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Over the course of an 18-year tenure as the Editor-in-Chief of The Jewish Publication Society, the author encountered numerous ethical dilemmas relating to publishing Holocaust manuscripts. These dilemmas concerned a book's provenance, authorship, distribution of royalties, authenticity, and appropriateness. In the article, the author presents several case studies of various Holocaust manuscripts and their disposition, describing the processes of vetting and debate pertaining to each problematic acquisition.

Chaim Potok’s novel My Name is Asher Lev uses as its central image a crucifixion, a complicated form for its Jewish protagonist to use. Though Potok and Asher understand the form to be merely an aesthetic mold, this article argues that the novel can be best read in reference to both the Hasidic and Christian teachings on atonement, a reading which better appreciates the communicative potential of the crucifixion regarding the Lev family’s work of atonement, particularly in the themes of suffering and sacrifice it images.

This article investigates the scholarly treatment of the place and function of Holocaust in Chaim Potok’s novels The Chosen and The Promise. Tracing a reception history of Potok’s work in the academy, this article argues that previous studies of Potok’s novels have relegated the Holocaust to a background historical event that informs the internal religious and ideological conflicts of the novels. Reading the two novels together, this article argues that the novels, through the characters of Danny and Reuven, explore a variety of ideological positions that each demand particular action in response to the Holocaust. The Promise, I argue, sees Reuven discern another possibility, one that engages with the ostensible incomprehensibility of the Holocaust as a generative force for sympathetic engagement with irreconcilable ideological positions, offering a new model for Jewish continuity in his post-Holocaust United States.

This is a story about the challenges and virtues of messiness for scholarship and teaching in academia generally, and Religious Studies in particular. It begins when I was first hired to teach Introduction to the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto Mississauga. It continues with a discussion of research into how introductory religion courses are taught in Canada, and reflection on that research – which includes examples of student learning from a world religions summer course I have taught in Hong Kong since 2012. It ends with a consideration of the ways in which messiness has been a key component of Michel Desjardins’ own scholarship and teaching.

While Chaim Potok's novel The Chosen remains one of the most popular works of Jewish fiction, it has not generally been regarded as a critical success. In contrast with authors such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Potok is often charged with presenting a romanticized (rather than realistic) view of traditional American Jews in the mid-twentieth century. The article challenges this assessment, arguing that Potok's work is undervalued in part because he does not present the version of Judaism preferred by critics of his time. Traditional Jews, particularly Hasidic Jews, were viewed as a throwback to the past, not a significant modern American Jewish community. This assessment reveals a biased perspective on traditional Judaism, and it assumes that the key issue confronting mid-century Jews was assimilation. The Chosen presents an alternative to this common characterization of American Judaism, highlighting instead the variety of Jewish traditions in mid-century America, and how the conflicts between them contributed to the development of American Jewish identity.

Suffering is at the core of Jewish-American literature in general and in the fiction of Saul Bellow and Chaim Potok in particular. Bellow and Potok, affirmative writers who believe in man’s redemption through suffering, portray characters that evoke the Job-like “suffering man” whose endurance and faith in God are finally rewarded. “Schooling in grief,” a phrase borrowed from Bellow’s Herzog (1964), can also be applied to Bellow’s The Victim (1947) and Potok’s The Chosen (1967). The paper reads these two novels with the notion of the I/It and I/Thou relationship as explained in Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1923). The characters in The Victim and The Chosen move from the I/It to the I/Thou encounter through suffering, which eventually leads towards mutual understanding and love for the other.

A defining characteristic of secular Jewish literatures since the Haskalah, or the movement toward “Jewish Enlightenment” that began around the end of the eighteenth century, is the reliance upon the archetypal aspects of the Judaic tradition, together with a propensity for intertextual pastiche and dialogue with the sacred texts. Indeed, from the revival of the Hebrew language at the end of the nineteenth century and all throughout the defining events of the last one hundred years, the trend of the textually sacrosanct appearing as a persistent motif in Judaic cultural production has only increased. What the discipline of literary studies has neglected to analyze, however, are the comparative aspects of such a rapport, with respect to the interpretive differences in the composition of modern Jewish fiction across geo-political, linguistic, and gender-based paradigms. To that end, this project presents a case study of the cultural variables of modern Judaic discourse through an archetypal analysis of selections from secular Modern Hebrew, Anglo-American, and Francophone Maghrebian Jewish fiction, focusing on the literary works of three major Jewish writers, all of whom were born in the last century. These writers are: the Israeli author A. B. Yehoshua (1936–); the American author Chaim Potok (1929–2002); and the Tunisian-born, French-Israeli author Chochana Boukhobza (1959–). These particular authors are relevant for a study of Judaic cultural variables because the literary works of all three have been characterized by their tendency to use religion, myth, and metanarratives to probe crises of identity and interaction in the modern Jewish paradigm. Included in this study are the analyses of Yehoshua’s short stories “Hamefaked haaharon” (“The Last Commander”) (1962) and “Bethḥilat kaiyts 1970” (“Early in the Summer of 1970”) (1972), as well as the analysis of his novel Gerushim meuḥarim (“A Late Divorce”) (1982). The literary works of Potok’s analyzed are the short story “The Trope Teacher” (2001) and the novels My Name Is Asher Lev (1972) and The Gift of Asher Lev (1990). The novel of Boukhobza’s explored in this study is Un été à Jérusalem (“A Summer in Jerusalem”) (1986). The central methodology used in this study has been taken from the discipline of “archetypal” post-Jungian psychology, which defines archetypes as recurrent themes, motifs, or figures, historically transmitted as patterns or models, which seem to follow a specific ethnic blueprint. This approach implies that many different interpretations of a people’s sub-cultural disposition may be found in a single archetype, depending on the specific sub-group involved. For example, the archetypes present in the common intertextual Judaic narratives or motifs that function as the building blocks for Yehoshua’s, Potok’s, and Boukhobza’s fiction include the Binding of Isaac; the revelation to Moses at Mt. Sinai; and the enigma of the “Shekhinah,” the feminine presence of the Divine. And yet, each author engages in a specific, exegetical midrash of these long-held stories based on his or her particular sub-cultural worldview. A careful examination of each writer’s response to the Judaic textual tradition demonstrates the ways in which the modern interpretation of foundational Judaic narratives is codetermined by several key environmental factors. These factors include: geo-political affiliation; degree of religious observance; attitudes regarding gender roles; and notions of ethnicity. Such factors create the conceptual frameworks through which Jewish writers from differing backgrounds reference, recast, re-envision, or subvert traditional and/or religious figures, themes, tropes, discourses, or narratives from the intertextual reservoir of Judaic culture. The foundational texts in this reservoir are made up of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Talmud, the Kabbalah, and other celebrated, canonical works that are familiar to Jews the world over as symbolic points of reference. Jewish writers who choose to incorporate into their literary texts well-known elements from the continuum of Judaic textual history ultimately generate the meaning of this incorporation by way of the sub-cultural variables that define the nature of their respective, environmentally-based conceptual frameworks. In the same way that the differences in those frameworks illustrate the sub-cultural schisms that exist between modern Jewish sub-groups, such frameworks are also responsible for the varieties of aesthetic formulae chosen to depict those schisms in the literary text. The core contribution of this project for the field of literary studies is that it is the first to examine the comparative aspects of the cultural variables in the concept of “Jewishness” as this concept appears in the context of Jewish literatures. It also breaks new ground in that it offers explanations as to why the idea of “Jewish literature” as literature produced by groups of dissimilar Jews must undergo the same scholarly reckoning in literary studies as the idea of “Jewish communities” has in sociological and anthropological surveys. This research, therefore, represents the first step toward a broader attempt at troubling the notion of “Jewish literatures” across geo-political, linguistic, and gender-based paradigms.

Unlike Reb Saunders, David Malter believes that the Holocaust can be meaningful if it is interpreted as God's way of facilitating the return of the Jews to their land. [...]for Reuven's father, the destruction of one-third of the world's Jews will be the rebirth of a nation, the Zionist goal of the establishment of a Jewish state in its ancient territory. According to him, Hasidic teaching is somehow like psychoanalysis in that \"it refers one from the problematic of external life to that of the inner life, and it shows the need of beginning with oneself rather than demanding that both parties to a relationship change together\" (Friedman 1960 [1955]: 189). According to Sanford Sternlicht (2000: 31), \"[t]he novel is a paean to life and it ends with optimism. [...]it is a turning point in the story as it presupposes Frank's awareness of the issue of suffering and its implications for Jewishness.