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[...]even (especially) the most idealistic of us are anxious about devoting our lives to activities that may not yield benefit to others when there is so much constructive work that surely needs to be done: healing the sick, helping the destitute, teaching the ignorant, or just showing up for an \"uncreative\" everyday job. All the same, the daily labor of science or humanistic study is not what we mean by creative work, however much it may serve as preparation for and verification of our creative moments. Creating a scholarly treatise or a work of art leaves an external object that endures in time and space. In a certain sense, a life well-lived is a work of art, which we cherish in others, as is evident in the fact that we often ask those who are wise to mediate conflicts or call upon them for personal counsel when we've made a mess of our relationships.

Given the momentary similarities between her fate and mine, it was natural that some of my thoughts were devoted to my aunt, who endured not a few days of indignity but a life sentence without parole, utterly at the mercy of others, some nice, some less nice, surrounded like me, day and night, by the howling of her fellow human beings, and like them, but unlike me, by the hopelessness of her state. Had I failed, in my youth, to empathize properly with her impotence and helplessness, with her experience of abandonment, with the lack of a voice that could break through her prison and command the response and respect of strangers? Much of my advocacy of liberal arts education in the service of religious commitment is connected to its potential contribution to human sympathy and understanding.

This dissertation examines the notion of contradiction as a way of addressing the crisis of modernity and secularism in Jewish existence at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. This term is viewed through the writings of Aharon David Gordon (1856-1922) and Yosef Haim Brenner (1881-1921), two of the main articulators of the Jewish movement that attempted to address this crisis—Zionism. The term contradiction in their writings indicates how they viewed the primary notion of human and Jewish existence. This term serves Gordon and Brenner to delineate forms of conflictual existence that do not seek resolution, but rather strive to utilize the contradictory tensions as a spiritual, and in some ways theological, drive in their perceptions of Zionism. In this research, I show the various appearances of the term contradiction in Gordon’s and Brenner’s thought and analyze how these appearances illuminate other terms such as theology, secularism, and nationalism. The centrality of Gordon and Brenner in Zionist thought, the way they influenced the development of Zionism as a movement of both philosophical thought and as political action, allows this dissertation to readdress the role of Zionism in expressing a spiritual and cultural question. Reading their writings through the prism of contradiction illustrates how they imagined the evolving Jewish settlement in Palestine. While most scholarly work has viewed Gordon’s thought as harmonious in nature, I offer an analysis of Gordon’s philosophy as one that derives from his epistemology of human existence, which he understood to be conflictual in nature: an existence that is located between rational human ability and an unmediated connection to nature. What appears as the primary contradiction in human and Jewish existence, becomes in Gordon’s thought a theological idea: preserving the unresolvable contradiction of human existence emerges as a spiritual principle that guides the creation of Jewish identity in Eretz Israel. Such a form of existence shifts between the secularized character of the Zionist enterprise and the motivation to charge it with theological power.In my explorations of Brenner’s writings, I suggest the ways in which we may understand the notion of contradiction as Brenner’s way of dealing with “the death of God.” Due to his harsh evaluation of Jewish existence, Brenner sought to anchor Jewish existence in “actuality” while also granting that actuality spiritual meaning. In fact, both Brenner’s harsh critique and vision are based on his own self-perception. As such, he utilizes the contradiction arising from his own existence to grant Jewish existence spiritual character after “the death of God.” Brenner’s perception of Jewish existence goes through a localized and rooted vision, which appears as a false ambition in which he remains torn between his belief in the possibility and justification of the territorially-rooted Zionist vision and his distrust of it. This conflictual character serves Brenner in formulating a form of unlocalized, in-organic existence and belonging to the land. The contradiction between the unrealized desire for locality and its impossibility characterizes Brenner’s writing in his attempt to address the question of Jewish existence in Palestine.I end this project with an examination of nationalism as viewed from the paradigm of contradiction. I argue that Gordon and Brenner rejected the realization of Zionism in the form of a State or any other form claiming to resolve the conflictual character of human existence. As an alternative, they articulated an individual-based Zionism: they promote, each in his own unique manner, a form of nationalism that preserves the unresolvedness of human existence and grant this embedded tension a spiritual and theological quality deriving from the conflict.

Marc Chagall and the Jewish Experience: A Personal Modernism in the Parisian Avant-Garde examines the interplay between Marc Chagall’s Jewish heritage and his engagement with the Parisian avant-garde of the early twentieth century. Chagall’s upbringing in the Russian Empire deeply informed his visual language, which persisted even as he explored the techniques and innovations of modernist movements.This thesis analyzes Chagall’s early works alongside close readings of key paintings such as I and the Village, 1911, Homage to Apollinaire, 1911–12, Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, 1912–13, and Green Violinist, 1923–24, considering symbols, colors, compositions, and recurring motifs drawn from religion, tradition, and memory. It explores how Chagall navigated a dual identity—torn between the past and present, East and West—and how this tension shaped his nonconformity to any singular modernist movement. Exposure to peers such as Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, as well as his encounters with Cubism, Fauvism, and Orphism, further influenced his evolving style.Ultimately, Chagall’s consistent inclusion of Jewish motifs and folkloric expression, combined with modernist experimentation, produced a dreamlike, highly personal symbolic vocabulary that resisted categorization. This unique synthesis defined the singular artistic identity for which Chagall is celebrated today.

This thesis examines the role that place performs in the creation of different Jewish identities in the South through the study of foodways practices. The first chapter provides a historical background of Jewish foodways and an analysis of two Jewish cookbooks and their recipes. These texts act as historical markers of the similarities and differences between varying diasporas across space and time and show how these elements impact Jewish culinary practices. Chapter two is centered around an oral history conducted with Jewish chef Laurence Faber and the places that have shaped his approach to the food served at his Knoxville restaurant, Potchke. Faber journeyed to his family’s ancestral home in Eastern Europe in order to better understand the culinary practices of old world Jewish communities so that he may adapt those traditions in a new world space. The final chapter is a study of my own southern Jewish identity. Through the use of autoethnographic vignettes and recipe development, I explore the ways in which my identity is informed by the spaces I occupy as well as those spaces that impact my identity from afar. The thesis dismantles the idea of a singular Southern Jewish experience and explores the different approaches taken in the formation of one’s identity.