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This deeply imaginative and wide-ranging book shows how, since the first centuries of the Christian era, gentiles have associated Jews with noise. Ruth HaCohen focuses her study on a "musical libel"--a variation on the Passion story that recurs in various forms and cultures in which an innocent Christian boy is killed by a Jew in order to silence his "harmonious musicality." In paying close attention to how and where this libel surfaces, HaCohen covers a wide swath of western cultural history, showing how entrenched aesthetic-theological assumptions have persistently defined European culture and its internal moral and political orientations.Ruth HaCohen combines in her comprehensive analysis the perspectives of musicology, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, tracing the tensions between Jewish "noise" and idealized Christian "harmony" and their artistic manifestations from the high Middle Ages through Nazi Germany and beyond. She concludes her book with a passionate and moving argument for humanizing contemporary soundspaces.
An entirely fresh take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that examines the life-shaping reverberations of wars and ongoing tensions upon the everyday lives of families in Jerusalem. An American, secular, diasporic Jew, Lis Harris grew up with the knowledge of the historical wrongs done to Jews. In adulthood, she developed a growing awareness of the wrongs they in turn had done to the Palestinian people. This gave her an intense desire to understand how the Israelis’ history led them to where they are now. However, she found that top-down political accounts and insider assessments made the people most affected seem like chess pieces. What she wanted was to register the effects of the coun...
Agnon’s Story is the first complete psychoanalytic biography of the Nobel-Prize-winning Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon. It investigates the hidden links between his stories and his biography. Agnon was deeply ambivalent about the most important emotional “objects” of his life, in particular his “father-teacher,” his ailing, depressive and symbiotic mother, his emotionally-fragile wife, whom he named after her and his adopted “home-land” of Israel. Yet he maintained an incredible emotional resiliency and ability to “sublimate” his emotional pain into works of art. This biography seeks to investigate the emotional character of his literary canon, his ambivalence to his family and the underlying narcissistic grandiosity of his famous “modesty.”
In this elegant and personal new work, Michael P. Steinberg reflects on the story of Moses and the Exodus as a foundational myth of politics—of the formation not of a nation but of a political community grounded in universal law. Modern renderings of the story of Moses, from Michelangelo to Spinoza to Freud to Schoenberg to Derrida, have seized on the story's ambivalences, its critical and self-critical power. These literal returns form the first level of the afterlife of Moses. They spin a persistent critical and self-critical thread of European and transatlantic art and argument. And they enable the second strand of Steinberg's argument, namely the depersonalization of the Moses and Exod...
Analyzes audio recordings of interwar Hebrew plays, providing a new model for the use of sound in theater studies. Possessed Voices tells the intriguing story of a largely unknown collection of audio recordings, a valuable tool for understanding historical theater, which preserve performances of modernist interwar Hebrew plays. Seldom used in scholarship, Ruthie Abeliovich focuses on four recordings: a 1931 recording of The Eternal Jew (1919), a 1965 recording of The Dybbuk (1922), a 1961 radio play of The Golem (1925), and a 1952 radio play of Yaakov and Rachel (1928). Abeliovich traces the spoken language of modernist Hebrew theater as grounded in multiple modalities of expressive practice...
"A vital, understated contribution to the body of Holocaust literature."-Kirkus Reviews https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/andrea-von-treuenfeld/going-backy/ How many Jewish women do you know who moved back to post-war Germany? In this collection of survivor stories, you'll meet 16. Each of these women recounts her life story with grace and courage, even as they remember horrors of the holocaust. Stories of fleeing war and living as a refugee, of deep personal loss and of German repatriation. Some were young and fled with family, some were older and escaped on their own. They all had to start fresh somewhere, with a new language, a new environment and new people. Some had difficulty ...
A detailed 2010 analysis of Bach's Passions which demonstrates how they reflect and constitute priorities and conditions of the western world.
Speechsong is a work of imaginative musicology that addresses the engimas of Schoenberg and Gould, of singing and speaking, of Moses und Aron, of technology and being. Its point of departure is Gould's last public performance, given at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, where a number of Schoenberg's works were performed during his California exile. It is here, after that last performance, that Gould encounters a spectral Schoenberg in a staged conversation that explores Schoenberg's travails in rethinking the fundamentals of Western music. This first part of Speechsong recalls Schoenberg's operatic masterpiece, Moses und Aron, in which the divinely inspired Moses seeks the help of h...
Musical culture in Jewish communities in early modern Italy was much more diverse than researchers originally thought. An interdisciplinary reassessment, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy evaluates the social, cultural, political, economic, and religious circumstances that shaped this community, especially in light of the need to recognize individual experiences within minority populations. Contributors draw from rich materials, topics, and approaches as they explore the inherently diverse understandings of music in daily life, the many ways that Jewish communities conceived of music, and the reception of and responses to Jewish musical culture. Highlighting the multifaceted experience of music within Jewish communities, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy sheds new light on the place of music in complex, previously misunderstood environments.