Books by Sander L. Gilman

A timely, cogent exploration of how COVID-19 has caused predudice and xenophobia.

Focuses on great authors who have by birth or choice (or both) found themselves outside the mainstream of their culture but who have still wished to address it: Goethe, Freud, Wilde, Heine, Nietzsche, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, among others. This title reveals their efforts to come to terms with their real or imagined sense of difference.

The humanities in higher education are too often labeled as impractical and are not usually valued in today's marketplace

Explores the questions and doubts surrounding the revitalisation of Jewish life in Germany since the fall of the Wall. The volume includes topics such as the social and institutional role of Jews; the role of religion in daily life; and gender and culture in post-Wall Jewish writing.

In an era of attacks on the humanities by the right ("Goethe is not taught anymore!") and the left ("Why teach dead white males?"), a distinguished teacher and scholar presents a series of closely interconnected exercises in understanding the present state and future possibilities of the humanities.

A pioneering interdisciplinary scholar examines the roles of images in the construction of stereotypes of the Jew's body in 20th-century art and literature.

Sander Gilman's story of Jurek Becker provides a portrait of an extraordinarily gifted artist whose hope and courage are manifested in his legacy as one of the greatest German writers of the past century.

A Jew in a violently anti-Semitic world, Sigmund Freud was forced to cope with racism even in the 'serious' medical literature of the fin de siecle, which described Jews as inherently pathological and sexually degenerate. This book argues that Freud's internalizing of these images of racial difference shaped the questions of psychoanalysis.

The fat man - a cultural icon, a social enigma, a pressing medical issue - is the subject of this remarkably rich book. The figures that Sander L. Gilman considers, from the ugly fat man with the beautiful sylph trapped inside to the smart fat boy to the aging body desirous of rejuvenation, appear and reappear in different guises throughout Western culture.

Nose reconstructions have been common in India for centuries. South Korea, Brazil, and Israel have become international centers for procedures ranging from eyelid restructuring to buttock lifts and tummy tucks. Argentina has the highest rate of silicone implants in the world. Around the globe, aesthetic surgery has become a cultural and medical fixture. Sander Gilman seeks to explain why by presenting the first systematic world history and cultural theory of aesthetic surgery. Touching on subjects as diverse as getting a "e;nose job"e; as a sweet-sixteen birthday present and the removal of male breasts in seventh-century Alexandria, Gilman argues that aesthetic surgery has such universal appeal because it helps people to "e;pass,"e; to be seen as a member of a group with which they want to or need to identify. Gilman begins by addressing basic questions about the history of aesthetic surgery. What surgical procedures have been performed? Which are considered aesthetic and why? Who are the patients? What is the place of aesthetic surgery in modern culture? He then turns his attention to that focus of countless human anxieties: the nose. Gilman discusses how people have reshaped their noses to repair the ravages of war and disease (principally syphilis), to match prevailing ideas of beauty, and to avoid association with negative images of the "e;Jew,"e; the "e;Irish,"e; the "e;Oriental,"e; or the "e;Black."e; He examines how we have used aesthetic surgery on almost every conceivable part of the body to try to pass as younger, stronger, thinner, and more erotic. Gilman also explores some of the extremes of surgery as personal transformation, discussing transgender surgery, adult circumcision and foreskin restoration, the enhancement of dueling scars, and even a performance artist who had herself altered to resemble the Mona Lisa. The book draws on an extraordinary range of sources. Gilman is as comfortable discussing Nietzsche, Yeats, and Darwin as he is grisly medical details, Michael Jackson, and Barbra Streisand's decision to keep her own nose. The book contains dozens of arresting images of people before, during, and after surgery. This is a profound, provocative, and engaging study of how humans have sought to change their lives by transforming their bodies.