Jewish Studies Commons^™

Adaptation Practices And Forms Of Struggle In Jewish Communities For The Preservation Of Religious Worldview In Soviet Ukraine (1920s-1930s), Tetiana Savchuk

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

The article is devoted to the reconstruction of the ways of adaptation of the Jews to the Soviet anti-religious experiments and the definition of forms of counteraction to these attacks during the 1920s and 1930s. There is insufficient research in the historiography of the struggle of Jews for the preservation of their religious worldview. The development of historiography shows a certain imbalance in the studies of the methods and extent of anti- church policy while ignoring the reaction of believers to the Bolshevik experiments. Based on archival documents of the Soviet secret services (not previously introduced into scientific circulation) and …

“It Kind Of Shows The Terrible Morality Of This Scene": Using Graphic Novels To Encourage Feminist Readings Of Jewish Hebrew Texts With Religious Significance, Talia Hurwich

Journal of Multilingual Education Research

This study considers whether and in what ways graphic novel adaptations of traditional Jewish Hebrew texts can encourage adolescent Modern Orthodox girls to adopt autonomous critical responses when encountering narratives that present women in unequal roles vis a vis men. According to scholars, Jewish literacy should teach students to read traditional Hebrew texts reverently while forming autonomous interpretations and opinions. Instead, Jewish educators teach normative readings posed by approved rabbinic authorities. This is particularly the case when teaching issues relating to gender among Modern Orthodox Jews, a conservative Jewish denomination, strives to synthesize tradition with the values of modern, secular …

Umaine Office For Diversity And Inclusion_Hanukkah, World Aids Day, And More! Email, University Of Maine Office For Diversity And Inclusion

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Email from the UMaine Office for Diversity and Inclusion with various details of the Office's work and details of specific events related to the impact of Maine’s Child Welfare practices within Indigenous communities, Hanukkah, and World Aids Day.

Jud Ms 26 Israel Bernstein Writings, Emily Margaret Newell

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Provenance: These papers were donated by Beth B. Schneider, on April 15, 2021.

Ownership and Literary Rights: The Israel Bernstein Writings Collection are the physical property of the University of Southern Maine Library. Literary rights, including copyright, belong to the creator or her legal heirs and assigns. For further information, consult the Special Collections Librarian.

Cite as: The Israel Bernstein Writings Collection, The Judaica Collection, Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, Special Collections, University of Southern Maine Library.

Restrictions on access: This collection is open for research.

Bus Line 163: A Public Pilgrim Bus To Rachel’S Tomb In Jerusalem, Mustafa Diktaş

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Buses are networks for both physical and social mobility. They permit people to become part of temporary communities of individuals whose goal is to travel along linear routes, which connect multiple stops and reach certain destinations. Through an ethnographic case study of Bus No. 163, which is designated for Jewish pilgrims traveling to Rachel’s tomb in Jerusalem, this paper focuses on the interactions between travelers that took place on this bus during December 2019 and February 2020. The interactions of people on Bus No 163 helps us better understand this liminal phase of pilgrimage. The findings of the research, as …

Dirty Minds & Failed Endings: Uses Of The Bawdy In Jewish Comedy, American And Israeli Perspectives, Eyal Tamir

Doctoral Dissertations

The connection between Jews, Jewish culture, and comedy in the twentieth century has long been established. The dissertation looks at Jewish comedy, comedians, and comediennes who have made the bawdy a central feature of their work. Moreover, it argues that the bawdy and the lewd have played an important role in the history of Jewish comedy and humor in the United States and in Israel. Aside from simply documenting various uses and occurrences of the bawdy in Jewish comedy, the dissertation seeks out some symptoms, as well as some underlying causes for the proclivity for such material in the work …

Jews And Gender, Leonard Greenspoon

Studies in Jewish Civilization

Jews and Gender features sixteen authors exploring the history and culture of the intersection of Judaism and gender from the biblical world to today. Topics include subversive readings of biblical texts; reappraisal of rabbinic theory and practice; women in mysticism, Chasidism, and Yiddish literature; and women in contemporary culture and politics. Accessible and comprehensive, this volume will appeal to the general reader in addition to engaging with contemporary academic scholarship.

Strange Genre-Related Loops In A Novel-Short Story: The Tension Between The Genres And Their Cultural Context, Orna Levin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The goal of the current study was to examine the strange genre-related loops in the novel The Short Story Master, by Maya Arad (2009), through the tension between the two genres represented in the text and their cultural contexts. The plot of the novel tells of the professional and personal crisis of the master of the short story, who failed in his mission to write a novel. The text hints to the reader that the central conflict that moves the plot along is neither romantic nor existential, but rather genre-related, and thus the entire work is a manifestation of …

Where Is Anne Frank, Ken Derry

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Where Is Anne Frank (2021) directed by Ari Folman.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening, Sherry Coman

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2021), directed by Bianca Stigter.

Jewish Mobile's Narrow Bridge, Deborah Gurt

University Faculty and Staff Publications

Mobile, Alabama, is home to a Jewish community formally established in 1841 when members purchased land for a burial ground. Approximately 1,000 in number, today’s Jewish residents are deeply entwined with the fabric of the city—in business, education, medicine, and civic life. Among them are Holocaust survivors and their descendants, families who have lived here for generations, Jews of color, transplants from the North, LGBTQ Jews, and converts to Judaism, unified primarily by their experiences as members of a religious and cultural minority in Alabama.

The Embroidered Tablecloth: How Locale Influences Eastern European Jewish Textile Production, Elena Solomon

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Recent scholarship frames craft as distinct from art and as an encapsulation of cultural expression at a given moment. Building on that framework, this thesis analyzes the shifting attitudes towards the production of handmade textiles among Eastern European Jews in the US in the twentieth century, as influenced by their migration. To demonstrate the textile environment at that time, this thesis examines pre- and post-migration primary sources and autobiographical writing, including Mary Antin’s The Promised Land, supplemented with interviews of first- and second-generation immigrants to Chicago. In contrast with stereotypes about craft as historically stable, defining craft as regional …

The Structural Grammaticalization Of The Biblical Hebrew Ethical Dative, Oliver Shoulson

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

This paper offers a structural analysis of the evolution of a grammatical phenomenon in Biblical Hebrew known as the Ethical Dative (ED). My analysis is rooted in the grammaticalization chain proposed by Talmy Givón wherein the Ethical Dative evolves incrementally from other dative forms, accounting for its lopsided distribution across the Bible. Via its similarity to the Personal Dative in Appalachian English, I propose a derivation for the ED whose locus is the specifier of a high Applicative Phrase, allowing us to account for Givón’s progression through the gradual reduction of merge-operations and feature-valuation at that node. My analysis bolsters …

Jewish Ancestral Languages And Communicating The Sephardic Experience: The Judeospanish Of Tela De Sevoya, Julia Kahn

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

Judeo-Spanish, the ancestral language of Sephardic Jews, enjoys fewer speakers, literature, and less scholarly attention compared to Yiddish, its counterpart spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. Nonetheless, Judeo-Spanish captures the rich experiences of its speakers through exile, persecution, and perseverance, embodying unique Jewish-Spanish culture and religious practice. It has received fresh recognition in the last two centuries from scholars and Sephardim themselves, and the quincentennial of the 1492 Jewish expulsion from Spain inspired a new Sephardic autobiographical genre, where Sephardic authors grapple with their heritages and language, dimming from assimilation and the Shoa. Myriam Moscona is one such author whose unique descent …

Joan Rivers: Comedy And Identity On The Road To Fashion Police, Melanie Gaw

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes how Joan Rivers’ comedy content and style changed during the first 30 years of her career and how these changes impacted Rivers’ presentation of her identity as a Jewish female comedian. This project focuses on Joan Rivers’ career in two sections: her early career with its reliance on a self-deprecatory style of humor spanning roughly from her first appearance on The Tonight Show in 1965 to the early 1980s, and a transitional period in her career that saw a shift toward a celebrity gossip style of humor during the 1980s. I perform textual analyses of some of …

The Emotional Heschel, Maria Junttila Carson

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation asserts that Heschel's work ought to be viewed as affective and emotional. Understanding Heschel's work as both creating and encouraging particular affects enables a more robust and fuller understanding of American Jewish postwar life. Specifically, American Jewish postwar life was animated by a nostalgia for the shtetl, a desire to connect with the State of Israel, a longing to create meaningful Jewish ritual, and uncertainty about the place of American Jews in broader social justice movements. Heschel views humans as interconnected in a web of affects and emotions; through affects, humans are connected to God, history and memory, …

“The Badge Of All Our Tribe”: Contradictions Of Jewish Representation On The English Renaissance Stage, Becky S. Friedman

Doctoral Dissertations

Literary and historical records fueled fantasies of intense difference between the Jews and Christians of early modern England. Representations of Jewishness in the Renaissance theater drew on many of these enduring pejorative fictions, which associated Jews with financial manipulation, corporeal abnormalities, and an innate predilection for iniquity. At the same time, depictions of stunningly beautiful Jewish women and sympathetic, relatable Jewish commoners also emerged on the stage, complicating centuries-old attitudes of antipathy with suggestions of fascination, compassion, and similitude. “The Badge of All Our Tribe”: Contradictions of Jewish Representation on the English Renaissance Stage sheds light on this broader spectrum …

From Alsace To America: The Development And Migration Of Ashkenazi Jewish Cuisine From Its Origins In Eastern France, Angela Hanratty

Dissertations

This research examines the historical development of a distinctly Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine from its roots in the Alsace region of France, through the Jewish settlements in Eastern Europe, and the mass immigration to America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The aim of the research was to come to an understanding of how global perception of what is considered to be quintessentially Jewish food (as evidenced in American Jewish delicatessens, Jewish homes, and in popular culture) has been shaped by developments in Alsace. Long standing views were held that Ashkenazi food developed in Eastern Europe, specifically Poland and the former …

Assimilating To Art-Religion: Jewish Secularity And Edgar Zilsel’S Geniereligion (1918), Abigail Fine

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

In 1918, Edgar Zilsel—a Marxist-Jewish philosopher who was soon to be exiled from Vienna—published a sociological study that later readers have found prescient of fascism. In Die Geniereligion (“The Religion of Genius”), Zilsel cautioned against the hidden dangers of elevating secular figures to the status of deities. As early as 1912, Zilsel was disturbed by how art-religion shaped music culture: his earliest published essay ruminated on timelessness and canonicity, on striving for heavenly tones while cast down to the earthly squalor of the concert hall. Indeed, in Zilsel’s Vienna, art-religion had come to dominate the music world—biographers made Beethoven a …

Review: The Art Of The Jewish Family: A History Of Women In Early New York In Five Objects, Jeanne E. Abrams

Center for Judaic Studies: Faculty Scholarship

Review of The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects by Laura Arnold Leibman.