Explore the vast range of titles available.

This vibrant anthology showcases new, unpublished short stories by a rapidly growing crop of highly talented young Jewish American fiction writers. Cohering around the core Jewish theme of the Promised Land, all the stories were written especially for this volume. With the kind of depth and imagination that only fiction allows, they offer striking variations on the multivalent theme of the Promised Land and how it continues to shape the collective consciousness of contemporary American Jews. This anthology provides a rich reading experience and a unique window onto Jewish American life and culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A scholarly introduction by Derek Rubin provides literary context, discusses the organization of the volume, and illuminates expected and unexpected connections among the stories. Promised Lands features 23 stories by Elisa Albert, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Janice Eidus, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Lauren Grodstein, Aaron Hamburger, Dara Horn, Rachel Kadish, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Joan Leegant, Yael Goldstein Love, Rivka Lovett, Tova Mirvis, Lev Raphael, Nessa Rapoport, Jonathan Rosen, Thane Rosenbaum, Joey Rubin, Edward Schwarzschild, Steve Stern, Lara Vapnyar, Adam Wilson, and Jonathan Wilson.

This paper analyzes contemporary Jewish fiction to suggest that both writers and their Orthodox daughter protagonists can be viewed as the inheritors and continuation of a literary tradition questioning roles, perceptions of and opportunities for Jewish women. It also proposes that the real \"mind-body\" problem or dilemma that Orthodox Jewish women confront comes not from the secular world—as Rebecca Goldstein's protagonist Renee presents in The Mind-Body Problem—but from the conservative and traditional religious Jewish world they experienced as children and, in several cases, leave as adults. It is within the confining and constricting world of traditional Judaism and Orthodox Jewish religious observance—traditionally male-dominated—that they experience a kind of disconnect or come to an impasse, finding that they must be perceived as either mind or body but cannot be perceived simultaneously as both.

Translation of Chana Blankshteyn's stories depicting the tumultuous interwar years in Europe. Fear and Other Stories is a translation from Yiddish to English of the collected stories of Chana Blankshteyn (~1860–1939), a woman who may be almost entirely forgotten now but was widely admired during her long and productive life. The mere existence of these stories is itself a remarkable feat as the collection was published in July 1939, just before the Nazis invaded Poland and two weeks before Blankshteyn's death. Anita Norich's introduction argues that this is not a work of Holocaust literature (there are no death camps, partisans or survivors of WWII), but anti-Semitism is palpable, as is the threat of war and its aftermath. What could it have felt like to live under these conditions? How might a woman who was a feminist, a Jew, and an activist understand the recent past of war and revolution through which she had lived and also confront the horror that was beginning to unfold? The nine stories in this volume take place primarily in Vilna, as well as various parts of Europe. As if presaging what was to come, World War I and Russian civil wars are the backdrops to these stories, as Jews and non-Jews find themselves under German occupation or caught up in the revolutionary fervor that promised them much and took away almost everything. The young women in Blankshteyn's stories insist on their independence, on equality with their lovers, and on meaningful work. Like the men in the stories, they study, work, and yearn for love. The situations in which these characters find themselves may be unfamiliar to a contemporary reader, but their reactions to the turmoil, the frighteningly changing times, and the desire for love and self-expression are deeply resonant with today's audience. The history may be specific, but the emotions are universal. Blankshteyn's stories are both a view of the final gasp of Eastern European Jewish culture and a compelling modern perspective on the broader world. Students and scholars of history and culture, women's literature, and translation studies will wonder how they've gone this long without reading Blankshteyn's work.

Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice , War and Peace , or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity--and the ultimate boundary transgression. Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this pioneering study, Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.

\"Reich is the author of the novels \"One Hundred Philistine Foreskins,\" \"My Holocaust,\" \"The Jewish War,\" \"Master of the Return,\" and \"Mara.\" Her stories have appeared in the \"Atlantic,\" \"Harper's,\" \"AGNI,\" \"Ploughshares,\" and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the National Magazine Award for Fiction, the Edward Lewis Wallant Book Award, as well as other prizes.\"--

The 1970s gave voice to a number of female Jewish authors who subverted stereotypes of Jewish women through the creation of complex, deeply funny Jewish female protagonists that reimagined and celebrated Jewish femininity. This paper considers Gail Parent’s Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York (1972), Louise Blecher Rose’s The Launching of Barbara Fabrikant (1974), and Susan Lukas’s Fat Emily (1974), three novels that repurpose the “Jewish American Princess” (JAP) stereotype to empower the Jewish daughter and to dismantle the image of young Jewish femininity previously set forth by male authors like Philip Roth. This paper contextualizes and analyzes each of the three novels in conversation with Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s conception of the “Jewish Big Mouth” and Nathan Abrams’s definition of the “New JAP with Attitude,” ultimately making the argument that the Jewish female protagonists in these novels were simultaneously progressive in their clear articulation of active female Jewish voices in American popular fiction and conservative in their reliance on mid-century tropes about JAPs and “Jewish Ugly Ducklings.” In doing so, these novels act as a bridge between the mid-century images of young Jewish femininity perpetuated by authors like Roth and the more nuanced, female-driven representations of Jewish women seen in contemporary popular culture.

“The Modern Jewess and Her Wondering Jewish Identity” argues that Margot Singer and Elisa Albert represent Jewish exile as women’s stories. In their narratives, women’s selfhood is historically and culturally inflected with both the imperative of Jewish women’s obligation and exile within Jewish communal life. Their modern Jewesses wonder about the foundational urgency of sustaining and regenerating, even against all odds, Jewish identity and continuity. Albert and Margot Singer portray the modern Jewess as wandering and wondering—entering the fray of a perennially contested and changing Jewish American history and social and cultural site: the absent presence of the Holocaust, the Jewish home, family, and community, and the evolving nature of Jewish American literature and characterization.

The British Yiddish writer Katie Brown wrote humorous stories and sketches for the London Yiddish newspapers Di post (The Post) in the 1930s and Di tsayt (The Times) in the 1940s. The stories, set in London's Jewish East End, concern the day-to-day effects of immigration, poverty, and Jewish culture in Britain. After the Second World War, in a bombed-out East End where Jewish migration to the suburbs was accelerating, Brown did not write entirely new sketches, but rather edited versions of her prewar stories. Looking at the earlier and later stories together, we get a sense of the changes happening to London's Jewish community: the decline of Jewish culture and religious practice, the changing relationship with the Eastern European homeland, and the decline of the Yiddish language. Through close reading and analysis, this article gives historical background to Brown and the social, cultural, and political context of her stories. It situates Brown as the only female journalist writing regularly for the press and identifies her unique perspective in making poignant interventions into Jewish debates of the day through stories of small incidents in family life. She raises questions around how to maintain a Jewish identity in England and visibility as a Jew in a Christian world, and traces change through two decades by describing the tension between the immigrant generation and their children. Using a range of neglected source material in Yiddish, this article throws new light on the Jewish East End in its twilight years.