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This collection of academic essays have been written in tribute to Professor Zev Garber, and are divided to reflect the areas in which Professor Garber has devoted his teaching and writing energies: the Holocaust, Jewish-Christian relations, philosophy and theology, history and biblical interpretation.
Tracing Germany's significance as an essential crossroads and incubator for modern Jewish culture
Charlotte Salomon's (1917-43) fantastical autobiography, Life? or Theater?, consists of 769 sequenced gouache paintings, through which the artist imagined the circumstances of the eight suicides in her family, all but one of them women. But Salomon's focus on suicide was not merely a familial idiosyncrasy. Nothing Happened argues that the social history of early-twentieth-century Germany has elided an important cultural and social phenomenon by not including the story of German Jewish women and suicide. This absence in social history mirrors an even larger gap in the intellectual history of deeply gendered suicide studies that have reproduced the notion of women's suicide as a rarity in history. Nothing Happened is a historiographic intervention that operates in conversation and in tension with contemporary theory about trauma and the reconstruction of emotion in history.
In 1896, a young Genevan medium named Hélène Smith perceived in trance the following words from a Martian inhabitant: "michma michtmon mimini thouainenm mimatchineg." Those attending her séance dutifully transcribed these words and the event marked the beginning of a series of occult experiences that transported her to the red planet. In her state of trance, Smith came to produce foreign conversations, a new alphabet, and paintings of the Martian surroundings that captured the popular and scientific imagination of Geneva. Alongside her Martian travels, she also retrieved memories of her past lives as a fifteenth-century "Hindoo" princess and as Queen Marie Antoinette. Today, Smith's séan...
In the half-century before Poland’s long-awaited political independence in 1918, anxiety surrounding the country’s burgeoning sex industry fueled nearly constant public debate. The Devil’s Chain is the first book to examine the world of commercial sex throughout the partitioned Polish territories, uncovering a previously hidden conversation about sexuality, gender propriety, and social class. Keely Stauter-Halsted situates the preoccupation with prostitution in the context of Poland’s struggle for political independence and its difficult transition to modernity. She traces the Poles’ growing anxiety about white slavery, venereal disease, and eugenics by examining the regulation of ...
Explores the storytelling of Anna Seghers and other 20th-century writers who faced the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, between conformity and resistance. While Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay "The Storyteller" (1936), lamented the decline of the storytelling tradition in the age of the modernist novel, Anna Seghers and other twentieth-century German writers went on to chronicle the century's darkest days in creative and compelling ways. This volume is at its heart a tribute to Germanist Helen Fehervary, whose work, particularly on the prose of Anna Seghers, continues to inspire scholars who examine narration and storytelling. The subtitle quotation, "for o...
Edited volume tracing the development of a new generation of German Jewish writers, offering fresh interpretations of individual works, and probing the very concept of "German Jewish literature."
There is an academic cottage industry on the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. This book takes a different approach, turning its gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to "touch" Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud's responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, "rescue," and connect with the famous Professor from Vienna.
Writing against Boundaries. Nationality, Ethnicity and Gender in the German-speaking Context presents a series of essays by prominent scholars who critically explore the intersection of nation and subjectivity, the production of national identities, and the tense negotiation of multiculturalism in German-speaking countries. By looking at a wide spectrum of texts that range from Richard Wagner's operas to Hans Bellmer's art, and to literature by Aras Ören, Irene Dische, Annette Kolb, Elizabeth Langgässer, Karin Reschke, Christa Wolf, to contemporary German theater by Bettina Fless, Elfriede Jelinek, Anna Langhoff, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and to Monika Treut's films, the volume explores the intersection of gender, ethnicity and nation and examines concepts of national culture and the foreigner or so-called 'other.' Focusing on such issues as immigration, xenophobia, gender, and sexuality, the volume looks at narratives that sustain the myth of a homogeneous nation, and those that disrupt it. It responds to a growing concern with borders and identity in a time in which borders are tightening as the demands of globalization increase.
The nation-state is a European invention of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the case of the German nation in particular, this invention was tied closely to the idea of a homogeneous German culture with a strong normative function. As a consequence, histories of German culture and literature often are told from the inside-as the unfolding of a canon of works representing certain core values, with which every person who considers him or herself “German” necessarily must identify. But what happens if we describe German culture and its history from the outside? And as something heterogeneous, shaped by multiple and diverse sources, many of which are not obviously connected to things traditio...