The Wandering Who

An investigation of Jewish identity politics and Jewish contemporary ideology using both popular culture and scholarly texts. Jewish identity is tied up with some of the most difficult and contentious issues of today. The purpose in this book is to open many of these issues up for discussion. Since Israel defines itself openly as the ‘Jewish State’, we should ask what the notions of ’Judaism’, ‘Jewishness’, ‘Jewish culture’ and ‘Jewish ideology’ stand for. Gilad examines the tribal aspects embedded in Jewish secular discourse, both Zionist and anti Zionist; the ‘holocaust religion’; the meaning of ‘history’ and ‘time’ within the Jewish political discourse; the anti-Gentile ideologies entangled within different forms of secular Jewish political discourse and even within the Jewish left. He questions what it is that leads Diaspora Jews to identify themselves with Israel and affiliate with its politics. The devastating state of our world affairs raises an immediate demand for a conceptual shift in our intellectual and philosophical attitude towards politics, identity politics and history.

An investigation of Jewish identity politics and Jewish contemporary ideology using both popular culture and scholarly texts. Jewish identity is tied up with some of the most difficult and contentious issues of today. The purpose in this book is to open many of these issues up for discussion. Since Israel defines itself openly as the e~Jewish Statee(tm), we should ask what the notions of e(tm)Judaisme(tm), e~Jewishnesse(tm), e~Jewish culturee(tm) and e~Jewish ideologye(tm) stand for. Gilad examines the tribal aspects embedded in Jewish secular discourse, both Zionist and anti Zionist; the e~holocaust religione(tm); the meaning of e~historye(tm) and e~timee(tm) within the Jewish political discourse; the anti-Gentile ideologies entangled within different forms of secular Jewish political discourse and even within the Jewish left. He questions what it is that leads Diaspora Jews to identify themselves with Israel and affiliate with its politics. The devastating state of our world affairs raises an immediate demand for a conceptual shift in our intellectual and philosophical attitude towards politics, identity politics and history.

*The most unusual novel you will read all year, where you create your own story* 'An ingenious choose-your-own-adventure challenge' Lauren Elkin, Guardian Longlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize You've grown roots, you're gathering moss. You're desperate to escape your boring life teaching English in Jakarta, to go out and see the world. So you make a Faustian pact with a devil, who gives you a gift, and a warning. A pair of red shoes to take you wherever you want to go. Turn the page and make your choice. You may become a tourist or an undocumented migrant, a mother or a murderer, and you will meet other travellers with their own stories to tell. Freedom awaits but borders are real. And no story is ever new. 'Sets you free to roam the Earth... an incisive commentary on the cosmopolitan condition' Tiffany Tsao 'An electrifying novel about cosmopolitanism and global nomadism that keeps readers on their toes' Book Riot Winner of an English PEN Translates Award, and a Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America

"A Jewish Yankee journeys through the American South to explore the lesser-known Jewish culture, music, food, and history of the region; she engages with the civil rights movement and legacy of the Civil War and reckons with a changed perspective on her place in American history."

While Jews figure in the work of many modern Latin American writers, the questions of how and to what end they are represented have received remarkably little critical attention. Helping to correct this imbalance, Erin Graff Zivin traces the symbolic presence of Jews and Jewishness in late-nineteenth- through late-twentieth-century literary works from Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, and Nicaragua. Ultimately, Graff Zivin’s investigation of representations of Jewishness reveals a broader, more complex anxiety surrounding difference in modern Latin American culture. In her readings of Spanish American and Brazilian fiction, Graff Zivin highlights inventions of Jewishness in which the concept is constructed as a rhetorical device. She argues that Jewishness functions as a wandering signifier that while not wholly empty, can be infused with meaning based on the demands of the textual project in question. Just as Jews in Latin America possess distinct histories relative to their European and North American counterparts, they also occupy different symbolic spaces in the cultural landscape. Graff Zivin suggests that in Latin American fiction, anxiety, desire, paranoia, attraction, and repulsion toward Jewishness are always either in tension with or representative of larger attitudes toward otherness, whether racial, sexual, religious, national, economic, or metaphysical. She concludes The Wandering Signifier with an inquiry into whether it is possible to ethically represent the other within the literary text, or whether the act of representation necessarily involves the objectification of the other.

A walking journey through France's vast interior becomes a meditation on both personal recovery and the role of history in the present--more than 425,000 copies sold in France After a free-climbing accident lands him in a coma and a hospital for four months, the French writer Sylvain Tesson makes a promise to himself: if he's ever able to walk again, he will traverse the entire country of France on foot. Part literary adventure, part philosophical reflection on our contemporary consumer culture, On the Wandering Paths takes us deep into the heart of what Tesson terms France's "hyperrural" zones. Tracing the obscure paths peasants once followed throughout the countryside, Tesson embarks on a three-month journey of solitude and personal contemplation as he walks along vast stretches of mountain ranges and rivers, encountering ancient Roman stone bridges and walkways, the French Foreign Legion, pagan prayer sites, Provençal villages, and the majestic Mont-Saint-Michel. Connecting deeply with the places he visits, his experiences inspire reflection on the essential need to disengage from the digital and immerse oneself in natural beauty. Rich with humor, historical insight, and literary power, On the Wandering Paths is both a meditation on the act of recovery and a potent recognition of the traces of our past in the present. Asking us to reassess our values and our relationship to the land, Tesson's exquisite chronicle through landscapes that continue to resist urbanization and technology is a thoughtful--and thought-provoking--glimpse into a poet's adventurous life. Les Chemins de Pierre, a film based on the book starring Jean Dujardin, is due to release in 2022.

Corballis argues that mind-wandering has many constructive and adaptive features. These range from mental time travel?the wandering back and forth through time, not only to plan our futures based on past experience, but also to generate a continuous sense of who we are--to the ability to inhabit the minds of others, increasing empathy and social understanding. Through mind-wandering, we invent, tell stories, and expand our mental horizons. Mind wandering , hardly the sign of a faulty network or aimless distraction, actually underwrites creativity, whether as a Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud, or an Einstein imagining himself travelling on a beam of light. Corballis takes readers on a mental journey in chapters that can be savored piecemeal, as the minds of readers wander in different ways, and sometimes have limited attentional capacity.