Holy Envy

Abstract

This book explores a significant lacuna in the study of interreligious relations. Whereas Jewish-Christian relations have been well examined from theological and historical perspectives, little has been said about the aesthetic implications of these intense encounters. Focusing on the emotional consequences of trafficking in the volatile space of interfaith encounters, this study examines modern and contemporary writers who negotiate the territory between Judaism and Christianity to important aesthetic and conceptual/theological ends. Exploring, from new angles, the unruly space where these two religious traditions intersect and engage, Holy Envy demonstrates what the Jewish Christian borderzone means for aesthetic production and identifies how these creative responses may suggest new ways of thinking about Jewish-Christian relations. Starting with novelists Sholem Asch and Henry Roth, the book shifts to consider a range of poets including Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, Karl Shapiro, Denise Levertov, and Leonard Cohen. Understanding how poetry can serve as a site of strong emotional response, Holy Envy tracks some of the complex feelings provoked by interreligious encounters—such as shame and, of course, envy. While recognizing a long overdue need to address a fundamentally Christian narrative underwriting twentieth-century American verse, Holy Envy does more than represent Christianity as an aesthetically coercive force, or as an adversarial other. In bringing together recent accounts of Jewish-Christian relations, affect theory, and poetics, Holy Envy offers new ways into difficult but urgent conversations about interreligious encounters.