Splendor Decline And Rediscovery Of Yiddish In Latin America

Splendor, Decline, and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America explores the history and legacy of the language and its speakers from the late 19th century onward, in a region where Yiddish culture has been neglected by mainstream scholarship.

"Shandler takes a wide-ranging look at Yiddish culture, including language learning, literary translation, performance, and material culture. He examines children's books, board games, summer camps, klezmer music, cultural festivals, language clubs, Web sites, cartoons, and collectibles - all touchstones of the meaning of Yiddish as it enters its second millennium. Rather than mourn the language's demise, Adventures in Yiddishland calls for taking an expansive approach to the possibilities for the future of Yiddish. Shandler's conceptualization of postvernacularity sheds important new light on contemporary Jewish culture generally and offers insights into theorizing the relation between language and culture."--BOOK JACKET.

Alan Astro's pioneering collection of Latin American Yiddish writings translated into English includes works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, Colombia, and Cuba. Literature has always served as a refuge for Yiddish speakers, and the Yiddish literature of Latin America reflects the writers' assertions of their political rights. Stories depicting working-class life in Buenos Aires by José Rabinovich and Samuel Rollansky evoke the works of Abraham Cahan and Henry Roth. Rosa Palatnik in Rio de Janeiro, Abraham Weisbaum in Mexico City, José Goldchain in Santiago de Chile, and Salomón Zytner in Montevideo satirize bourgeois aspirations among Jews distancing themselves from their modest backgrounds--one of Philip Roth's major themes. Abraham Josef Dubelman and Aaron Zeitlin in Cuba ponder possible links to the crypto-Jews who came to the New World to escape the Inquisition. Themes of identity permeate Latin American Yiddish writing, and the works featured in this anthology provide a glimpse into Jewish life and culture throughout Latin America. As Ilan Stavans notes in the introduction, "This anthology documents that Yiddish--or, in one of its Spanish spellings, idish--also flourished in Latin America, leaving behind powerfully artistic testaments."

Mara H. Benjamin contends that the physical and psychological work of caring for children presents theologically fruitful but largely unexplored terrain for feminists. Attending to the constant, concrete, and urgent needs of children, she argues, necessitates engaging with profound questions concerning the responsible use of power in unequal relationships, the transformative influence of love, human fragility and vulnerability, and the embeddedness of self in relationships and obligations. Viewing child-rearing as an embodied practice, Benjamin's theological reflection invites a profound reengagement with Jewish sources from the Talmud to modern Jewish philosophy. Her contemporary feminist stance forges a convergence between Jewish theological anthropology and the demands of parental caregiving.

The popular image of Scotland is dominated by widely recognized elements of Celtic culture. But a significant non–Celtic influence on Scotland’s history has been largely ignored for centuries? This book argues that much of Scotland’s history and culture from 1100 forward is Jewish. The authors provide evidence that many of the national heroes, villains, rulers, nobles, traders, merchants, bishops, guild members, burgesses, and ministers of Scotland were of Jewish descent, their ancestors originating in France and Spain. Much of the traditional historical account of Scotland, it is proposed, rests on fundamental interpretive errors, perpetuated in order to affirm Scotland’s identity as a Celtic, Christian society. A more accurate and profound understanding of Scottish history has thus been buried. The authors’ wide-ranging research includes examination of census records, archaeological artifacts, castle carvings, cemetery inscriptions, religious seals, coinage, burgess and guild member rolls, noble genealogies, family crests, portraiture, and geographic place names.

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture reflects current approaches to Holocaust literature that open up future thinking on Holocaust representation. The chapters consider diverse generational perspectives—survivor writing, second and third generation—and genres—memoirs, poetry, novels, graphic narratives, films, video-testimonies, and other forms of literary and cultural expression. In turn, these perspectives create interactions among generations, genres, temporalities, and cultural contexts. The volume also participates in the ongoing project of responding to and talking through moments of rupture and incompletion that represent an opportunity to contribute to the making of meaning through the continuation of narratives of the past. As such, the chapters in this volume pose options for reading Holocaust texts, offering openings for further discussion and exploration. The inquiring body of interpretive scholarship responding to the Shoah becomes itself a story, a narrative that materially extends our inquiry into that history.

This volume offers a thorough introduction to Jewish world literatures in Spanish and Portuguese, which not only addresses the coexistence of cultures, but also the functions of a literary and linguistic space of negotiation in this context. From the Middle Ages to present day, the compendium explores the main Jewish chapters within Spanish- and Portuguese-language world literature, whether from Europe, Latin America, or other parts of the world. No comprehensive survey of this area has been undertaken so far. Yet only a broad focus of this kind can show how diasporic Jewish literatures have been (and are ) – while closely tied to their own traditions – deeply intertwined with local and global literary developments; and how the aesthetic praxis they introduced played a decisive, formative role in the history of literature. With this epistemic claim, the volume aims at steering clear of isolationist approaches to Jewish literatures.