Modern Jewish Women Writers In America

This collection includes groundbreaking essays, and interviews with scholars and writers which reveal that despite pressures of assimilation, personal goals, and in some cases, anti-Semitism, they have never been able to divorce their lives or literature from their heritage.

The essays in this book focus on a wide and representative variety of Jewish American women writers, including Cynthia Ozick, Anne Roiphe, Erica Jong, Pauline Kael, Allegra Goodman, Norma Rosen, Adrienne Rich, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, and others. In every instance the contributors have tried to deal not only with the Jewish content of their work but also with its literary quality and other major themes.

This anthology of scholarship on Jewish women writers is the first to focus on what it is to be a woman and a Jew and to explore how the two identities variously support and oppose each other. The collection is part of a growing scholarship that reflects the enormous output of writing by Jewish women since the second wave of the women's movement in the 1970s.

Explores the universal longing for home, illuminated through the essays, poetry, and fiction of forty Jewish women writers from around the world.

Even among scholars of Jewish literature, Jewish American women writers have been largely neglected. Nevertheless, these women have made an enormous contribution to literature and culture. This reference explores the extraordinary achievement of Jewish American women novelists, poets, and playwrights who have written in English. Every effort was made to provide a representative selection of writers, and the final list was determined after consultation with specialists and scholars. The volume is composed mainly of entries arranged alphabetically by writer. Many of these women have an indisputable place in the literary canon, while others are relative newcomers to the field. Still others are being rediscovered after years of neglect. The profiles provide a biography, bibliography, and survey of criticism for each author. Each also provides an analysis of the writer's work by a scholar in Jewish American literature, women's studies, or a related field. An introductory essay defines the scope of Jewish American women's literature, while a special chapter is devoted to writers of autobiographies who document the experience of Jewish women in America.

Between 1830 and 1880, the Jewish community flourished in England. During this time, known as haskalah, or the Anglo-Jewish Enlightenment, Jewish women in England became the first Jewish women anywhere to publish novels, histories, periodicals, theological tracts, and conduct manuals. The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer analyzes this critical but forgotten period in the development of Jewish women's writing in relation to Victorian literary history, women's cultural history, and Jewish cultural history. Michael Galchinsky demonstrates that these women writers were the most widely recognized spokespersons for the haskalah. Their romances, some of which sold as well as novels by Dickens, argued for Jew's emancipation in the Victorian world and women's emancipation in the Jewish world.

Groundbreaking anthology that explores the intersections of Jewish and LAtin American cultures through the varies styles and perspective of gifted women writers.

For Norma Rosen, the Holocaust is the central event of the twentieth century. In this book, she examines the relationship of post-Holocaust writers to their work in terms of subject, language, imagery, and facing up to the task of writing in a post-Holocaust era. She considers the work of such major influences on our time as T. S. Eliot, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, E. L. Doctorow, Norman Mailer, Eugenio Montale, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow. Accidents of Influence combines critical analysis with personal response and autobiographical moments. It includes quotidian encounters in friendship, sex, society, art, politics, response to violence, and religious observance, which struggle for moral ground in this post-Holocaust era.