Jewish Studies Commons^™

The Mathematical Imagination, Matthew Handelman

Philosophy

This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of World War II. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative, showing how for other German-Jewish thinkers, such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, mathematics offered metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Influential theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique, Handelman shows, borrowed ...

Is Judaism Democratic? Reflections From Theory And Practice Throughout The Ages, Leonard J. Greenspoon

Purdue University Press Book Previews

As government by the people, democracy has always had its proponents as well as opponents. What forms of government have Jewish leaders, both with and without actual political power, favored? Not surprisingly, many options have been offered theoretically and in practice. Perhaps more surprisingly, democracy has been at the heart of most systems of governance. Biblical Israel was largely a monarchy, but many writers of the Bible were critical of the excesses that almost always arise when human kings take charge: the general populace loses its freedom. In rabbinic Judaism, the majority ruled, and many principles that support modern democratic ...

Lessons From The Treblinka Archive: Transnational Collections And Their Implications For Historical Research, Chad S.A. Gibbs

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

In work for his 1979 book The Death Camp Treblinka, Alexander Donat began the process of locating survivors of the camp and recording their histories. In a telling testament to the lethality of this place, he could identify only sixty-eight survivors. Analysis of Donat’s early findings—emerging six years prior to the publication of any major academic monograph on the subject—offers a window into the difficulties of conducting research on this Nazi extermination camp and its widely-scattered witnesses.

Treblinka’s disembarkation ramp was effectively the eye of a transnational needle through which so many passed and so few ...

Review Of Golem: Modern Wars And Their Monsters By Maya Barzilai, Temma F. Berg

English Faculty Publications

The golem crosses many borders. A popular culture icon and an enduring image of creative power, its hybridity contributes to its elusive nature. What it is and what it means shifts over time. Maya Barzilai's Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters takes a unique approach. Deeply interdisciplinary, as one must be to explore such a complex and paradoxical figure, and drawing on religious, literary, cinematic, and historical contexts, Barzilai weaves a rich tapestry of golem narratives. All the while, Barzilai keeps a clear eye on the golem's ongoing association with war, seeing its birth in the clay trenches ...

The Quest For Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought In Joseph Roth's Works, Rares G. Piloiu

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works by Rares Piloiu fills an important gap in Roth scholarship, placing Roth’s major works of fiction for the first time in the context of a generational interest in religious redemption among the Jewish intellectuals of Central Europe. In it, Piloiu argues that Roth’s challenging, often contradictory and ambivalent literary output is the result of an attempt to recast moral, political, and historical realities of an empirically observable world in a new, religiously transfigured reality through the medium of literature. This diegetic recasting of phenomenological encounters with ...

Haunted Stories, Haunted Selves: Ghosts In Latin American Jewish Literature, Charlotte Gartenberg

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study approaches haunting in Latin American Jewish Literature from the 1990s through the 2010s as it appears in works by and featuring the descendants of Jewish immigrants. In these decades, this trope is frequently invoked as both a literary metaphor and a critical lens. It arises from and activates a number of themes common in trauma studies and in postmodernism, such as loss, the transmission of memory, our relationships to the past, the rupturing of traditional realities and questions of what can be known and represented. It is particularly prevalent amongst those who pen and protagonize the works examined ...

When Basketball Was Jewish, Jack Ryan

English Faculty Publications

Philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, writing in Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame, describes Barney "Tiny" Sedran, born Bernard Sedransky on the Lower East Side of New York, as a quintessential Jewish basketball player: "manically energetic, compulsively alert, upending expectations, and compensating for short—really short—comings" (17). Sedransky was the "shortest player ever inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame," she writes, who excelled at a time "when Jews ruled basketball — and lest you think those last three words are a misprint, let me repeat: Jews ruled basketball" (17). Indeed, in the modern era it is easy to forget ...

Review Of Leonard Barkan's Berlin For Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion seems to be directed at an insider community of Jews who care about Jewish history, especially those considering a trip to Germany. The book's meandering look at Berlin is broader and more nuanced than a travel guide, with close attention to how Jews of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries understood their own relationships to Jewishness. Still, it remains unclear who beyond a small subset of travelers will be interested in Leonard Barkan's writing on Berlin. That the author is not an expert in either German or Jewish Studies has both merits ...

Jewish Germany: An Enduring Presence From The Fourth To The Twenty-First Century, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book Jewish Germany: An enduring presence from the fourth to the twenty-first century.

Borders, Territories, And Ethics: Hebrew Literature In The Shadow Of The Intifada, Adia Mendelson-Maoz

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadow of the Intifada by Adia Mendelson-Maoz presents a new perspective on the multifaceted relations between ideologies, space, and ethics manifested in contemporary Hebrew literature dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the occupation. In this volume, Mendelson-Maoz analyzes Israeli prose written between 1987 and 2007, relating mainly to the first and second intifadas, written by well-known authors such as Yehoshua, Grossman, Matalon, Castel-Bloom, Govrin, Kravitz, and Levy. Mendelson-Maoz raises critical questions regarding militarism, humanism, the nature of the State of Israel as a democracy, national identity and its borders, soldiers as moral ...

Seasoned Antisemitism: Cannibalism In The Destruction Of Jerusalem, Bailey Ludwig

English Summer Fellows

My project examines an episode of maternal cannibalism within the medieval poem The Destruction of Jerusalem. Several variations of the story of the 70 AD Roman siege of Jerusalem that include this particular episode exist; the story even has roots in the bible. I am looking at the poem within this context and noting its differences in order to best determine its intentions. This version, more so than any other I have encountered, eliminates complicating factors, such as the murder of the child or presence of male figures, in order to make its antisemitic message as direct as possible. The ...

Estudio Sobre Retrato Del Templo De Selomo, Maria Del Carmen Artigas

Foreign Languages Faculty Publications

En este artículo estudio la vida y uno de los libros del prestigioso intelectual y artista Jacob Judah (Aryeh) León (Siglo XVII), en el que describe el Templo de “Selomo.”[1] Nótese que el nombre del autor aparece en la portada de su libro: Retrato del Templo de Selomo, 1642 como: Jacobo Judah León.[2] Al final de su vida se le comenzó a llamar Templo por su famosa maqueta del Templo. Asimismo, sus hijos adoptaron Templo como el nombre de la familia.

Found In Translation: Essays On Biblical Jewish Translation In Honor Of Leonard J. Greenspoon, James W. Barker, Anthony Ledonne, Joel N. Lohr

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Found in Translation is at once a themed volume on the translation of ancient Jewish texts and a Festschrift for Leonard J. Greenspoon, the Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick Professor in Jewish Civilization and professor of classical and near Eastern studies and of theology at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Greenspoon has made significant contributions to the study of Jewish biblical translations, particularly the ancient translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, known as the Septuagint. This volume comprises an internationally renowned group of scholars presenting a wide range of original essays on Bible translation, the influence of culture on ...

Soap From Human Fat: The Case Of Professor Spanner, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book Soap from Human Fat: The Case of Professor Spanner, by Monika Tomkiewicz and Piotr Semków (Gdynia: Wydawnictwo Róza Wiatrów, 2013).

Lucille Cairns. Francophone Jewish Writers: Imagining Israel. Liverpool: Liverpool Up, 2015., Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Lucille Cairns. Francophone Jewish Writers: Imagining Israel. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015. x + 310 pp.

Tolerance As A Way To Remember, Natalie Figueroa

Voces Novae

This project examines the topic of Holocaust memorialization with a specific focus on the Simon Wiesenthal Center and their Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance. It posits that the mission and design of the museum were shaped by two major factors, first, the values of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal for whom the Center was named, and second, racial and ethnic tensions within the City of Los Angeles during the late 1980s and early 1990s, which culminated in the Los Angeles riots in 1992 following the acquittal of four white police officers in the 1991 beating of Rodney King. The museum opened ...

Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots For The Diaspora: Ghosts In The Family Tree. Ann Arbor: U Of Michigan P, 2016., Annie De Saussure

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the family tree. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 325 pp.

Book Review: Constructing Genocide And Mass Violence: Society, Crisis, Identity, Carola Lingaas

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Putting (Inter)Faith Into Practice: Reflections Of A Jewish Scholar In Residence At A Canadian Lutheran Seminary, Daniel Maoz

Consensus

No abstract provided.

Teaching Is Not Instruction: A Jewish Perspective On Teaching Religion In The Light Of Krister Stendahl’S Three Rules Of Religious Understanding, Dow Marmur

Consensus

No abstract provided.