick's critique of Harold Bloom, in which she argues that his literary critical schemas amount to a form of idolatry, is developed into a wider account of the place of the risks of idol making and idol worship in her fictional and nonfictional writings. Ozick is seen to gradually move from a vision of the imagination as intrinsically idolatrous—hence the very notion of
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Moloch and Monotheism: Ozick's Aestheticism Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-16 Evan Goldstein
abstract: A tidy story is told about Cynthia Ozick: an aesthete in her youth, her reading of Leo Baeck prompted a break with this "religion of Art" and inspired a polemical commitment to literature centered by a particularly Jewish moral seriousness. This article contests this consensus by revisiting Ozick's career-long articulation of aestheticism's appeal, and particularly her relation to the avatar
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The Lord of History in Cynthia Ozick's "Ruth" Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-16 Na'amit Sturm Nagel
abstract: Cynthia Ozick has published widely on the categorization and definition of Jewish literature. This article reexamines her definition in "Toward a New Yiddish" in light of Ozick's essay "Ruth," published first in Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible (1987) and later in her essay collection Metaphor & Memory (1989). In "Ruth," Ozick's enigmatic definition of Jewish literature
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Ozick's Feminism and the Woman Writer Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-16 Emily Coit
abstract: As Ozick herself has noted, readers have observed a contradiction between her championing of the particularity of the Jewish writer and her insistence on the human universality of the writer who happens to be a woman. Examining Ozick's thinking about sex and gender, this article explains why this apparent contradiction isn't one for her. Considering the relationship between her "classical
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Empowering the Literary Essay: Cynthia Ozick and the Search for Authority Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-16 Bryan Cheyette
abstract: The nonfiction of Cynthia Ozick includes many surrogate father figures, including Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and Elie Wiesel. These towering presences have been refashioned by Ozick in what she calls her "literary essays," which she regards as a model of unrestrained creativity as championed by James. Ozick characterizes the literary essay as a gendered "secret self," with
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Between Granite and Rainbow: Woolfian Literary Speculation in Ozick's Nonfiction Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-16 Lillian Hingley
abstract: While figures such as Ruth R. Wisse hold that Cynthia Ozick's melding of fiction with nonfiction is a rejection of authorial responsibility, Ozick's fictionalized accounts of real-life writers has a literary precedent: Virginia Woolf. Just as Woolf speculates about how Austen might have become an experimental, proto-modernist writer had she lived longer, Ozick speculates that Woolf herself
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Cynthia Ozick's "Outcry of Failure" Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-16 Charlie Tyson
abstract: This article examines the preoccupation with failure that pervades Cynthia Ozick's essays. Ozick regularly presents herself in her public statements as obscure, unread, and soon to be forgotten; in essays and interviews she habitually returns to a period in her twenties and thirties when she labored in vain to get published. Ozick's concern with the youthful literary success that eluded her
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The Melodrama of Cynthia Ozick's Imagination Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-16 Michèle Mendelssohn
abstract: Dualistic energies ripple throughout Ozick's writing. Her attraction to good and evil, light and dark, the agonistic and the operatic, the Zarathustrian and the Wagnerian, is undeniable. This article focuses on the literary dimensions of her nonfiction to shed light on her essays' mysterious powers. By eschewing the habitual liturgical framing of Ozick's works for a literary one, this article
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Essay as Novel and Fiction as Art: The Evolution of Two Genres in the Oeuvre of Cynthia Ozick Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-16 Susanne Klingenstein
abstract: Embarking on her first novel in 1950 as an ardent admirer of Henry James, Cynthia Ozick developed a demanding theory of literary high art. When she emerged from her self-seclusion in 1964 with her novel Trust and began to publish short stories, her new work was sharply critical, from a Jewish point of view, of the arrogance, vanity, and maddening ambition that drives the creation of art.
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Pre/Occupied Longing: Toward a Definition of Postnostalgia in Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-11-11 Lucas F. W. Wilson
This article presents a theoretical formulation that names an experience that is common to many third-generation protagonists in the literature written by the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors: postnostalgia. Postnostalgia is an adopted "nostalgia"—though it not actually nostalgia—for a place and a time that descendants have never lived but long for as if they have. This almost-form of "nostalgia"
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Yekl to Jake: Reading Cahan with Arendt Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-11-11 Sarah Schwartzman Ramsey
In Abraham Cahan's 1896 novella, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, Yekl/Jake is a Russian Jewish immigrant who repeats loud and self-aggrandizing accounts of himself as a proudly assimilated American. This article uses Hannah Arendt's writing on cliché and her 1943 essay "We Refugees" to argue that Cahan's depiction of Jake exemplifies a type of performance, one that Arendt witnessed among Jewish
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"Love, Alex": Queering Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-11-11 Christopher C. Apap
Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2002) follows the two protagonists and narrators of the novel, American descendent of Holocaust survivors Jonathan and Alexander Perchov, his Ukrainian translator and collaborator on the story that constitutes the book itself. This article analyzes a heretofore unconsidered element of the novel: the potential to read Alex as queer. The book's possible
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The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist by Sarah Imhoff (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-11-11 Annie Atura Bushnell
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist by Sarah Imhoff Annie Atura Bushnell (bio) SARAH IMHOFF. THE LIVES OF JESSIE SAMPTER: QUEER, DISABLED, ZIONIST. DURHAM, NC: DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2022. 288 PP. Like most good pieces of feminist life-writing, Sarah Imhoff's The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled,
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The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History by Barbara E. Mann (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-11-11 Laura Arnold Leibman
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History by Barbara E. Mann Laura Arnold Leibman (bio) BARBARA E. MANN. THE OBJECT OF JEWISH LITERATURE: A MATERIAL HISTORY. NEW HAVEN, CT: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2022. 280 PP. This is an exquisitely written, field-changing book. Scholarship on Jewish material culture tends to employ
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How the Soviet Jew Was Made by Sasha Senderovich (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-11-11 Brett Winestock
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: How the Soviet Jew Was Made by Sasha Senderovich Brett Winestock (bio) SASHA SENDEROVICH. HOW THE SOVIET JEW WAS MADE. CAMBRIDGE, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2022. 368 PP. In a season 13 episode of The Simpsons, the family travels to Brazil. At one very inopportune moment, Homer proclaims he has to urinate because he has
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Mordecai Richler's Imperfect Search for Moral Values by Shana Rosenblatt Mauer (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-11-11 Emily Robins Sharpe
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Mordecai Richler's Imperfect Search for Moral Values by Shana Rosenblatt Mauer Emily Robins Sharpe (bio) SHANA ROSENBLATT MAUER. MORDECAI RICHLER'S IMPERFECT SEARCH FOR MORAL VALUES. MONTREAL AND KINGSTON: MCGILL-QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2022. 240 PP. Shana Rosenblatt Mauer's Mordecai Richler's Imperfect Search for Moral
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Holy Envy: Writing in the Jewish Christian Borderzone by Maeera Y. Shreiber (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-11-11 Norman Finkelstein
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Holy Envy: Writing in the Jewish Christian Borderzone by Maeera Y. Shreiber Norman Finkelstein (bio) MAEERA Y. SHREIBER. HOLY ENVY: WRITING IN THE JEWISH CHRISTIAN BORDERZONE. NEW YORK: FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2022. 170 PP. A new book by Maeera Shreiber is a significant critical event. Shreiber's first book, Singing in a
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The Border and the Line: Race, Literature and Los Angeles by Dean Franco (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-11-11 Aldon Lynn Nielsen
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Border and the Line: Race, Literature and Los Angeles by Dean Franco Aldon Lynn Nielsen (bio) DEAN FRANCO. THE BORDER AND THE LINE: RACE, LITERATURE AND LOS ANGELES. REDWOOD CITY, CA: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019. 225 PP. Neighborhoods and their boundaries, to paraphrase the old song, are a sometimes thing. The section
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Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down Meets "I Do This, I Do That": Reconnecting Charles Reznikoff and Frank O'Hara Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Allison Pitinii Davis
abstract: The poems of Objectivist Charles Reznikoff and the New York School's Frank O'Hara insist that marginalized experiences—both their own and others'—belong in America's public spaces and discourse. Reznikoff records New York's streets as the Jewish child of immigrants in collections including Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down (1941), while O'Hara records these streets from a queer experience
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Memory and the Exigencies of Literary Form: Anthony Hecht's "The Book of Yolek" Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Karen Weisman
abstract: Anthony Hecht's "The Book of Yolek" may be read as a test case for understanding a strand of twentieth-century American Jewish poetry, one that takes up a series of questions about the very meaning of the term "Jewish poetics," especially when it sets itself to the task of remembering what Hecht once described as the "very terrible aspects of existence." Hecht's resistance to sentimentalism
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Either War Is Finished or We Are: Why Herman Wouk's Duology Deserves a Second Look Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-03-22 David Pickus
abstract: This article seeks to reinvigorate critical discussion of Herman Wouk by focusing on his two massive war novels, The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978). Although well known in his lifetime, Wouk has received only limited academic exposition. His memory is bifurcated between a popular readership that continues to turn to Wouk for entertainment and instruction, and his reception
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Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies by Sheila E. Jelen (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Debra Caplan
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies by Sheila E. Jelen Debra Caplan (bio) SHEILA E. JELEN. SALVAGE POETICS: POST-HOLOCAUST AMERICAN JEWISH FOLK ETHNOGRAPHIES. DETROIT, MI: WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2020. 402 PP. What does the recent success of 2018's Yiddish production of Fidler afn dakh
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The Philip Roth We Don't Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography by Jacques Berlinerblau (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Rachel Gordan
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Philip Roth We Don't Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography by Jacques Berlinerblau Rachel Gordan (bio) JACQUES BERLINERBLAU. THE PHILIP ROTH WE DON'T KNOW: SEX, RACE, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY. CHARLOTTESVILLE: UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS, 2021. 240 PP. Jacques Berlinerblau's recent book is motivated by a timely question: what do
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Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life by Zev Eleff (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Joshua Furman
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life by Zev Eleff Joshua Furman (bio) ZEV ELEFF. AUTHENTICALLY ORTHODOX: A TRADITION-BOUND FAITH IN AMERICAN LIFE. DETROIT, MI: WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2020. 326 PP. At first glance, a bottle of peanut oil or a pack of trading cards might not seem to be appropriate
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The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature by Josh Lambert (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Brett Ashley Kaplan
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature by Josh Lambert Brett Ashley Kaplan (bio) JOSH LAMBERT. THE LITERARY MAFIA: JEWS, PUBLISHING, AND POSTWAR AMERICAN LITERATURE. NEW HAVEN, CT: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2022. 258 PP. Josh Lambert's The Literary Mafia is a brave book. For a Jewish Studies scholar
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Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Hilene S. Flanzbaum
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Introduction:Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture Hilene S. Flanzbaum From now on, I am only taking gigs where I can say what I want. —MIDGE MAISEL Sophisticated, powerful, forthright—and Jewish—Rachel Menken walks on the set in the first season of Mad Men (2007), a television show that Rolling Stone magazine will
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The Weight of RBG's Crown: Jewish Feminism and Its Appropriations Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Annie Atura Bushnell
This article takes a critical look at the "Notorious RBG" iconography that has proliferated since the 2010s, when shifts in the ideological makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court caused Ginsburg to find herself more frequently in dissent. Attending to the trope's origins in the "King of New York" photo shoot featuring Christopher George Latore Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls, it situates Notorious RBG rhetoric
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"The Dark Path Back": Investigating Holocaust Memory in Sara Paretsky's Novel Total Recall Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Phyllis Lassner
Women writers challenge the popular and critical entrenchment of male-authored literary detective fiction. A close reading of Sara Paretsky's 2001 novel Total Recall demonstrates that the ongoing quest for social justice by her woman detective, V. I. Warshawski, is addressed through assertive women's voices that have also transformed critical approaches to women's crime fiction. In Paretsky's novels
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The Last Black (Jewish) Unicorn: Tiffany Haddish's Black Mitzvah and the Reframing of Jewish Female Identity Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Samantha Pickette
This paper explores the work of Tiffany Haddish, the Black Jewish stand-up comedian and actress, both in terms of Haddish's contributions to the well-established canon of Jewish female comedy and in terms of the ways that Haddish's work paves new ground. Through an analysis of Haddish's 2019 Netflix special, Black Mitzvah, this paper first traces the stylistic and aesthetic methods that connect Haddish's
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The Limits of Drag: Women, Gender, and the Other in Hayehudim Baim Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Melissa Weininger
The Israeli sketch comedy show Hayehudim Baim skewers many elements of Jewish and Israeli history, and its satirical, secular, liberal readings of biblical figures and religious practices have created political controversy. Yet despite its apparently progressive take on Jewish history and Israeli culture, the show's use of drag as a central feature of its satire reveals certain practical and ideological
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The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and the Fantasy of Becoming Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Tahneer Oksman
This short, reflective essay considers various incongruous premises at the heart of the television show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, particularly regarding protagonist Midge Maisel's motivations and character development. It does so in the context of some 20th century touchstones of Jewish American women's comedy, after which the show was, on some level, modeled. The essay argues that the series is best
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Midge: A Women of Her Time, but Also of Our Own? Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Rachel Gordan
Does The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel have antecedents in American Jewish literature? The Sherman-Palladino creation has been compared with the work of comedians Joan Rivers and Jean Carroll, but novelist Herman Wouk's 1955 character, Marjorie Morningstar, offers another compelling source of inspiration that sheds light on what makes Maisel true to her midcentury moment, and how the character is more of a
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"Exiled from Exile Itself": Jewish Privilege and the Feminist Afterlives of Yiddish in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Broad City Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Danny Luzon
This essay studies how Jewish creators of television comedy negotiate the tension between Jewish white privilege and inherited memories of social precarity by shaping a Jewish-ly coded vernacular. Specifically, I explore the multilingual idioms designed by Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson, and Rachel Bloom in the sitcoms Broad City and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I argue that their feminist language design generates
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Nomadism and Stasis in Transparent Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Ranen Omer-Sherman
Joey Soloway (previously known as Jill) approaches the Jewish story as one of perpetual wandering—between identities, between bodies, between realms of belonging. While Transparent is as arguably concerned with relationality and interdependence as untethered individualism, in the series' tense opposition between wandering and stasis, Soloway privileges the expansive, open-ended identity of wandering
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Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Hilene S. Flanzbaum
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Introduction:Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture Hilene S. Flanzbaum From now on, I am only taking gigs where I can say what I want. —MIDGE MAISEL Sophisticated, powerful, forthright—and Jewish—Rachel Menken walks on the set in the first season of Mad Men (2007), a television show that Rolling Stone magazine will
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The Weight of RBG's Crown: Jewish Feminism and Its Appropriations Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Annie Atura Bushnell
This article takes a critical look at the "Notorious RBG" iconography that has proliferated since the 2010s, when shifts in the ideological makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court caused Ginsburg to find herself more frequently in dissent. Attending to the trope's origins in the "King of New York" photo shoot featuring Christopher George Latore Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls, it situates Notorious RBG rhetoric
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"The Dark Path Back": Investigating Holocaust Memory in Sara Paretsky's Novel Total Recall Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Phyllis Lassner
Women writers challenge the popular and critical entrenchment of male-authored literary detective fiction. A close reading of Sara Paretsky's 2001 novel Total Recall demonstrates that the ongoing quest for social justice by her woman detective, V. I. Warshawski, is addressed through assertive women's voices that have also transformed critical approaches to women's crime fiction. In Paretsky's novels
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The Last Black (Jewish) Unicorn: Tiffany Haddish's Black Mitzvah and the Reframing of Jewish Female Identity Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Samantha Pickette
This paper explores the work of Tiffany Haddish, the Black Jewish stand-up comedian and actress, both in terms of Haddish's contributions to the well-established canon of Jewish female comedy and in terms of the ways that Haddish's work paves new ground. Through an analysis of Haddish's 2019 Netflix special, Black Mitzvah, this paper first traces the stylistic and aesthetic methods that connect Haddish's
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The Limits of Drag: Women, Gender, and the Other in Hayehudim Baim Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Melissa Weininger
The Israeli sketch comedy show Hayehudim Baim skewers many elements of Jewish and Israeli history, and its satirical, secular, liberal readings of biblical figures and religious practices have created political controversy. Yet despite its apparently progressive take on Jewish history and Israeli culture, the show's use of drag as a central feature of its satire reveals certain practical and ideological
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The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and the Fantasy of Becoming Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Tahneer Oksman
This short, reflective essay considers various incongruous premises at the heart of the television show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, particularly regarding protagonist Midge Maisel's motivations and character development. It does so in the context of some 20th century touchstones of Jewish American women's comedy, after which the show was, on some level, modeled. The essay argues that the series is best
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Midge: A Women of Her Time, but Also of Our Own? Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Rachel Gordan
Does The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel have antecedents in American Jewish literature? The Sherman-Palladino creation has been compared with the work of comedians Joan Rivers and Jean Carroll, but novelist Herman Wouk's 1955 character, Marjorie Morningstar, offers another compelling source of inspiration that sheds light on what makes Maisel true to her midcentury moment, and how the character is more of a
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"Exiled from Exile Itself": Jewish Privilege and the Feminist Afterlives of Yiddish in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Broad City Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Danny Luzon
This essay studies how Jewish creators of television comedy negotiate the tension between Jewish white privilege and inherited memories of social precarity by shaping a Jewish-ly coded vernacular. Specifically, I explore the multilingual idioms designed by Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson, and Rachel Bloom in the sitcoms Broad City and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I argue that their feminist language design generates
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Nomadism and Stasis in Transparent Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Ranen Omer-Sherman
Joey Soloway (previously known as Jill) approaches the Jewish story as one of perpetual wandering—between identities, between bodies, between realms of belonging. While Transparent is as arguably concerned with relationality and interdependence as untethered individualism, in the series' tense opposition between wandering and stasis, Soloway privileges the expansive, open-ended identity of wandering
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"Un libro no convencional": Communities of Response and Finding Jewishness in Alex Appella's Writing Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-04-15 Jessica L. Carr
This article analyzes Alex Appella’s art book published in Argentina in English as The János Book and in Spanish as Entonces el libro and Después de la carta, along with the reception of the book among “communities of response” in classrooms throughout Argentina through a program called the Biblioteca Ambulantes, or Traveling Libraries. I argue that Appella’s writing is multidirectional and nonlinear
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"My Father's Face": Judaism, God, and Ritual Practice In Philip Roth's Everyman, Indignation, and Nemesis Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-04-15 Samuel J. Kessler
This article is about the occurrence and centrality of distinctly Jewish ideas and ritual practices in Philip Roth’s Nemesis (2010), Indignation (2008), and Everyman (2006). In these three novels, Roth constructed characters whose existential crises most often come during or when meditating upon moments of Jewish ritual or Jewish theological expression, and what emerges is that the when, where, and
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An "Ambiguously Menacing Predicament": Reading The Plot Against America in the Age of Donald Trump Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-04-15 Andy Connolly
This article offers a critical reassessment of the ways in which Philip Roth’ s The Plot Against America (2004) has been read in the era of Donald Trump. It questions how efforts to apply a politics of liberal anti-fascism to the text imply Roth’s unquestioned support for the moral and intellectual frameworks of contemporary liberal opposition to Trump. This article explores how Roth’s formal concerns
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Planet Auschwitz by Brian Crim (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-04-15 Michael Richardson
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Planet Auschwitz by Brian Crim Michael Richardson (bio) BRIAN CRIM, PLANET AUSCHWITZ. NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ: RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2020. 280 PP. In Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, the main character, a professor of “Hitler Studies,” replies to his daughter’s observation that Hitler was on television the previous night, “He’s
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Teaching Jewish American Literature ed. by Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-04-15 Eli Bromberg
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Teaching Jewish American Literature ed. by Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein Eli Bromberg (bio) ROBERTA ROSENBERG AND RACHEL RUBINSTEIN, ED. TEACHING JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE. NEW YORK: THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, 2020. 348 PP. In Teaching Jewish American Literature (TJAL), Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel
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The Converso's Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture by Dalia Kandiyoti (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-04-15 Katharine G. Trostel
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture by Dalia Kandiyoti Katharine G. Trostel (bio) DALIA KANDIYOTI. THE CONVERSO’S RETURN: CONVERSION AND SEPHARDI HISTORY IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND CULTURE. STANFORD, CA: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2020. VII–XIV, 311 PP. Dalia Kandiyoti’s
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“My Father’s Face”: Judaism, God, and Ritual Practice in Philip Roth’s Everyman, Indignation, and Nemesis Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Samuel J. Kessler
This article is about the occurrence and centrality of distinctly Jewish ideas and ritual practices in Philip Roth’s Nemesis (2010), Indignation (2008), and Everyman (2006). In these three novels, Roth constructed characters whose existential crises most often come during or when meditating upon moments of Jewish ritual or Jewish theological expression, and what emerges is that the when, where, and
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An “Ambiguously Menacing Predicament”: Reading The Plot Against America in the Age of Donald Trump Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Andy Connolly Cuny
This article offers a critical reassessment of the ways in which Philip Roth’ s The Plot Against America (2004) has been read in the era of Donald Trump. It questions how efforts to apply a politics of liberal anti-fascism to the text imply Roth’s unquestioned support for the moral and intellectual frameworks of contemporary liberal opposition to Trump. This article explores how Roth’s formal concerns
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“Un libro no convencional”: Communities of Response and Finding Jewishness in Alex Appella’s Writing Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Jessica L. Carr
This article analyzes Alex Appella’s art book published in Argentina in English as The János Book and in Spanish as Entonces el libro and Después de la carta, along with the reception of the book among “communities of response” in classrooms throughout Argentina through a program called the Biblioteca Ambulantes, or Traveling Libraries. I argue that Appella’s writing is multidirectional and nonlinear
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"Don't Be Hopeless, Kid": A Literary-Biographical Consideration of Isaac Bashevis Singer's First Years in New York, 1935–1937 Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2021-09-15 David Stromberg
Isaac Bashevis Singer arrived in New York on May 1, 1935, on a tourist visa—and spent the next two years finalizing his immigrant status while trying to advance the career he had begun to establish in Warsaw. Scholarly inquiries into Singer’s life, especially during this period, have historically based their claims on his autobiographical writing in Yiddish and English, as well as fictionalized versions
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Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky in McClure's Magazine: Race, Capitalism, and Jewish American Identity Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2021-09-15 Jonathan Barron
By situating The Rise of David Levinsky in its original 1913 magazine context, I recognize the ways in which Abraham Cahan set out to undermine the theories of race—and attendant ideas about Jewish identity—with which McClure’s and other American periodicals were obsessed. I argue that the novel appears to accept the premise that races exist while it also undermines a belief in racial inequality. In
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Traumatic Mapping and Generational Topographies in Amy Kurzweil's Flying Couch Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2021-09-15 Megan V. Reynolds
Amy Kurzweil’s graphic memoir Flying Couch demonstrates the lingering struggles the third generation of Holocaust survivors face in trying to understand their own identities. This article examines Flying Couch and Kurzweil’s struggles with her familial Holocaust trauma. Through the use of maps, Kurzweil examines her relationship to her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, and her mother, a member of
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"Eatmor Dairy": Ben Katchor's Genealogy of the Dairy Restaurant Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2021-09-15 Donald Weber
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: “Eatmor Dairy”: Ben Katchor’s Genealogy of the Dairy Restaurant Donald Weber (bio) BEN KATCHOR. THE DAIRY RESTAURANT. NEW YORK: SCHOCKEN, 2020. For Jews of a certain age who grew up in New York during the tail end of its Jewish gastronomic heyday—in my experience, the late 1950s through the ’70s—and who dream of sizzling potato pirogen
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Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930 by Dana Mihăilescu (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2021-09-15 Cristina Stanciu
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930 by Dana Mihăilescu Cristina Stanciu (bio) Dana Mihăilescu. Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930. LANHAM, MD: LEXINGTON BOOKS, 2018. How did people who faced various forms of suffering—from the pogroms in Eastern Europe to the legal and political discrimination
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New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literatures: Reading and Teaching ed. by Victoria Aarons and Holli Levitsky (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2021-09-15 Joe Kraus
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literatures: Reading and Teaching ed. by Victoria Aarons and Holli Levitsky Joe Kraus (bio) VICTORIA AARONS AND HOLLI LEVITSKY, EDS. NEW DIRECTIONS IN JEWISH AMERICAN AND HOLOCAUST LITERATURES: READING AND TEACHING. ALBANY: SUNY UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019. 348 PP. This ambitious
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The New Jewish American Literary Studies ed. by Victoria Aarons (review) Studies in American Jewish Literature Pub Date : 2021-09-15 Hilene Flanzbaum
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The New Jewish American Literary Studies ed. by Victoria Aarons Hilene Flanzbaum (bio) VICTORIA AARONS, ED. THE NEW JEWISH AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES. CAMBRIDGE: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019. In the title of this edited collection, The New Jewish American Literary Studies, only the meaning of the word “studies” does not