Forthcoming
Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos
Sven-Erik Rose
Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Writing in Nazi ghettos - within, at the limits of, and against an array of literary conventions.
This is the first study devoted to how little known but essential authors grappled with the destitution of ghetto existence by writing within, at the limits of, and against an array of literary scenarios, tropes, plot lines, and generic conventions, including those of nature lyric, modernist interior monologue, the realist social novel, the detective story, and the gothic horror tale. Contending with starvation, disease, desperate housing conditions and the looming threat of being murdered, inhabitants of ghettos in Poland nonetheless made them sites of rich Jewish cultural production. Rose’s readings of these literary works reveal how authors asserted their humanity by insisting on writing works of literature. In such radically dehumanizing circumstances, however, their recourse to established literary genres was not naive. Rather, ghetto authors brilliantly meditated on the grotesque incongruities between established
literary models and the extreme conditions of ghetto existence.
This publication has been made possible thanks to the Martin A. & Ruth Benjamin Coleman '57 Endowment for Holocaust Studies.
“The first scholarly account of the literature written in the ghettos that takes it seriously as literature. The consequences for our understanding of the ghettos as a historical phenomenon, of the lives lived there, and of the way that these lives have been remembered, memorialized, and understood, are profound.” — Na’ama Rokem, University of Chicago
“Among the most powerful works of literary criticism I have read in many years. The focus on literary production in the ghettos is both literary criticism/history and Holocaust history, and should be taken seriously in both fields. A must-read.” — Naomi Seidman, University of Toronto
“Sven-Erik Rose has written a work of immense erudition and scholarly acumen. His portrait of literature produced under circumstances horrific or worse is masterful. A fluent, persuasive argument for the importance of he resurrects with rare skill.” — Steven J. Zipperstein, Stanford University
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About the Author
Sven-Erik Rose is professor of German and of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. His first book, Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848, was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies in the category of Philosophy and Jewish Thought.
Between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, 1870–1930: A Memoir
Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche, author; Michelle U. Campos and Or Aleksandrowicz, editors
The literary memoir of a founder of Tel Aviv, now available for the first time in an annotated English translation.
Born in Jaffa in 1870, Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche grew up within a notable Sephardi family in the local Jewish community. He went on to become a prominent entrepreneur; a founder of Tel Aviv; and a fierce critic of the Ashkenazi Zionist leadership, Arab nationalism, and British colonial sectarianism; before emerging, in the last decade of his life, as an anguished public figure struggling to repair Arab-Jewish relations.
His memoir paints an intimate portrait of life in Palestine at the turn of the twentieth century, told from the perspective of a Middle Eastern Jew deeply embedded in local society. By centering on the world and experiences of a native Jew who was an eyewitness to and participant in the unfolding conflict in Palestine, this book shows how the course of Zionist politics and Jewish-Arab relations in pre-state Palestine might have taken alternative pathways. A comprehensive introduction sets the scene in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jaffa and thoughtful annotations contextualize Chelouche’s story within the modern history of Palestine and Israel. Between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, 1870–1930 tells the fascinating story of a civic leader—and offers a complex view of the various cultural, social, and political forces that forged multilayered Jewish identities in the Middle East. The book includes a family tree and is illustrated with photographs of the family and scenes of Jaffa and early Tel Aviv.
Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche (1870–1934) was a prominent builder, entrepreneur, public figure, and a founder of Tel Aviv.
About the Editors
Michelle U. Campos is associate professor of history and Jewish studies at Pennsylvania State University. A historian of late Ottoman Palestine, she is the author of Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine.
Or Aleksandrowicz is assistant professor in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He is an architectural and urban historian and serves as the chief editor of Architectures book series at Babel Publishers. Aleksandrowicz is also a descendant of Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche.
Modern Jewish Ethics Since 1970: Writings on Methods, Sources, & Issues
Jonathan K. Crane, Emily Filler, and Mira Beth Wasserman, editors
The field of Jewish ethics is never far from foundational questions about how to do Jewish ethics – and these questions are inseparable from other kinds of scholarly conclusions or prescriptions. In part because Jewish ethics is inherently deliberatively, the volume is organized not by standalone essays but by small sets of curated conversations between scholars from different time periods, academic subfields, and religious commitments (or lack thereof).
These deliberate juxtapositions are to encourage scholars and students to develop similar meta-ethical analyses on Jewish ethics, broadly construed. Jewish ethics is not just a set of propositions or principles; nor can it be reduced to a single trajectory of thought or abstracted as an elaborate system of ideas. Jewish ethics is the field of study that engages Jewish texts, ideas, history, and experience in conversations about values and virtues, justice and good judgment, human relations and responsibilities. This volume presents some of those conversations to spark many more.
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About the Editors
Mira Wasserman is the Director of the Center for Jewish Ethics and Associate Professor of Rabbinic Literature at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She is the author of book, Jews, Gentiles, and other Animals: The Talmud after the Humanities which was awarded the Baron Prize for the best first book in Jewish studies, and the forthcoming “‘Halakhah’ and ‘Aggadah’ and What the Talmud is Made of,” in What is the Talmud? edited by Christine Hayes and Jay Harris.
Emily A. Filler is Assistant Professor in the Study of Judaism at Washington and Lee University, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Jewish Ethics. Her work has been published in the Journal of Religious Ethics, Religions, Shofar, the Journal of Textual Reasoning, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and several edited volumes. She is currently completing her first monograph, a study of modern Jewish philosophy, biblical violence, and the virtues of plain sense interpretation.
Jonathan K. Crane is the Raymond F. Schinazi Scholar of Bioethics and Jewish Thought at the Ethics Center; professor of Medicine, Emory School of Medicine, and affiliated faculty in the Department of Religion, Emory College of Arts and Sciences. He is coauthor of Ahimsa: The Way to Peace, co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality, author of Narratives and Jewish Bioethics, editor of Beastly Morality: Animals as Ethical Agents, author of Eating Ethically: Religion and Science for a Better Diet, and editor of Judaism, Race, and Ethics: Conversations and Questions. He is the founder and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Jewish Ethics.