The act of defining, circumscribing, and demarcating has long been a principal activity of modern Jewish literary scholarship, yet the boundaries have proved elusive. While many definitions of Jewish literature have been offered, none has been universally accepted, and questions about who is and who is not a Jewish writer, what is and what is not a Jewish book, remain unsettled.¹ So vexed has the enterprise been, that Hana Wirth-Nesher has wondered whether the only thing that unifies the field is the question itself: What is Jewish literature?² Modern Jewish literature lacks the basic markers of national literatures: it has...

An article in the “Style and Entertaining” section of the New York Times Magazine, dated October 6, 2002, offers a glimpse of present-day New York. Titled “Whiskey à Go-Go,” it features Hope Atherton, a young and stylish woman, who has undertaken to “reinvent the salon.” “To understand why, as people say, ‘it’s all about’ Hope Atherton this season, let us try to explain how so-called New York society is constituted” (119), journalist William Norwich writes as he compares the social scenes of “uptown,” “downtown,” and everything “in between” to competitive athletics:

As in sports, nothing energizes a team like new...

In the summer of 1819, Joseph Salvador, then a young doctor in Paris, happened upon a newspaper account of a bloody attack on the Jews of a small town in Germany. The dispatch deeply affected him, especially the “war cry”—Hep! Hep!—uttered by the assailants. The author of the article had glossed Hep as an acronym for the Latin phrase Hierosolyma est perdita, which Salvador understood to mean “Jerusalem is forever annihilated.”¹ To judge by Salvador’s writing over the four decades following the incident, this threat of annihilation presented itself in psychic, no less than political and social, terms....

The entrance to the Trinity Church in the Kiev Cave Monastery is bordered by a peculiar eighteenth-century fresco, illustrating the above passage from the Gospel According to John. In case there is any doubt as to the saved and condemned in the scene, Jesus has a full face, reminiscent of the holy figures of Orthodox icons, whereas most of the moneychangers show only one eye, an iconographic symbol of evil.¹ The latter are depicted in swarthy baroque colors; their fleshy arms shield their heads and their spilling wares as they make haste to leave. What is striking about this particular...

By the turn of the twentieth century, the life of Ottoman Sephardim had undergone dramatic political, social, and cultural transformations as a result of modernizing and secularizing processes under way in the empire. Consequently, Ottoman Jewish identity had been redefined by a number of factors and had assumed a new form. Indisputably, the most significant factor was the Westernizing activity of European Jewry, particularly the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU). The Westernizing ideology introduced by the French Jews did not imply a rupture with the Jewish tradition, which is reflected in the curricula of the AIU schools, which attached great importance...

I. L. Peretz’s writing can be said to represent an entire literary corpus: the Hasidic writing of other modern writers of his time. Most of the prevailing studies dealing with Peretz’s literary and personal approach to the Hasidic heritage tend to stress the opposite, arguing that Peretz’s work is an anomaly and not to be read in conjunction with other writings in dialogue with Hasidism from the same period. Thus, the important and comprehensive studies of Shmuel Niger or Yehuda Friedlander place great emphasis on the claim that one ought to distinguish between the sincere neo-Hasidic romanticism characterizing the approach...

At the center of Sholem Aleichem’s voluminous and enduringly popular creativity stands his semi-mythical, semi-satirical shtetl, Kasrilevke. Although contemporary critical scrutiny has focused primarily on canonical works such as the Tevye monologues, the Menakhem-Mendl letters, and the adventures of Motl the Cantor Peyse’s son, the particular typology and topography of Sholem Aleichem’s central fictional locus has received comparatively little attention.¹ More generally, most modern commentators have concentrated on Sholem Aleichem’s most dynamic narratives, those works that dramatize a process of mobility and transformation to illustrate the momentum away from the shtetl and into the modern metropolis, whereas the Kasrilevke stories...

In the research on Zionism and Hebrew culture, it is common to posit a dichotomy between the Land of Israel and the Diaspora, between Hebrew culture and Yiddish culture.² The Eretz Israel identity crystallized in conscious antithesis to, and negation of, Jewish culture in the Diaspora. One of the icons of Hebrew culture was Joseph Hayyim Brenner (1881–1921). At the hour of crisis for Hebrew culture, when the language seemed to have no future, a rallying call came from foggy London, declaring: “We cannot do without writing Hebrew because the divine spark within us emanates naturally only from this...

The Hebrew poetry that flourished in America between the two world wars of the previous century can be understood in part as a struggle to negotiate the influence of Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky, the two great forces in Hebrew poetry at the turn of that century.¹ Unfolding at the same time in the emerging literary center in Palestine is a very different dynamic: an outright revolt against these two leonine precursors in the name of Russian and French symbolism and German expressionism. Yet for the Americans, who were brought up in the public schools on the flowers of...

Is there such a thing as “women’s poetry”? The Yiddish critics in the first half of the twentieth century thought so, and the women who wrote poetry in Yiddish in those years were constantly challenged as they tried to write against the parameters that their male contemporaries set. In this chapter, I will examine some assumptions held in the 1920s and 1930s about women poets in Yiddish and consider how these writers and their works fit into Yiddish literary tradition by concentrating on one of the most unusual of these poets, Celia Dropkin (1887–1956), whose erotic and explicitly sexual...

In “Thank God for His Daily Blessings,” Amos Oz describes a walk through Geulah, the neighborhood in Jerusalem where he grew up among Labor Zionists but that has since evolved into an ultraorthodox enclave: “The Orthodox Eastern European Jewish world continues as though nothing had happened, but the fathers of modern Hebrew literature, Mendele and Berdyczewski, Bialik, and Brenner and the others, would have banished this reality from the world around them and from within their souls. In an eruption of rebellion and loathing, they portrayed this world as a swamp, a heap of dead words and extinguished souls. They...

The Seventh Column comprises Natan Alterman’s main body of journalistic verse.¹ It was published regularly on Fridays as the seventh column of the second page of the widespread daily Davar from 1943 to 1967, and was avidly read and received. Dealing with all things public, large or small, written with brilliantly lucid poetic diction, deftly combining wit and pathos, seriousness and jest, empathy and humor, it earned Alterman unprecedented popularity and prestige among the Jewish population in pre-state Palestine (the Yishuv) and in the early decades of the Israeli state.

Alterman’s stance vis-à-vis the Diasporic Jew in The Seventh Column...

The choice of language among European Jews was never neutral. During the Holocaust, contention over languages intensified: idealistic calls for a return to Jewish languages competed with realistic defections to the vernacular. Speaking a flawless German, Polish, or Ukrainian, moreover, could help one escape the persecutor’s net. In the main arenas of terror, Jews forged their own tongues: coded communication in the ghetto, a fabricated jargon in the camps. In the war’s aftermath, language continued to be marked by these wartime struggles. Psychologist David Boder claimed that the victim’s postwar speech bore evidence of trauma, and this was one of...

Two early memories of my father’s bookstore, J. Roth / Bookseller of Fine & Scholarly Judaica, are a prologue of sorts for this essay. Here is the first: it is 1967, and I am six years old. My father, Jack Roth, is having an IBM computerized billing machine installed in the store. This is the first store, the one on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, which started out as M. Harelick Books, a small Yiddish-oriented bookshop that Michael Harelick opened in 1944 and that my father bought and is making over into a more sophisticated operation. He has just...

Circa 1990, the heyday of ethnic literary study. African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native Americans were all boldly claiming their place in the academy, demanding critical attention and respect for neglected literatures that they jealously claimed as their own. Canons were exploding everywhere, curricula were being challenged and rewritten, and faculties were being confounded and reconfigured.¹

The intellectual movement of ethnic literary studies in the last decade of the twentieth century was markedly centrifugal, away from an encroaching cultural mainstream, away from the phenomenon that Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, in the first decade of the century, called “The Melting-Pot.” The objectives...

In 1974, the Yiddish poet Malka Heifetz Tussman, born in Russia, living in California, published a small volume of poems in Israel. This peripatetic author’s text is paradigmatic of the cosmopolitan, multilingual nature of modern Jewish literature. The book, written by a woman who at various times was a Yiddish teacher, an anarchist, and a writer of Russian poetry and English essays, was titled Unter dayn tseykhn (Under your sign), and it is only one of the reasons she was awarded the Itsik Manger Prize for Yiddish Poetry in 1981. Like much of her poetry, the book enters into many...