Books in the Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences series

This book explores the emergence of the fundamental political concepts of medieval Jewish thought, arguing that alongside the well-known theocratic elements of the Bible there exists a vital tradition that conceives of politics as a necessary and legitimate domain of worldly activity that preceded religious law in the ordering of society.

In the Russian Empire of the 1870s and 1880s, while intellectuals and politicians furiously debated the "e;Jewish Question,"e; more and more acculturating Jews, who dressed, spoke, and behaved like non-Jews, appeared in real life and in literature. This book examines stories about Jewish assimilation by four authors: Grigory Bogrov, a Russian Jew; Eliza Orzeszkowa, a Polish Catholic; and Nikolai Leskov and Anton Chekhov, both Eastern Orthodox Russians. Safran introduces the English-language reader to works that were much discussed in their own time, and she situates Jewish and non-Jewish writers together in the context they shared.For nineteenth-century writers and readers, successful fictional characters were "e;types,"e; literary creations that both mirrored and influenced the trajectories of real lives. Stories about Jewish assimilators and converts often juxtaposed two contrasting types: the sincere reformer or true convert who has experienced a complete transformation, and the secret recidivist or false convert whose real loyalties will never change. As Safran shows, writers borrowed these types from many sources, including the novel of education produced by the Jewish enlightenment movement (the Haskalah), the political rhetoric of "e;Positivist"e; Polish nationalism, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Slavic folk beliefs.Rewriting the Jew casts new light on the concept of type itself and on the question of whether literature can transfigure readers. The classic story of Jewish assimilation describes readers who redesign themselves after the model of fictional characters in secular texts. The writers studied here, though, examine attempts at Jewish self-transformation while wondering about the reformability of personality. In looking at their works, Safran relates the modern Eastern European Jewish experience to a fundamental question of aesthetics: Can art change us?

This book on culture and consciousness in history concerns the worldwide transformations of Jewish culture and society and the revival of the ancient Hebrew language following the waves of pogroms in Russia in 1881.

This is a selection of plays by the Israeli playwright and director Hanoch Levin. Levin's artistic credo was based on a constant urge to criticize Israeli society and its mainstream ideology while simultaneously confronting the basic human and existential issues of life and death.

This book explores the complex relations among the hegemonic triad of territory, nation, and national literature that have characterized the modern European nation-state. In the case of Hebrew literature, this triad was unattainable and its components fiercely contested, hence the literary field itself was responsible for shaping the nation, preceding the nation-state itself.

With a combination of erudition and insight, this work investigates the major aspects of Yiddish language and culture, showing where Yiddish came from and what it has to offer, even as it ceases to be a living language.

This work weaves its interpretation of Jewish culture in the Palestine of late antiquity on the warp of a singular rabbinic text "Lamentations Rabbah". The textual analyses that form the core of the book are informed by a range of theoretical paradigms rarely brought to bear on rabbinic literature.

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) traversed a long route from a boy in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, to a commissar of art in revolutionary Russia, to the position of a world-famous French artist. This book presents a comprehensive collection of Chagall's public statements on art and culture.

By examining literary allusion in Isaiah 40-66, the author illuminates the changes that led to the demise of biblical prophecy and the rise of hermeneutically based religions in the post-biblical era.

In this delightful book, the author enumerates and classifies the formulas Yiddish speakers use to express their emotions-from blessings and thanks to lamentations and curses. A rarity among scholarly books, it brings joy while it teaches; it makes us smile, sometimes roar with laughter, while it develops the most rigorous linguistic argumentation.

This is a detailed study of two intriguing figures in early rabbinic literature, shown to be products of the literary creativity of rabbinic storytellers who convey a particular ideology through the image of the rabbinic heroes they portray: Elisha ben Abuya, considered as apostate and sinner, and Eleazar ben Arach, known as the one who forgot his Torah.

It has often been said that rich pagan women, much more so than men, were attracted both to early Judaism and Christianity. This book provides a new reading of sources from which this truism springs, focusing on two texts from the turn of the first century, Josephus's Antiquities and Luke's Acts.

This book offers the first full-length English-language biography of Avraam Uri Kovner, a fascinating and peculiar Russian-Jewish writer and criminal who lived at the end of the nineteenth century. It is also an examination of Russo-Jewish identity in the modern period and of larger questions of hybridity and performativity.

This book offers a new perspective on the extensive rabbinic discussions of menstrual impurity, female physiology, and anatomy, and on the social and religious institutions those discussions engendered. It analyzes the functions of these discussions within the larger textual world of rabbinic literature and in the context of Jewish and Christian culture in late antiquity.

This book examines how the social and cultural paradigms of contemporary Israel are articulated through the body, constructing a panoramic view of how the Israeli body is chosen, regulated, cared for, and ultimately made perfect.