The Lowercase Jew PDF Download

Author: Rodger Kamenetz
Publisher: TriQuarterly Books
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Table of contents

Author: Cynthia M. Baker
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813573866
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Jew. The word possesses an uncanny power to provoke and unsettle. For millennia, Jew has signified the consummate Other, a persistent fly in the ointment of Western civilization’s grand narratives and cultural projects. Only very recently, however, has Jew been reclaimed as a term of self-identification and pride. With these insights as a point of departure, this book offers a wide-ranging exploration of the key word Jew—a term that lies not only at the heart of Jewish experience, but indeed at the core of Western civilization. Examining scholarly debates about the origins and early meanings of Jew, Cynthia M. Baker interrogates categories like “ethnicity,” “race,” and “religion” that inevitably feature in attempts to define the word. Tracing the term’s evolution, she also illuminates its many contradictions, revealing how Jew has served as a marker of materialism and intellectualism, socialism and capitalism, worldly cosmopolitanism and clannish parochialism, chosen status, and accursed stigma. Baker proceeds to explore the complex challenges that attend the modern appropriation of Jew as a term of self-identification, with forays into Yiddish language and culture, as well as meditations on Jew-as-identity by contemporary public intellectuals. Finally, by tracing the phrase new Jews through a range of contexts—including the early Zionist movement, current debates about Muslim immigration to Europe, and recent sociological studies in the United States—the book provides a glimpse of what the word Jew is coming to mean in an era of Internet cultures, genetic sequencing, precarious nationalisms, and proliferating identities.

Author: Regine Rosenthal
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527562565
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Based on a medieval extrabiblical Christian legend, the figure of the Wandering Jew has long served as a negative representation of all Jews. Condemned by Christ to endless wandering and everlasting life, the Wandering Jew has lived on ever since in literature and criticism as a legendary and symbolic paradigm, ranging from anti-Jewish stereotype to the generalized cultural Other. While Romanticism took him outside of the Jewish context, nineteenth-century antisemitic racism again adopted the figure in an evolving discourse that culminated in his image in Nazi propaganda as the despicable, racialized cultural Other who needed to be exterminated. The present work takes up this trope in all its complex, intersecting facets and shifts the focus of the inquiry from the perspective of the dominant culture to that of the Jewish Other. Starting with nineteenth-century American popular and mainstream writers, it explores the responses to, and the subversions and reinventions of, the paradigmatic figure in works by a variety of European, Canadian, and American Jewish writers and thinkers. It also opens the discussion to the broader issues of contemporary society and politics, such as pervasive uprootedness, transborder migration, the plight of refugees, and states’ rights versus human rights.

Author: Jonathan Boyarin
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816627509
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Author: Rodger Kamenetz
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0307379337
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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From the acclaimed author of The Jew in the Lotus comes an "engrossing and wonderful book" (The Washington Times) about the unexpected connections between Franz Kafka and Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav—and the significant role played by the imagination in the Jewish spiritual experience. Rodger Kamenetz has long been fascinated by the mystical tales of the Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. And for many years he has taught a course in Prague on Franz Kafka. The more he thought about their lives and writings, the more aware he became of unexpected connections between them. Kafka was a secular artist fascinated by Jewish mysticism, and Rabbi Nachman was a religious mystic who used storytelling to reach out to secular Jews. Both men died close to age forty of tuberculosis. Both invented new forms of storytelling that explore the search for meaning in an illogical, unjust world. Both gained prominence with the posthumous publication of their writing. And both left strict instructions at the end of their lives that their unpublished books be burnt. Kamenetz takes his ideas on the road, traveling to Kafka’s birthplace in Prague and participating in the pilgrimage to Uman, the burial site of Rabbi Nachman visited by thousands of Jews every Jewish new year. He discusses the hallucinatory intensity of their visions and offers a rich analysis of Nachman’s and Kafka’s major works, revealing uncanny similarities in the inner lives of these two troubled and beloved figures, whose creative and religious struggles have much to teach us about the Jewish spiritual experience.

Author: Craig Raine
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199910421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the twentieth century's most famous poet and its most influential literary arbiter, T.S. Eliot has long been thought to be an obscure and difficult poet--forbiddingly learned, maddeningly enigmatic. Now, in this brilliant exploration of T.S. Eliot's work, prize-winning poet Craig Raine reveals that, on the contrary, Eliot's poetry (and drama and criticism) can be seen as a unified and coherent body of work. Indeed, despite its manifest originality, its radical experimentation, and its dazzling formal variety, his verse yields meaning just as surely as other more conventional poetry. Raine argues that an implicit controlling theme--the buried life, or the failure of feeling--unfolds in surprisingly varied ways throughout Eliot's work. But alongside Eliot's desire "to live with all intensity" was also a distrust of "violent emotion for its own sake." Raine illuminates this paradoxical Eliot--an exacting anti-romantic realist, skeptical of the emotions, yet incessantly troubled by the fear of emotional failure--through close readings of such poems as "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock," "Gerontion," The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and many others. The heart of the book contains extended analyses of Eliot's two master works--The Waste Land and Four Quartets. Raine also examines Eliot's criticism--including his coinage of such key literary terms as the objective correlative, dissociation of sensibility, the auditory imagination--and he concludes with a convincing refutation of charges that Eliot was an anti-Semite. Here then is a volume absolutely indispensable for all admirers of T.S. Eliot and, in fact, for everyone who loves modern literature.

Author: Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Publisher: Jewish Lights Publishing
ISBN: 158023691X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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A how-to for Jewish spirituality that works. "A spiritual seeker is a person whose soul is awake. In this book I make no assumptions about how much you know about Judaism, what holidays you keep, or whether you believe in God. I want us to start from your soul's experience and carry on from there." --from the Introduction "Virtually anyone remotely affiliated with Judaism should read this book," wrote Publishers Weekly, which listed Jewish with Feeling among its Best Religion Books of the Year. "Without question the best, most readable introduction to Reb Zalman's philosophy of Judaism, it is also the best beginner's guide to Jewish spirituality available today," wrote the Forward, "the perfect book for both the spiritual seeker and the curious skeptic." Taking off from basic questions like "Why be Jewish?" and whether the word God still speaks to us today, Reb Zalman lays out a vision for a whole-person Judaism. This is not only Sinai then but Sinai now, a revelation of the Torah inside and all around us. Complete with many practical suggestions to enrich your own Jewish life, Jewish with Feeling is "a mystical masterpiece filled with spiritual practices and an exciting vision of the future" (Spirituality & Health). Spiritual experience, as Reb Zalman shows, repays every effort we make to acquire it.

Author: Theodore Ross
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0142180394
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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“I was nine years old when my mother forced me to convert to Christianity….” When Theodore Ross moved from New York City to small-town Mississippi, his mother insisted that the family pretend to not be Jewish. He was sent to an Episcopal school, where he studied the Bible, sang in the choir, and even took communion. As an adult, he abandoned the religious charade, but wondered: Am I a Jew? In search of an answer, Ross immersed himself within communities on the fringes of Jewish identity—“Crypto-Jews,” “Lost Tribes,” the ultra-Orthodox, and more. Filled with humor, curiosity, and sincerity, Am I a Jew? explores America’s riotous religious diversity, and one man’s quest to stake a claim within it.

Author: Jacob P. B. Mortensen
Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
ISBN: 3772000754
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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This exciting new interpretation of Pauls Letter to the Romans approaches Pauls most famous letter from one of the newest scholarly positions within Pauline Studies: The Radical New Perspective on Paul (also known as Paul within Judaism). As a point of departure, the author takes Pauls self-designation in 11:13 as apostle to the gentiles as so determining for Pauls mission that the audience of the letter is perceived to be exclusively gentile. The study finds confirmation of this reading-strategy in the letters construction of the interlocutor from chapter 2 onwards. Even in 2:17, where Paul describes the interlocutor as someone who calls himself a Jew, it requests to perceive this person as a gentile who presents himself as a Jew and not an ethnic Jew. If the interlocutor is perceived in this way throughout the letter, the dialogue between Paul and the interlocutor can be perceived as a continuous, unified and developing dialogue. In this way, this interpretation of Romans sketches out a position against a more disparate and fragmentary interpretation of Romans.

Author: Rodger Kamenetz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781877770579
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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