Below is a special list from Henry Hollander, Bookseller
for the AJLsellers promotion to
benefit AJL. When ordering remember to include the phrase
HASAFRAN DECEMBER OFFER. Ordering information is at the end of this
post.
Chajes, J.H.
Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism. Philadelphia, University of Philadelphia Press, 2003. First Edition. ISBN: 0-8122-3724-2. Octavo in dust jacket, vi, 278 pp., Appendix: Spirit Possession Narratives from Early Modern Jewish Sources, notes, bibliography, index. Hardbound. Very Good.
"After a nearly two-thousand-year interlude, and just as Christian Europe was in the throes of the great Witch Hunt and what historians have referred to as "The Age of the Demoniac," accounts of spirit possession began to proliferate in the Jewish world. Concentrated at first in the Near East but spreading rapidly westward, spirit possession, both benevolent and malevolent, emerged as perhaps the most characteristic form of religiosity in early modern Jewish society.
Adopting a comparative historical approach, J. H. Chajes uncovers this strain of Jewish belief to which scant attention has been paid. Informed by recent research in historical anthropology, Between Worlds provides fascinating descriptions of the cases of possession as well as analysis of the magical techniques deployed by rabbinic exorcists to expel the ghostly intruders.
Seeking to understand the phenomenon of spirit possession in its full complexity, Chajes delves into its ideational framework—chiefly the doctrine of reincarnation—while exploring its relation to contemporary Christian and Islamic analogues. Regarding spirit possession as a form of religious expression open to—and even dominated by—women, Chajes initiates a major reassessment of women in the history of Jewish mysticism. In a concluding section he examines the reception history of the great Hebrew accounts of spirit possession, focusing on the deployment of these "ghost stories" in the battle against incipient skepticism in the turbulent Jewish community of seventeenth-century Amsterdam.
Exploring a phenomenon that bridged learned and ignorant, rich and poor, men and women, Jews and Gentiles, Between Worlds maps for the first time a prominent feature of the early modern Jewish religious landscape, as quotidian as it was portentous: the nexus of the living and the dead.," From the jacket's front flap copy. (72297) $14.50
Goluboff, Sascha L.
Jewish Russians: Upheavals in a Moscow Synagogue. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. First Edition. ISBN: 0-8122-3705-6. Octavo, black cloth with red lettering, vi, 208 pp., map, plans, notes, personae, glossary, works cited, index . Hardbound. Very Good.
"The prevalence of anti-Semitism in Russia is well known, but the issue of race within the Jewish community has rarely been discussed explicitly. Combining ethnography with archival research, Jewish Russians: Upheavals in a Moscow Synagogue documents the changing face of the historically dominant Russian Jewish community in the mid-1990s. Sascha Goluboff focuses on a Moscow synagogue, now comprising individuals from radically different cultures and backgrounds, as a nexus from which to explore issues of identity creation and negotiation. Following the rapid rise of this transnational congregation—headed by a Western rabbi and consisting of Jews from Georgia and the mountains of Azerbaijan and Dagestan, along with Bukharan Jews from Central Asia—she evaluates the process that created this diverse gathering and offers an intimate sense of individual interactions in the context of the synagogue's congregation.
Challenging earlier research claims that Russian and Jewish identities are mutually exclusive, Goluboff illustrates how post-Soviet Jews use Russian and Jewish ethnic labels and racial categories to describe themselves. Jews at the synagogue were constantly engaged in often contradictory but always culturally meaningful processes of identity formation. Ambivalent about emerging class distinctions, Georgian, Russian, Mountain, and Bukharan Jews evaluated one another based on each group's supposed success or failure in the new market economy. Goluboff argues that post-Soviet Jewry is based on perceived racial, class, and ethnic differences as they emerge within discourses of belonging to the Jewish people and the new Russian nation." From UPenn website. (72298) $12.00
Nathans, Benjamin and Safran, Gabriella, edited by.
Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. First Edition. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4055-9. Octavo in glossy paper covers, x, 323 pp., notes, index. Hardbound. Very Good.
"For most of the last four centuries, the broad expanse of territory between the Baltic and the Black Seas, known since the Enlightenment as "Eastern Europe," has been home to the world's largest Jewish population. The Jews of Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Galicia, Romania, and Ukraine were prodigious generators of modern Jewish culture. Their volatile blend of religious traditionalism and precocious quests for collective self-emancipation lies at the heart of Culture Front.
This volume brings together contributions by both historians and literary scholars to take readers on a journey across the cultural history of East European Jewry from the mid-seventeenth century to the present. The articles collected here explore how Jews and their Slavic neighbors produced and consumed imaginative representations of Jewish life in chronicles, plays, novels, poetry, memoirs, museums, and more.
The book puts culture at the forefront of analysis, treating verbal artistry itself as a kind of frontier through which Jews and Slavs imagined, experienced, and negotiated with themselves and each other. The four sections investigate the distinctive themes of that frontier: violence and civility; popular culture; politics and aesthetics; and memory. The result is a fresh exploration of ideas and movements that helped change the landscape of modern Jewish history." From the front dust jacket flap.
Preface by David B. Ruderman. Introduction: "A New Look at East European Jewish Culture," Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella Safran. Articles are "Jewish Literary Responses to the Events of 1648-1649 and the Creation of a Polish Jewish Consciousness," Adam Teller, "'Civil Christians': Debates on the Reform of the Jews in Poland, 1789-1830," Marcin Wodzinski, "The Botched Kiss and the Beginnings of the Yiddish Stage," Alyssa Quint, "The Polish Popular Novel and Jewish Modernization at the End of the Nineteenth and Beginning of the Twentieth Centuries," Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, "Cul-de-Sac: The "Inner Life of Jews" on the Fin-de-Siècle Polish Stage," Michael C. Steinlauf, "Yosef Haim Brenner, the "Half-Intelligentsia," and Russian-Jewish Politics, 1899-1908," Jonathan Frankel, "Recreating Jewish Identity in Haim Nahman Bialik's Poems: The Russian Context," Hamutal Bar-Yosef, "Not The Dybbuk but Don Quixote: Translation, Deparochialization, and Nationalism in Jewish Culture, 1917-1919," Kenneth Moss, "Beyond the Purim-shpil: Reinventing the Scroll of Esther in Modern Yiddish Poems," Kathryn Hellerstein, "Revealing and Concealing the Soviet Jewish Self: The Desk-Drawer Memoirs of Meir Viner," Marcus Moseley, "The Shtetl Subjunctive: Yaffa Eliach's Living History Museum," Jeffrey Shandler. (72295) $15.00
Ragussis, Michael.
Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. First Edition. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4220-1. Octavo in glossy dust jacket, viii, 248 pp., b/w drawings, notes, index. Hardbound. Very Good.
"Perhaps the most significant development of the Georgian theater was its multiplication of ethnic, colonial, and provincial character types parading across the stage. In Theatrical Nation, Michael Ragussis opens up an archive of neglected plays and performances to examine how this flood of domestic and colonial others showcased England in general and London in particular as the center of an increasingly complex and culturally mixed nation and empire, and in this way illuminated the shifting identity of a newly configured Great Britain.
In asking what kinds of ideological work these ethnic figures performed and what forms were invented to accomplish this work, Ragussis concentrates on the most popular of the "outlandish Englishmen," the stage Jew, Scot, and Irishman. Theatrical Nation understands these stage figures in the context of the government's controversial attempts to merge different ethnic and national groups through the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland, the Jewish Naturalization Bill of 1753, and the Act of Union with Ireland of 1800.
Exploring the significant theatrical innovations that illuminate the central anxieties shared by playhouse and nation, Ragussis considers how ethnic identity was theatricalized, even as it moved from stage to print. By the early nineteenth century, Anglo-Irish and Scottish novelists attempted to deconstruct the theater's ethnic stereotypes while reimagining the theatricality of interactions between English and ethnic characters. An important shift took place as the novel's cross-ethnic love plot replaced the stage's caricatured male stereotypes with the beautiful ethnic heroine pursued by an English hero." from the front flap of the book. (72294) $15.00
Zakim, Eric.
To Build and Be Built: Landscape, Literature, and the Construction of Zionist Identity. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. First Edition. ISBN: 978-0-8122-3903-4. Octavo in glossy paper covers, 250 pp., b/w photos, notes, bibliography, index. Hardbound. Very Good.
"Eric Zakim follows the literary and intellectual career of the powerful Zionist slogan "to build and be built" from its conceptual origin in reaction to the Kishinev pogroms of 1903, when it first served as an expression of settlement aspiration, until the end of pre-state national expansion in Palestine in 1938. "Draining the swamps" and "making the desert bloom," the Jewish settlers imagined themselves as performing "miracles" on the land. By these acts, they were also meant to reinvent the very notion of what it was to be a Jew in the modern world. As Jewish settlers reshaped nature in the Holy Land by turning it from one thing into another, they too were newly constructed. Zakim argues that in the period leading up to the establishment of the state of Israel, the action of working the land and building its cities in order to transform both into something essentially Jewish increasingly came to mark a turn inward toward the reclamation of a Jewish subject tied to the very soil of Palestine.
To Build and Be Built radically recontextualizes modernist Hebrew literature to demonstrate how literary aesthetics of nature formed the very political discourse they nominally reflected. Zakim's work sees no division between politics and representation. Instead, the depiction of nature in literature, art, and architecture became constitutive of a political and social understanding of the Jew's place in the Middle East. By refusing to acknowledge the disciplinary boundaries of standard works on literature, history, and political thought, To Build and Be Built challenges the methodological certainties that have guided popular and academic understandings of the development of Zionist involvement in the land of Israel. For this reason, To Build and Be Built will be of interest to people beyond literature, in particular those working in history and those outside of Israel studies who have an interest in modernism and the representation of nature in the history of culture." From the front jacket flap. (72296) $25.00
Zlotnick, Helena.
Dinah's Daughters: Gender and Judaism from the Hebrew Bible to Late Antiquity. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. First Edition. ISBN: 0-8122-3644-0. Octavo, gray-black cloth with silver lettering, x, 248 pp., notes, bibliography, general index, index of citations. Hardbound. Very Good.
"The status of women in the ancient Judaism of the Hebrew Bible and Rabbinic texts has long been a contested issue. What does being a Jewess entail in antiquity? Men in ancient Jewish culture are defined primarily by what duties they are expected to perform, the course of action that they take. The Jewess, in contrast, is bound by stricture. Writing on the formation and transformation of the ideology of female Jewishness in the ancient world, Zlotnick places her treatment in a broad, comparative, Mediterranean context, bringing in parallels from Greek and Roman sources. Drawing on episodes from the Hebrew Bible and on Midrashic, Mishnaic, and Talmudic texts, she pays particular attention to the ways in which they attempt to determine the boundaries of communal affiliation through real and perceived differences between Israelites, or Jews, on one hand and non-Israelites, or Gentiles, on the other.
Women are often associated in the sources with the forbidden, and foreign women are endowed with a curious freedom of action and choice that is hardly ever shared by their Jewish counterparts. Delilah, for instance, is one of the most autonomous women in the Bible, appearing without patronymic or family ties. She also brings disaster. Dinah, the Jewess, by contrast, becomes an agent of self-destruction when she goes out to mingle with gentile female friends. In ancient Judaism the lessons of such tales were applied as rules to sustain membership in the family, the clan, and the community.
While Zlotnick's central project is to untangle the challenges of sex, gender, and the formation of national identity in antiquity, her book is also a remarkable study of intertextual relations within the Jewish literary tradition." From the UPenn website. (72299) $12.50
Henry Hollander, Bookseller
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