[PDF] Eastern European Jewish American Narratives 1890 1930 eBook

Author : Dana Mihailescu
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 26,2 MB
Release : 2018-06-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1498563902

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The compelling argument of Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930: Struggles for Recognition is that narratives of Eastern European Jewish Americans are important discourses offering a response to America’s norms of assimilation, rationalized progress, and control in the early twentieth century under the guise of commitment to the specificity of individual experiences. The book sheds light on how these texts suggest an alternative ethical agency which encompasses both mainstream and minority practices, and which capitalizes on the need of keeping alive individual responsibility and vulnerability as the only means to actually create a democratic culture. In that, this book opens up novel areas of inquiry and research for both the academic world and the social and cultural fields, facilitating the rediscovery of long-neglected Eastern European Jewish American writers and the rethinking of the more familiar authors addressed.

Author : Debora Cordeiro Rosa
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 32,92 MB
Release : 2012-04-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0739172980

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The Jewish presence in Latin America has produced a remarkable body of literature that gives voice to the fascinating experience of Jews in Latin American lands. This book explores how trauma and memory influence the formation of Jewish identity for the fictional Jewish characters of five novels written by Jewish authors born in the Southern Cone.

Author : Hasia R. Diner
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 476 pages
File Size : 38,90 MB
Release : 2006-05-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0520248481

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Annotation A history of Jews in American that is informed by the constant process of negotiation undertaken by ordinary Jews in their communities who wanted at one and the same time to be good Jews and full Americans.

Author : Aaron Tillman
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 159 pages
File Size : 36,48 MB
Release : 2017-11-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1498565034

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Efforts to describe contemporary Jewish American identities often reveal more questions than concrete articulations, more statements about what Jewish Americans are not than what they are. Highlighting the paradoxical phrasings that surface in contemporary writings about Jewish American literature and culture—language that speaks to the elusive difference felt by many Jewish Americans—Aaron Tillman asks how we portray identities and differences that seem to resist concrete definition. Over the course of Magical American Jew, Tillman examines this enigma—the indefinite yet undeniable difference that informs contemporary Jewish American identity—demonstrating how certain writers and filmmakers have deployed magical realist techniques to illustrate the enigmatic difference that Jewish Americans have felt and continue to feel. Similar to the indeterminate nature of Jewish American identity, magical realism is marked by paradox and does not fit easily into any singular category. Often characterized as a mode of literary expression, rather than a genre within literature, magical realism has been the subject of debates about definition, origin, and application. After elucidating the features of the mode, Tillman illustrates how it enables uniquely cogent portrayals of enigmatic elements of difference. Concentrating on a diverse selection of Jewish American short fiction and film—including works by Woody Allen, Sarah Silverman, Cynthia Ozick, Nathan Englander, Steve Stern, and Melvin Jules Bukiet— Magical American Jew covers a range of subjects, from archiving Holocaust testimony to satirical Jewish American humor. Shedding light on aspects of media, marginalization, excess, and many other facets of contemporary American society, the study concludes by addressing the ways that the magical realist mode has been and can be used to examine U.S. ethnic literatures more broadly.

Author : Mary Antin
Publisher : Read Books Ltd
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 33,90 MB
Release : 2018-08-31
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1528781554

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This compelling autobiography narrates the story of immigration rights activist Mary Antin, and her enlightening journey from early life in Russia to her migration and Americanisation in late nineteenth-century USA. The Promised Land is an introspective first-hand account of life as a Jewish American immigrant. Mary Antin was just 12-years-old when she arrived in Boston with her family and she underwent a great deal of change and development before she could call the USA her home. Antin’s autobiography details how the young Jewish girl escaped Czarist Russia and adapted to an entirely new culture and lifestyle. Antin explores her memories of public school and accompanies powerful historical context with hard-hitting political commentary. The Promised Land is one person’s story, but speaks for the millions who have had all too similar experiences. This gripping volume includes fascinating chapters such as: - Children of the Law - Daily Bread - The Exodus - The Initiation - ‘My Country’ - A Child’s Paradise Now in a new edition, Read & Co. Books have republished this illuminating autobiography for a new generation of readers. The Promised Land is a great read for those interested in the history of immigration rights and for fans of Mary Antin’s work.

Author : Hasia R. Diner
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 24,29 MB
Release : 2002-03-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691095455

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Manhattan's Lower East Side stands for Jewish experience in America. With the possible exception of African-Americans and Harlem, no ethnic group has been so thoroughly understood and imagined through a particular chunk of space. Despite the fact that most American Jews have never set foot there--and many come from families that did not immigrate through New York much less reside on Hester or Delancey Street--the Lower East Side is firm in their collective memory. Whether they have been there or not, people reminisce about the Lower East Side as the place where life pulsated, bread tasted better, relationships were richer, tradition thrived, and passions flared. This was not always so. During the years now fondly recalled (1880-1930), the neighborhood was only occasionally called the Lower East Side. Though largely populated by Jews from Eastern Europe, it was not ethnically or even religiously homogenous. The tenements, grinding poverty, sweatshops, and packs of roaming children were considered the stuff of social work, not nostalgia and romance. To learn when and why this dark warren of pushcart-lined streets became an icon, Hasia Diner follows a wide trail of high and popular culture. She examines children's stories, novels, movies, museum exhibits, television shows, summer-camp reenactments, walking tours, consumer catalogues, and photos hung on deli walls far from Manhattan. Diner finds that it was after World War II when the Lower East Side was enshrined as the place through which Jews passed from European oppression to the promised land of America. The space became sacred at a time when Jews were simultaneously absorbing the enormity of the Holocaust and finding acceptance and opportunity in an increasingly liberal United States. Particularly after 1960, the Lower East Side gave often secularized and suburban Jews a biblical, yet distinctly American story about who they were and how they got here. Displaying the author's own fondness for the Lower East Side of story books, combined with a commitment to historical truth, Lower East Side Memories is an insightful account of one of our most famous neighborhoods and its power to shape identity.

Author : Amy K. Milligan
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 141 pages
File Size : 20,65 MB
Release : 2018-12-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1498595804

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Jewish Bodylore: Feminist and Queer Ethnographies of Folk Practices explores the Jewish body and its symbology as a space for identity communication, applying the tools of bodylore (the folkloric study of the body) to the Jewish body in ways that are in line both with feminist and queer theory. The text centers a feminist folkloric approach to embodiment while simultaneously recognizing its overlaps with the study of Jewish bodies and symbols. It investigates Jewish embodiment with a keen eye to that which breaks from tradition. Consideration is given to the ways in which bodies intersect with time and space in the synagogue, within religious movements, in secular culture, and in childhood ritual. Representing a unique approach to contemporary Jewish Studies, this book argues that Jewish bodies and the intersections they represent are at the core of understanding the contemporary Jewish experience. Rather than abandoning or dismissing Judaism, many contemporary Jews use their bodies as a canvas, claiming space for themselves, demonstrating a deliberate and calculated navigation of Jewish law, and engaging a traditionally patriarchal symbol set which, in its feminist use, amplifies their voices in a context which might otherwise silence them. Through these actions and choices, contemporary Jews demonstrate a nuanced understanding of their public identities as gendered and sexed bodies and a commitment to working towards increased inclusivity within the larger Jewish and secular communities. In the end, this book is a foray into the world of Jewish bodies, how they can be conceptualized using folkloristics, and how feminist methodologies of the body can be applied fairly to Jewish bodies, celebrating the multitude of ways in which the body can be conceptualized and experienced.

Author : Abraham Cahan
Publisher : Courier Corporation
Page : 394 pages
File Size : 40,17 MB
Release : 2013-03-21
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0486146359

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A young Hasidic Jew seeks his fortune in New York's Lower East Side. He turns from his religious studies to focus on the business world, where he discovers the high price of assimilation.

Author : Sandra McGee Deutsch
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 397 pages
File Size : 32,78 MB
Release : 2010-07-13
Category : History
ISBN : 0822392607

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In Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation, Sandra McGee Deutsch brings to light the powerful presence and influence of Jewish women in Argentina. The country has the largest Jewish community in Latin America and the third largest in the Western Hemisphere as a result of large-scale migration of Jewish people from European and Mediterranean countries from the 1880s through the Second World War. During this period, Argentina experienced multiple waves of political and cultural change, including liberalism, nacionalismo, and Peronism. Although Argentine liberalism stressed universal secular education, immigration, and individual mobility and freedom, women were denied basic citizenship rights, and sometimes Jews were cast as outsiders, especially during the era of right-wing nacionalismo. Deutsch’s research fills a gap by revealing the ways that Argentine Jewish women negotiated their own plural identities and in the process participated in and contributed to Argentina’s liberal project to create a more just society. Drawing on extensive archival research and original oral histories, Deutsch tells the stories of individual women, relating their sentiments and experiences as both insiders and outsiders to state formation, transnationalism, and cultural, political, ethnic, and gender borders in Argentine history. As agricultural pioneers and film stars, human rights activists and teachers, mothers and doctors, Argentine Jewish women led wide-ranging and multifaceted lives. Their community involvement—including building libraries and secular schools, and opposing global fascism in the 1930s and 1940s—directly contributed to the cultural and political lifeblood of a changing Argentina. Despite their marginalization as members of an ethnic minority and as women, Argentine Jewish women formed communal bonds, carved out their own place in society, and ultimately shaped Argentina’s changing pluralistic culture through their creativity and work.