Matrilineal Dissent

Redefining Jewish American literature through expansive feminist frameworks.

While individual essays reveal literary discoveries of self and forgings of identity by women rising to the opportunities and challenges of drastically altered Jewish social realities, a significant number also show the sad decline of women writers upon whom silence was reimposed. Several chapters consider how Jewish women were depicted by male writers from the Middle Ages through the mid-nineteenth century.

The greatest American Jewish author of the nineteenth century, Emma Lazarus was a celebrated poet and humanitarian activist. This edition is a broad collection of her writings, including her essays, previously unpublished poems, her innovative late work, and, in its entirety, her most important book, Songs of a Semite (1882). Her best known poem, “The New Colossus” (the 1883 Statue of Liberty poem that made Lazarus a national icon), is also here, along with a selection of cultural documents that help contextualize her work in relation to contemporary debates about Jewish history, the Russian pogroms of the 1880s, the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, immigration, and antisemitism.

This is an indispensable resource about the role of Jewish women from post-biblical times to the twentieth century. Unique in its approach, it is structured so that each chapter, which is divided into three parts, covers a specific period and geographical area. The first section of the book contains an overview, explaining how historical events affected Jews in general and Jewish women in particular. This is followed by a section of biographical entries of women of the period whose lives are set in their economic, familial, and cultural backgrounds. The third and last part of each chapter, "The World of Jewish Women," is organized by topic and covers women's activities and interests and how Jewish laws concerning women developed and changed. This comprehensive work is an easy-to-use sourcebook, synopsizing rich and diverse resources. By examining history and analyzing the dynamics of Jewish law and custom, it illuminates the circumstances of Jewish women's lives and traces the changes that have occurred throughout the centuries. It casts a new and clear light on Jewish women as individuals and sets women firmly within the context of their own cultural and historical periods. The book contains illustrations, boxed text, extensive endnotes, and indices that list each woman by name. It is ideal for women's groups and study groups as well as students and scholars.

The first and only comprehensive collection of writings by Elizabeth Garver Jordan, the groundbreaking journalist, suffragist, and editor whose fearless reporting on women preceded the #MeToo movement and popularized the true-crime genre A Penguin Classic The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings is the first to collect Garver Jordan’s fiction and journalism, much of which has been out of print for over a century. Jordan began her career as a reporter, making her name as one of few women journalists to cover the Lizzie Borden murder trial for the New York World in 1893. Jordan’s distinctive, narrative-driven coverage of the Borden and other high-profile murder cases brought her national visibility, and she turned increasingly to fiction writing. Drawing on her experiences as a true-crime reporter and newspaper editor, she published detective novels and short story collections such as Tales of the City Room that explored the fine line between women’s criminality and crimes against women. Employing popular genre conventions as a means of dealing with women’s issues, Jordan exposed gendered abuse in the workplace and the prevalence of sexual violence. The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings encourages readers to draw a historical trajectory from Jordan’s pioneering literary activism to the writings of contemporary journalists and novelists whose work continues to fuel discussions of gender, feminism, and crime, raising questions about who gets to tell women’s stories, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

Instilled in interdisciplinary cross-cultural perspectives of mythical, socio-economic, literary, pedagogic and psychoanalytic representations, two archetypal, creative inheritance laws interact as ‘twins’: Eros (fusion/containment/safety) and Thanatos (division/separation/risk). Hypothesising these ‘twin’ laws as matrilineal (Eros) and patrilineal (Thanatos), this book explores why cross-cultural forms, including gender traits, are not fixed but are instead influenced by earlier flexible matrilineal forms. Through a study of ‘twins’ on macro and micro levels, Elizabeth Brodersen argues that a psychological ‘twin’ dilemma is implicit in inheritance laws and offers a unique forum to show how each law competes for primacy as the ‘first’ and ‘other’. Chapters begin by looking at ‘twins’ in creation myths and the historical background to the laws of inheritance, as well as literary representations. The book then moves on to the developmental structures imbued in twin research and educational systems to explore how past cultural forms have been re-defined to fit a modern landscape and the subsequent movement away from the importance of patrilineal primogeniture. Laws of Inheritance will be of key value to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, archetypal theory, cross-cultural depth psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology, gender studies and twin research. The book will also be of interest to practicing psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.