Languages Of Modern Jewish Cultures

This collection of essays brings to Jewish Language Studies the conceptual frameworks that have become increasingly important to Jewish Studies more generally: transnationalism, multiculturalism, globalization, hybrid cultures, multilingualism, and interlingual contexts. Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures collects work from prominent scholars in the field, bringing world literary and linguistic perspectives to generate distinctively new historical, cultural, theoretical, and scientific approaches to this topic of ongoing interest. Chapters of this edited volume consider from multiple angles the cultural politics of myths, fantasies, and anxieties of linguistic multiplicity in the history, cultures, folkways, and politics of global Jewry. Methodological range is as important to this project as linguistic range. Thus, in addition to approaches that highlight influence, borrowings, or acculturation, the volume represents those that highlight syncretism, the material conditions of Jewish life, and comparatist perspectives.

Jewish Languages in Historical Perspective is devoted to the diverse array of spoken and written language varieties that have been employed by Jews in the Diaspora from antiquity until the twenty-first century. It focuses on the following five key themes: Jewish languages in dialogue with sacred Jewish texts, Jewish languages in contact with the co-territorial non-Jewish languages, Jewish vernacular traditions, the status of Jewish languages in the twenty-first century, and theoretical issues relating to Jewish language research. This volume includes case studies on a wide range of Jewish languages both historical and modern and devotes attention to lesser known varieties such as Jewish Berber, Judeo-Italian, and Karaim in addition to the more familiar Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, and Ladino. "On top of Brill’s Journal of Jewish Languages and a number of recent publications providing systematic overviews of Jewish languages as well as related theoretical discussions, this volume is a valuable addition to the increasing interest in Jewish languages and linguistics." -Wout van Bekkum, Groningen, Bibliotheca Orientalis LXXVI 3-4 (2019)

What makes a great Jewish book? In fact, what makes a book "Jewish" in the first place? Ruth R. Wisse eloquently fields these questions in The Modern Jewish Canon, her compassionate, insightful guide to the finest Jewish literature of the twentieth century. From Isaac Babel to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elie Wiesel to Cynthia Ozick, Wisse's The Modern Jewish Canon is a book that every student of Jewish literature, and every reader of great fiction, will enjoy.

The phenomenal rise of Yiddish language and culture is one of the most interesting and colorful sagas of modern Jewish history. In this significant book, Dr. Goldsmith relates the growth of Yiddish to the explosion of Jewish literature, the surge of Zionism, and the popularity of Socialism that impacted upon the Jews of Europe, America, and Israel. Including a study of the major personalities associated with the first Yiddish Language Conference (1908, ) this is the first comprehensive work to explore a movement that affected the lives of millions of Jews before the Holocaust and continues to influence Jewish life throughout the world.

The Routledge Handbook to Contemporary Jewish Cultures explores the diversity of Jewish cultures and ways of investigating them, presenting the different methodologies, arguments and challenges within the discipline. Divided into themed sections, this book considers in turn: How the individual terms "Jewish" and "culture" are defined, looking at perspectives from Anthropology, Music, Literary Studies, Sociology, Religious Studies, History, Art History, and Film, Television, and New Media Studies. How Jewish cultures are theorized, looking at key themes regarding power, textuality, religion/secularity, memory, bodies, space and place, and networks. Case studies in contemporary Jewish cultures. With essays by leading scholars in Jewish culture, this book offers a clear overview of the field and offers exciting new directions for the future.

The vast majority of intellectual, religious, and national developments in modern Judaism revolve around the central idea of "Jewish culture." This book is the first synoptic view of these developments that organizes and relates them from this vantage point. The first Jewish modernization movements perceived culture as the defining trait of the outside alien social environment to which Jewry had to adapt. To be "cultured" was to be modern-European, as opposed to medieval-ghetto-Jewish. In short order, however, the Jewish religious legacy was redefined retrospectively as a historical "culture," with fateful consequences for the conception of Judaism as a human and not only a divinely mandated regime. The conception of Judaism-as-culture took two main forms: an integrative, vernacular Jewish culture that developed in tandem with the integration of Jews into the various nations of western-central Europe and America, and a national Hebrew culture which, though open to the inputs of modern European society, sought to develop a revitalized Jewish national identity that ultimately found expression in the revival of the Jewish homeland and the State of Israel. This is a large, complex story in which the author describes the contributions of Mendelssohn, Wessely, Krochmal, Zunz, the mainstream Zionist thinkers (especially Ahad Ha-Am, Bialik, and A.D. Gordon), Kook, Kaplan, and Dubnow to the formulation of the various versions of the modern Jewish cultural ideal.

This book deals with two remarkable events--the worldwide transformations of the Jews in the modern age and the revival of the ancient Hebrew language. It is a book about social and cultural history addressed not only to the professional historian, and a book about Jews addressed not only to Jewish readers. It tries to rethink a wide field of cultural phenomena and present the main ideas to the intelligent reader, or, better, present a "family picture" of related and contiguous ideas. Many names and details are mentioned, which may not all be familiar to the uninitiated; their function is to provide some concrete texture for this dramatic story, but the focus is on the story itself.

Is there such a thing as a distinctive Jewish literature? While definitions have been offered, none has been universally accepted. Modern Jewish literature lacks the basic markers of national literatures: it has neither a common geography nor a shared language—though works in Hebrew or Yiddish are almost certainly included—and the field is so diverse that it cannot be contained within the bounds of one literary category. Each of the fifteen essays collected in Modern Jewish Literatures takes on the above question by describing a movement across boundaries—between languages, cultures, genres, or spaces. Works in Hebrew and Yiddish are amply represented, but works in English, French, German, Italian, Ladino, and Russian are also considered. Topics range from the poetry of the Israeli nationalist Natan Alterman to the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam; from turn-of-the-century Ottoman Jewish journalism to wire-recorded Holocaust testimonies; from the intellectual salons of late eighteenth-century Berlin to the shelves of a Jewish bookstore in twentieth-century Los Angeles. The literary world described in Modern Jewish Literatures is demarcated chronologically by the Enlightenment, the Haskalah, and the French Revolution, on one end, and the fiftieth anniversary of the State of Israel on the other. The particular terms of the encounter between a Jewish past and present for modern Jews has varied greatly, by continent, country, or village, by language, and by social standing, among other things. What unites the subjects of these studies is not a common ethnic, religious, or cultural history but rather a shared endeavor to use literary production and writing in general as the laboratory in which to explore and represent Jewish experience in the modern world.