Explore the vast range of titles available.

This article explores the Jewish question in the context of the 1907 Romanian Peasants’ Revolt through the novels of the Austrian Jewish communist Leo Katz. Katz witnessed the uprising as a youth from his native village situated on the border between the Habsburg Empire, Romania, and Tsarist Russia. He wrote two novels about the revolt: one in 1940 and the other in 1946. The present study examines the violent clashes that unfolded at the border and how the writer approached the concept of antisemitism in the context of the revolt. Relying mainly on Katz’s personal papers, the article shows that Katz’s understanding of antisemitism was related to his communist beliefs. This changed following debates on antisemitism that he and other German-speaking communists had while in exile in Mexico, where Katz spent most of World War Il. Although Katz includes more details on antisemitism in his second novel, he does not address the anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by the rural masses, which is an aspect otherwise well documented by the Austro-Hungarian border authorities. Katz’s novels are the most comprehensive Jewish narratives on the 1907 Romanian Peasants’ Revolt and represent a Jewish intellectual’s struggle to make sense of the rising antisemitism in that tri-border area at the turn of the twentieth century.

Abstract This article parses the role of the body in Howard Jacobson's Kalooki Nights and the manner in which Jacobson satirically draws on antisemitic concepts of Jewish difference. The article explores the role of the body in Jacobson's magnum opus and how the author deconstructs the binaries that define and separate Jews and non-Jews. It offers new close readings of the novel that focus on the protagonist's failed marriages, and – following from David Brauner's recent monograph-length study – brings into focus new ways in which Jacobson's novel engages and departs from Philip Roth.

The phrase \"Jewish paradise\" (from Latin paradisus Judeorum) originated in an early seventeenth-century xenophobic and antisemitic poem. Over the centuries, the original poem has been forgotten and the phrase, originally intended to be a satirical exaggeration of the Jewish position, has become increasingly used as a neutral or even favorable expression referencing the Golden Age of Jewish Culture in early modern Poland-Lithuania. This paper traces the history of this transition and argues that it represents an example of the linguistic reclamation: turning an antisemitic phrase into a philosemitic one, used from Poland to Jewish communities worldwide.

During the mid-1990s the Australian literary scene was shaken by controversy over issues of antisemitism and Holocaust representation in Helen Demidenko's debut novel, The Hand That Signed the Paper. In 2017, Darville reissued the novel. At a time when debate is raging over the nature and limits of freedom of expression and the status of words and facts, this was a provocative move. This article revisits The Hand in order to resolve the issues of literary antisemitism and freedom of speech that it raised in 1994 and continues to raise today. I apply Avishai Margalit's notion of an “ethics of memory” to the autofictional text in order to develop a theory of an “ethics of narration” in literary fiction. This narrative ethics enables distinctions to be made in relation to truth claims and fictionality, which were opaque in Demidenko's original autofiction and remain unresolved in the reissued version.

This article addresses narrative ethics from a media and memory studies perspective. It discusses the ethics of premediation in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Premediation is a forward-facing, generative dynamic of cultural memory: the medial preformation of imagination, experience, storytelling, and action. I first explore Ulysses’s mimesis of premediation, showing how in the Calypso episode, Bloom’s imagination is premediated by Orientalist stereotypes, and how in the Ithaca episode, Stephen’s ballad of Little Harry Hughes exposes the premediating power of age-old anti-Semitic narratives. Both episodes reveal the ethically problematic dimension of premediating schemata, which often operate non-consciously. But they also hint at the possibility of critical reflection, of “turning around upon one’s schemata” in the psychologist Frederic Bartlett’s sense. In a second step, I discuss the novel’s references to the Odyssey as a case of premediation, showing how new concepts of memory and mediation can elucidate this famous case of intertextuality. I argue that the particular presence of Homer in Ulysses — not as remediation, but as premediation — marks modernism’s new temporal regime, where tradition is used to tell new stories and thus turns into a future-oriented and enabling resource. Discussing the dynamic of premediation both on the level of narrative representation and in the novel’s intertextual relations, this article explores the potentials of a memory studies concept for the fields of (ethical) narratology, Joyce studies, and classical reception studies.

The protagonist of Arthur Schnitzler's play Professor Bernhardi (1912) falls victim to an anti-Semitic smear campaign that costs him his career. Bernhardi's unwavering adherence to his ethical principles and the triumph of his opportunistic detractors has been linked to the crisis of liberalism in Austria at the end of the nineteenth century. This article reads Bernhardi's individual ethics in the context of contemporary discourses on the relationship of the individual and society that surfaced in response to the increasing anti-Semitism in Europe such as Émile Durkheim's defense of individualism in \"Individualism and the Intellectuals\" (1898) and Werner Sombart's discussion of Jewish contribution to society in Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (1911). It argues that Bernhardi's insistence on moral individualism should not be read as Schnitzler's mourning of a failed political ideal but as his reclaiming of the values of Enlightenment for Jewish identity.

Bronia (Breyndl) Baum (1896–1947) was an Orthodox Jewish writer, activist, and journalist. She was born into a Hasidic family in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, moved to Piotrków Trybunalski in 1918, and then to Łódź. In 1925, she left Poland for the Land of Israel. Among poems and articles that she published in Yiddish papers were “Der Yud,” “Dos Yidishe Togblat,” and “Beys Yankev.” She also wrote in Hebrew—“Bat Israel” and “Baderekh” are two examples—with her Hebrew writing collected in Ketavim le-bat Yisra’el, published in Tel Aviv in 1954. Baum energetically promoted women’s education, an active role for religious Jewish women, and a number of charities. This article analyzes Bronia Baum’s unpublished manuscripts from the years 1912 to 1921. They include a diary in Russian and poems in Polish and Yiddish, and together constitute a unique literary and historical document. Baum’s work is considered from five perspectives: (1) the critical importance of education; (2) the role of World War I in shaping and determining her opinions and worldview, and of antisemitism in developing her Zionist stance; (3) her position on tradition and religion; (4) feminist motifs in her manuscripts, along with her attitude toward men and her relations with women; and (5) her approach toward her own writing, her compulsion to write and its source.

This article examines the specific charges against Jews in the Middle Ages that they killed Christians to use their blood in religious rituals and that they practiced usury. It argues that these and other charges were connected in the web of delusional mental associations that accompanies magical thinking. The article looks at a number of these associative links between usury and the blood libel in medieval and early Renaissance theology, philosophy, and literature, with special reference to Dante and Shakespeare.

This article is an exploratory reading of Gertrud Kolmar's novella Susanna, which the poet wrote under extreme circumstances between 1939 and 1940 in a Judenhaus in Berlin. Kolmar's novella offers unique and invaluable insight into acts of surveillance at the end of the Weimar Republic. The novella demonstrates how German-Jewish women experienced the damaging effects of small-town gossip, neighborhood spying, and daily instances of social ostracism. On the narrative level, Nazi oppression does not come into play, although racist and antisemitic ideologies are shown to have entered the surrounding Jewish world. Embedded within the story of Susanna is a critical commentary on prejudice within the Jewish community directed against more traditional Jews. My analysis of the first-person narrator and her ward illuminates how both female characters use the act of storytelling as an important strategy of negotiation, which is otherwise impossible.