Hebrew Writers Research Articles

Never Ending Stories? Hebrew Writers' Creative Journey in the Second Half of Life

ABSTRACTThis qualitative study explored the relationship between creativity, time, age, and the literary world among 16 award‐winning Israeli writers in the second half of their lives. Based on data collected through in‐depth interviews with the participants, the findings indicate that the writers' creativity in the second half of life was linked to Preservation, Growth, and Decline, leading to four interrelated dimensions: (a) preserving youth through creativity, (b) enhancing creativity over time, (c) navigating creativity, acclaim, and ageism, and (d) managing creativity amidst a changing world. The study found that the writers' creativity was enhanced over time, as they gained experience and developed their skills. However, some writers experienced a decline in stamina or their ability to write long novels. The study also found that the writers' experiences of acceptance from the literary world and the audience changed over time. Some writers continued to receive acclaim and attention, while others experienced ageism and a decline in the audience's interest in their work.

Muḥammad in Zion

Abstract This article discusses the ways in which Hebrew writers in late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine interacted with the history of early Islam and the relations between Muslims and Jews of the Arabian Peninsula and the political, cultural, and social functions their reconstruction fulfilled in the critical junctures of Hebrew culture in the East. The article argues that these Hebrew works reflected the development of Hebrew culture in Palestine and masqueraded the advancement of Zionist tenants among Jewish settlers on the land. Those Zionist ideals encompassed: the revival of Hebrew, the physical and cultural return to the Orient, the demonstration of the cultural and material profits Zionists might bring to the indigenous population of Palestine through underscoring a Jewish influence on Islam, and finally, to promote aspects of Jewish heroism and sacrifice by focusing on the early confrontation between Jews and Muslims.

Hebrew Gomel: Space, Genre, Modernity

Abstract: This article explores the understudied role of Gomel as an important center of literary production during the emergence of Hebrew modernism at the turn of the twentieth century. Prominent writers such as Gershon Shofman, Yosef Haim Brenner, and Uri Nissan Gnessin fostered personal and literary dialogues in and with the city. By combining various methodological approaches—New Historicism, literary cartography, and regional history—we analyze the unique spatial dynamics that sparked Gomel's transformation into a laboratory of Hebrew modernism. While grounding our readings of Shofman, Brenner, and Gnessin in the spatial turn in literary theory, we argue that these three canonical Hebrew writers created literary texts that captured the urban experience of this eastern European Jewish metropolis. We trace the evolution of Hebrew texts written in Gomel from a synchronic perspective and construct a detailed description of the town's literary-cum-cultural history. At the same time, we focus on Gomel's broader historical and geographical status within the Pale of Settlement and demonstrate how each of the three writers used a different literary genre—the urban miniature, the novel, and the novella—to create a unique representation of Gomel's urban space. Furthermore, by focusing on the chronotope of Gomel, our readings of Shofman, Brenner, and Gnessin underscore that these texts are grounded in Gomel's urban fabric through particular forms of local belonging, rather than an abstract notion of "uprooted" existence.

The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature by Marina Zilbergerts

Reviewed by: The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature by Marina Zilbergerts Wendy Zierler Marina Zilbergerts. The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. 184 pp. It has long been acknowledged that deep knowledge of biblical and rabbinic literature on the part of early modern Hebrew poets and prose writers played a vital role in the creation of modern Hebrew literature and the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. As Benjamin Harshav notes, “Secular Hebrew poetry grew in the soil of Hebrew study in the religious society against which all Hebrew poets rebelled in their youth.”1 In light of this, Marina Zilbergerts’s new study of the yeshiva and the rise of modern Hebrew literature might seem, at first, like old news. Far from it, however. Whereas previous studies of this subject emphasized the role of Haskalah, Zionism, or secularism, Zilbergerts examines the rise of the modern yeshiva, with its elite ethos of Torah lishmah (Torah study for its own sake), as a way of explaining the seemingly miraculous rise of Hebrew literary culture. The book sets out to answer several questions from this vantage point: How and why did modern Hebrew literature come to be, and why in the setting of late nineteenth-century Russia? Given the utter impracticality of creating a literature in a language that no one actually spoke, and the ideological push in Russian culture for writing that was materially useful to society, how did these mid- and late nineteenth-century Hebrew writers make the case for their writing? Zilbergerts argues that the text-centeredness of the modern yeshiva led to an orientation where texts became more real than the physical world, where the “play and pleasure” of textual learning took on heightened importance. The result of viewing Torah as an omnisignificant literature to be interpreted and debated through a variety of hermeneutic and literary strategies was a blurring of the conventional boundary between sacred and secular Hebrew texts. All this laid the groundwork for these text-centered values to be transferred to secular Hebrew literary production once these young writers left the yeshiva. In addition to considering the autotelic value of text in yeshiva culture, Zilbergerts considers corresponding patterns of study and ideological dissent among nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox seminarians. Yeshiva and Russian Orthodox students alike experienced both the exhilaration of elite study and deep [End Page 240] despair over their lack of practical skills and economic opportunities, despite their erudition. Seminary-educated Russian nihilist writers such as Nikolay Chernyshevsky (1828–1889) and Nikolay Dobrolyubov (1836–1861) expressed deep dissatisfaction with their church education, along with a strong desire to achieve social usefulness. Nevertheless, these nihilist writers often mimicked the practices of Russian Orthodox hermeneutics in their critical writing, a cultural pattern that was reproduced by disaffected ex-yeshiva students. Indeed, even when yeshiva students abandoned their studies, they carried with them a reverence for textuality for its own sake. Under the pressures and influence of Russian nihilism, Hebrew writers such as Avraham Uri, Shaul, and Yiẓḥak Aizik Kovner attacked the maskilic Hebrew language and literature for ignoring the pressing material issues of society. Still, these same critics often resorted to the Hebrew wordplays and exegetical practices of the very rabbinic/maskilic culture they sought to critique. Even as these writers sought to detach themselves from the constraints of their yeshiva background, they kept returning to the practices and aesthetic models of Torah lishmah, redirecting these practices to the creation of their new secular Hebrew poetry and prose. Moshe Leib Lilienblum thus inveighs against the superstitions and backward practices of traditional Judaism, including kest marriage, and the failure of the yeshiva system to provide young men with a practical vocation, only to defend talmudic literature against maskilic charges of nonsense. Similarly, ex-Volozhin Yeshiva students Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky and Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik produced literary works that decry the dead-in-life nature of text study, but also revel in it with a kind of sublimated sexual energy. “The freedom to engage with Jewish texts and ideas without exterior motive,” Zilbergerts argues, “along with the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, was arguably...

The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature by Neta Stahl

Reviewed by: The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature by Neta Stahl Chen Mandel-Edrei Neta Stahl. The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature. London: Routledge, 2020. 212 pp. Neta Stahl's The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature provides us with fresh terminology with which to consider modern Hebrew literary historiographies and constitutes a call for new scholarly frameworks within the field of modern Hebrew literature. Stahl argues that despite challenges to the established critical narrative of secularization in modern Hebrew letters, the binary categories of religion and secularization still dominate. Stahl claims that this binary system is ineffective for reading the various and complex forms by which divinity appears in modern texts and seeks to go beyond and against this limited framework. As was illuminated by Gershom Scholem, Hannan Hever, Shachar Pinsker, and others, the divine is embedded in the Hebrew language despite attempts to repress or secularize it, a condition that in the Zionist context might be culturally destructive. Acknowledging this, Stahl works to illuminate a broader spectrum [End Page 447] of representations of the divine while extending our understanding of their literary and cultural functions. Fundamental to this literature, Stahl writes, are three religious-philosophical tensions that challenge the act of representing divinity. The first is the biblical prohibition against representing God, which, developed by Maimonides, allows a merely rhetorical representation of a transcendent and bodyless entity whose intentions are concealed. The second is kabbalist perceptions according to which divinity resides in language itself, posing representational problems. The third is a historical tension that questions the assumption that modern Hebrew writers worked to depart from tradition. Here, Stahl adopts Shraga Bar-On's suggestion to understand modern literary projects through the concept of quest in which God is present and absent simultaneously. In the first chapter, which is dedicated to pantheism, Stahl reads canonic works from the turn of the twentieth century (by Aḥad Ha-ʿam, S. Y. Abramovitsh, Ḥ. N. Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky, and M. Y. Berdyczewski) and validates the well-established claim that these writers did not seek to secularize Judaism but to extract God from the limited halakhic world to a national sphere, which is natural and universal. The second chapter focuses on the relation between images of man and God as described by Y. H. Brenner and Avraham Shlonsky. Here, "theomorphism" and its nuances (mainly anthropomorphism) are the center of discussion. Stahl shows that in Brenner's writing, the world-without-God forces man to embrace godly powers for redeeming humanity, a move that fails and leaves man in what Aharon Appelfeld has called "distress of religiosity" (43). In Shlonsky's late poems, God provides utopian dimensions to the national labor of the pioneer, who then becomes "a divine creature whose own hands re-create God's world" (52). The third chapter is dedicated to Uri Ẓvi Greenberg and presents a complicated image of his transition from a world filled with "the God of mother-father" to a broken world (seemingly) devoid of God. Stahl shows how Greenberg's response to World War I was to split God into two entities; while rejecting the universal God of the arts that his contemporaries embraced, Greenberg elevates the local God whose divinity is realized through the open wound of the poet. Greenberg's response to World War II in Reḥovot ha-nahar (1951) is read by Stahl through the notion of hester panim and the dynamics of theodicy that help illuminate the poet's justification for violence. Focusing on S. Y. Agnon, the fourth chapter examines providence and punishment. Discussing various works, Stahl claims that Agnon depicts divine order through negative theology and criticizes it using what she calls "theo-narration" (103). The fifth chapter deals with Dahlia Ravikovitch and Yehuda Amichai's antiwar poetry. Stahl points out that in Amichai's poems, humans are presented as victims of violence that results from a distanced divinity; a structure that is incompatible with the secular world and that overlooks human accountability. She explains that this antitheodicy rhetoric allows Amichai to remain loyal to the victims by graphically depicting the results of violence without "tainting" them with politics. Juxtaposing Ravikovitch with Amichai, Stahl shows that Ravikovitch emphasizes what...

Vilna as a Centre of Hebrew Literature: The Journal Hazman

In 1904, a Hebrew journalistic and literary initiative was established in Vilna, headed by the writer and publisher Ben-Avigdor, and the journalist and editor Ben Zion Katz. Vilna was chosen, among other reasons, for being a deeply rooted centre of Hebrew culture, with a long tradition of printing and publishing. The new initiative revived it as a magnet for Hebrew writers and journalists, an impressive team that joined together to create the daily Hazman (The Time) and its supplements. The editors’ policy was not to impose a binding political line on the paper, but to give an opening to all the factions in the Jewish public, while also hoping to expand the target audience of the paper. The year 1905 was the time of glory of Hazman, both for its news and its literary sections. But its momentum was halted during 1906, due to the political storm in Russia and the rapid decline of Hebrew journals, which lost most of their readership to the flourishing Yiddish press. Thus, the Hazman affair embodies a dramatic crossroads. It was the beginning of the decline of Hebrew literature in Eastern Europe, alongside the laying of the foundations for Hebrew literature in the Land of Israel during the first two decades of the 20th century. This essay draws an outline of the affair on the basis of a variety of sources, including the newspaper itself, memories of the personalities involved, and correspondence that has survived from those days.

Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution by Karen Grumberg (review)

Reviewed by: Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution by Karen Grumberg Maya Barzilai Karen Grumberg. Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 328 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000295 The title of Karen Grumberg's 2019 book, Hebrew Gothic, states what is not obvious: modern Hebrew literature has not been often associated with the [End Page 473] European Gothic and its ghosts, supernatural phenomena, haunted castles, crypts, and labyrinths. Grumberg herself contends that the Gothic mode might appear at first "incompatible with the aesthetic and the setting of Israel/Palestine" (3). Over the course of this lucidly written volume, however, she makes a compelling case for considering Hebrew writers' engagement with the European and American Gothic. Through comparative readings of Hebrew fiction alongside popular Gothic works by Horace Walpole and Edgar Alan Poe, Grumberg shows that scholarship of Hebrew literature stands to gain from a reassessment of this corpus outside the conventional frameworks of Hebrew literary history and more classical European literature. The twentieth-century writers Grumberg discusses did not adopt the Gothic wholesale, but rather appropriated Gothic themes and conventions to offer a critical examination of the Jewish past; they also drew on the Gothic tradition in order to address the ambivalence inherent to Jewish nationalism, reopening wounds such as the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. The European Gothic has allowed Jewish writers to call into question the narration of past events, to engage both history and historiography. In Hebrew Gothic, Grumberg constellates European and American works with Hebrew literature spanning the early twentieth-century writers S. Y. Agnon, Dvora Baron, and Yaakov Shteinberg, through Leah Goldberg's mid-twentieth-century theatrical writing, to novels by Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua. She productively pairs Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Israeli writer Almog Behar's short story "Ana min al-yahoud" (I'm one of the Jews), and concludes the book with parody and black humor in twenty-first-century Gothic-inspired Israeli film and television. At the outset, Grumberg points out that "it is not only what gothic texts do but also how they do it that makes them gothic" (6). In other words, the transgression of established social, cultural, and national boundaries in Gothic works unleashes a state of anxiety, an atmosphere of terror. The Gothic trades in instability, Grumberg explains, and this instability stems from the return of repressed narratives in Gothic literature. One of the central questions Hebrew Gothic poses concerns how twentieth-century Hebrew writers engaged historical events in order to comment on the Jewish and Zionist present and future. In many of Grumberg's case studies, supernatural motifs and gothic scenes allow writers to interrupt linear narratives of national conquest and triumph, as well as to call into question gender norms and expectations. Divided into two parts, "A Spectralized Past" and "Haunted Nation," Hebrew Gothic balances works that contend with the Jewish European past with post-1948 Hebrew literature. Reading Agnon's macabre Polish stories, Grumberg shows how the author appropriated stereotypes of the Wandering Jew and the bloodthirsty Jew in order to "recalibrate the dynamics of victims and oppressors," assigning antisemitic tropes to Christian figures. The issue of victimization returns in the chapter on maternal figures in stories by Baron and Shteinberg. In contrast to the passive and repressed Gothic heroine, Grumberg reads the "gothic agunah" as both "excessively present" and "defiant" or resistant through her affect (85). Grumberg previously explored Space and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature (2012) and her current book likewise focuses on the spatiotemporal dimensions of the Hebrew Gothic. She focuses, for instance, on the [End Page 474] cuckoo clock in Leah Goldberg's "Lady of the Castle," interpreting it as a foreboding Gothic motif that also invites a spatial reading, as it leads to a secret passageway and room where Lena, a Holocaust survivor, remained locked away even after the war's conclusion. Grumberg's comparative analysis, drawing on the work of Poe, suggests that Goldberg narrated the castle as a spiritual sanctuary in response to the demand placed on her to produce ideologically enlisted literature. The notion of a "conflicted Zionism," becomes relevant also for Oz and Yehoshua...

Um órfão na epidemia - conto de Eliyahu Meidanek

Este texto apresenta a tradução do conto O Órfão, do escritor em língua hebraica Eliyahu Meidanek.

A European Enlightenment in the Promised Land? The Jewish Kulturkampf at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT This article discusses the European Kulturkampf in the nineteenth century from the points of view of the Russian Hebrew writer Judah Leib Gordon and the founding father of the Zionist movement Theodor Herzl. Gordon’s literary outlook emphasizes the tension between the traditional Jewish religious leadership and the maskilim as an instance of the sweeping all-European Kulturkampf phenomenon, in which the problem of the rabbis was the last issue that had not yet been solved. He believed that the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel, without the elimination of the rabbis’ authority, carried serious dangers. In his dystopian feuilleton published in 1885 depicting the future Jewish state, he argued that the victory of liberalism was a historical necessity in order to avoid a radical orthodox and nationalistic hegemony. Like Gordon before him, Herzl feared that losing the basic humanistic principles of the Enlightenment the Jews had acquired in Europe would be one of the outcomes of their settling in the Land of Israel. In his 1902 utopian novel Altneuland he declared: “Stand by the principles that have made us great: Liberalism, Tolerance, Love of Mankind. Only then will Zion be truly Zion.” Gordon and Herzl both expressed their concerns in their fictional works, probably wishing that these would serve only as warning signs.

Reportage from Blotetown: Yisroel-Yoysef Zevin (Tashrak) and the Shtetlization of New York City

ABSTRACT The neglected-but-popular Yiddish humorist Tashrak (penname of Yisroel-Yoysef Zevin) offers not just an opportunity to discover understudied aspects of the Jewish urban experience and modern Yiddish culture, but also allows us to tap into a less refined level of beliefs, behavior, judgments and attitudes of Yiddish-speaking Jews in America. Tashrak wittily conveyed to his readers a comforting image of the New World: New York City was just an enlarged shtetl, whose Jewish residents clashed over a host of issues, while encountering a number of stereotypical non-Jews. In his representation of internal Jewish divisions and disputes, relations with non-Jews, and the trials of modernity and assimilation, Tashrak followed, to some extent, the literary paths of earlier Yiddish and Hebrew writers. Yet critics often frowned upon his politics as either conservative or apolitical, and considered his literary style as lowbrow, thus they disregarded his work altogether, or referred to it as worthless.

The War on Useless Literature: Nihilism and the Crisis of Modern Hebrew Literature in Russia

This article details how the ideas of nihilism challenged the incipient sphere of Hebrew literature in nineteenth-century Russia. In the 1860s, Russian nihilist critics Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobroliubov, and Dmitrii Pisarev argued that the value of literary works lies in their social utility. For young Jewish writers emerging from rabbinic milieus where the engagement with sacred texts was valued for its own sake, discovery of the utilitarian view of literature threatened to undermine their own literary aspirations and the project of Hebrew literature as a whole. I show that, in the wake of the nihilist critique in the 1860s, yeshivaeducated writers began to turn against the newly formed sphere of Hebrew letters with the accusation that a "useless" textual engagement characteristic of Talmud study pervaded the Hebrew literary production of their day. I track the development of this idea in the debates of pioneering Hebrew writers and literary critics such as Abraham Uri Kovner, his lesser-known brother Isaac Kovner, and the writer Abraham Ber Gottlober. Reading early Jewish writers and critics alongside their Russian contemporaries, this article illuminates the struggle of modern Hebrew writers with the Jewish religious textual tradition, while situating it in the context of larger Russian debates about literature's value and function in the world.

Tubercular Capital: Illness and the Condition of Modern Jewish Writing by Sunny S. Yudkoff

Reviewed by: Tubercular Capital: Illness and the Condition of Modern Jewish Writing by Sunny S. Yudkoff Rachel Rubinstein Tubercular Capital: Illness and the Condition of Modern Jewish Writing By Sunny S. Yudkoff. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. 241 pp. In their 2015 essay "Jewish Literature/World Literature: Between the Local and the Transnational," Lital Levy and Allison Schachter persuasively argue that modern Jewish literature's "transnational networks of linguistic and cultural exchange provide a clear counterpoint" to the dominant model of "center-periphery" circulation assumed by much of comparative literary studies.1 Jewish print culture easily crossed linguistic and geographical boundaries between Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and Jewish readers and writers all over the globe participated in a variety of local, national, and transnational debates via translation and adaptation. Ultimately, Levy and Schachter call for a new vision of comparative Jewish literary studies, arguing that the "rich, multilingual body of modern Jewish writing exemplifies the dynamic interaction of diverse literary cultures along circuits of exchange in the so-called global peripheries."2 One would not think that a seemingly modest book about tuberculosis in modern Jewish literature might serve as an exemplar of Levy and Schachter's bracing vision of Jewish literature as world literature. But according to Sunny Yudkoff's book, which was awarded the 2018 Salo Baron Award for the best first book in Jewish studies, tuberculosis provided a "generative context" for writers and served as a "condition of possibility" for their careers (2), despite the devastation that it wrought on their bodies. In functioning as a "critical mediator" in the creation and circulation of modern Yiddish and Hebrew writing, alongside their German and English intertexts, across Europe, the Middle East, and America, tuberculosis became an engine for transnational and translingual literary exchange in both material and metaphorical ways. [End Page 315] Yudkoff's introduction provides a wide-ranging, multidisciplinary introduction to tuberculosis and its various meanings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the Romantics, tuberculosis was the poet's disease, but for social reformers of the nineteenth century, it was the tragic by-product of industrialization and labor exploitation. Tuberculosis, like other illnesses such as syphilis and neurasthenia, was frequently coded as a racialized Jewish disease. Tuberculosis, that is to say, was a flexible signifier, deployed to invoke a multitude of connotations. But Yudkoff is attentive not only to the "symbolic range" of tuberculosis, but also to its material, lived realities, from the economics and social dynamics of the sanitorium, to the medical profession's changing treatment protocols (15–16). Yudkoff's four case studies focus on the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, the Hebrew poet Rahel, the American Yiddish writers who sojourned in the Jewish Consumptives Relief Society in Denver, Colorado, and the Hebrew writer David Vogel. Each of these case studies describes a uniquely multilingual and transnational context for these writers' literary production, complexly mediated by tuberculosis. Sholem Aleichem's illness became a global fundraising opportunity and catalyzed his career, literalizing the "Tubercular Capital" of Yudkoff's title. For the poet Rahel, writing between Russian and Hebrew in pre-state Palestine, tuberculosis as poetic subject and her sickroom as "spatial-experiential frame" (55) helped to crystallize her signature literary style of pashtut [simplicity]. The Yiddish writers who were sent to the Denver sanitorium included Yehoash, H. Leivick, David Edelshtat, and many others. Indeed, the sanitorium, a veritable writers' colony, published its own bilingual literary journal called the Sanatorium. The journal solicited work from Yiddish writers all over the country in its effort to raise funds for the sanitorium, and the writers then used the journal as a testing ground for writing in English—notably, Yehoash himself, for whom the Sanatorium "became the venue for him to test out his American voice and to engage the Anglo-American literary tradition—both in English and Yiddish" (91). Finally, Yudkoff turns to David Vogel, considered a Hebrew writer but who, as Yudkoff persuasively demonstrates, wrote across Yiddish, German, and [End Page 316] Hebrew. Like the peripatetic Sholem Aleichem, Vogel moved between Vilna, Palestine, Vienna, Merano, Italy (formerly Austria), and Paris largely because of his precarious health. His Hebrew novel, In the Sanatorium, was based on his...

The Real Motives Behind the Constitution: The Endless Quest

The Real Motives Behind the Constitution: The Endless Quest Jack N. Rakove (bio) Jeff Broadwater, Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Xiv + 274 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Xiii + 865 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. Of the making of many books about the Constitution, there is no end. But contrary to the wisdom of Qohelet (the Hebrew writer better known from the Septuagint as Ecclesiastes), when we discuss the Constitution—its creation, history, and interpretation—we reject the proposition that “much chatter is a weariness of the flesh”.1 In these two quite different books, Jeff Broadwater and Michael J. Klarman carry us back to the origins of the Constitution. Broadwater offers a quasi-biopic approach focusing on the famous friendship of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, arguably the most celebrated personal alliance in American political history. His book can be read as one more riff of Founders’ chic, a genre that Joseph Ellis (a great narrator though less reliable analyst) has most profitably exploited. Klarman manifestly does not worship with that cult. The Framers’ Coup is a far more ambitious work. It presents a comprehensive, thoroughly researched (by a platoon of twenty-four law students and two staff assistants) history of the adoption of the Constitution, from the “critical years” of the mid-1780s through the ratification of the first ten amendments, later known as the Bill of Rights, in 1791. Klarman’s conception of a “coup”—a point to be discussed in some detail later—hardly accords with the heroic account of the Framing/Founding that still dominates the conventional narrative. Equally noteworthy, Klarman casts himself as a latter-day Beardian, a neo-neo-Progressive historian who emphasizes the play of interests far more than the articulation of ideas. Sharing the advocatory voice of legal scholarship, Klarman wants to disabuse his readers of any un-critical loyalty—or ingrained “veneration,” to evoke a venerable moral from Madison’s Federalist 49—to the Constitution itself. [End Page 216] In nearly every conventional story of the adoption of the Constitution, Madison still stands primus inter pares. Neither Broadwater nor Klarman disputes that judgment. However one assesses Madison’s victories and defeats at the 1787 convention, no one contributed more to the task of fashioning a strategy of constitutional reform, or did more to set the Convention’s agenda, via his seminal memorandum on the “Vices of the Political System of the U. States” or through the Virginia Plan that launched the business. Equally important, Madison’s twenty-nine contributions to The Federalist, especially the celebrated Tenth and Fifty-first essays, provide the foundation for the prevailing belief that the United States still inhabits a “Madisonian constitution.” True, some efforts have been made to dislodge Madison’s authority. In her great book on ratification, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (2010), the late Pauline Maier made a bold move by making George Washington the pivotal figure. She offered a view, not from Madison’s study at Montpelier, with its vista of the Blue Ridge, but from Washington’s verandah at Mount Vernon, rising high above the Potomac. In A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (2003), Max Edling provides a predominantly Hamiltonian account that privileges the needs of national security and the experiences of the Continental Army. William Ewald’s projected biography of James Wilson is expected to make a bold claim for the greater influence of the Scottish immigrant to Pennsylvania.2 But at least since Charles Beard first emphasized Federalist 10 in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), Madison has been our preeminent authority. Because Jefferson’s role in the adoption of the Constitution is more modest, Broadwater takes a certain risk in his dual-biographic venture. We can speculate whether the Constitution would have looked different had Jefferson and John Adams attended the Federal Convention, rather than fulfilling their respective diplomatic missions in Paris and London respectively. But we recall Jefferson first and foremost...

What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) ed. by Naomi B. Sokoloff & Nancy E. Berg

Reviewed by: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) ed. by Naomi B. Sokoloff & Nancy E. Berg Emily Alice Katz Naomi B. Sokoloff & Nancy E. Berg, eds. What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans). Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. Pp 256. Hardcover $95, paper $30. ISBN 9780295743752, 9780295743769. You would be forgiven for mistaking the story of poet Robert White-hill-Bashan for a magic-realism novella: deep in the heart of Texas, an American-born poet teaches himself Hebrew as a teenager, produces four books of admirable Hebrew poetry in the following four decades, then moves to Hollywood to launch a successful career as a septuagenarian actor. The [End Page 140] story is true: Whitehill-Bashan is the sole American-born poet writing in Hebrew today, decades after the zenith of Hebraist culture in the United States, with its small constellation of Ivrit B'ivrit teacher training institutes and Hebrew-immersion camps, its dedicated coterie of Hebrew writers and thinkers. This heady, seemingly improbable poetic flowering in the American heartland—a "literary miracle" in the words of scholar Michael Weingrad—suggests that Hebrew has not yet exhausted its astonishments in the New World. Indeed, the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) proposes that teaching, studying, and even writing Hebrew stateside is an endeavor ripe for reclamation, reconsideration, and renewal. The writers, educators, and scholars between its covers promise that the story of Hebrew in America is yet unfolding. As the introduction by editors Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg, and the volume's subsequent material, makes clear, the problems besetting Hebrew within the academy, and in the larger Jewish community, are manifold. Hebrew faces particularly cumbersome obstacles among modern languages: a Jewish populace that is increasingly diffuse and assimilated; a pedagogical environment, in the college classroom, complicated by Jewish "heritage" learners with little to no actual facility with the spoken or written language; declining enrollments in languages and the humanities generally; and a political landscape in which Hebrew, as the language of modern Israel, is bound up with vigorous, sometimes hostile critiques of its place on the contemporary campus. Consider this grim scenario: in the last decade, enrollments in Hebrew, along with ancient Greek, have declined more precipitously than any other languages of study. In light of this reality, is there a path forward for Hebrew? This book answers a decisive "yes," and considers the most meaningful and probable ways to ensure Hebrew's future in the United States. The essays in this volume propose new forms, new frames, and new connective pathways for doing so. This includes embracing Hebrew-language-related blogs, podcasts, streaming video, and other new media; amplifying the process of translating Hebrew within the classroom, as a resonant and indispensable pedagogical and intellectual experience; and privileging a flexible admixture of Hebrew and English in Jewish communal spaces, over the more purist linguistic goal of proficiency. Not surprisingly, the question of authenticity looms large, and many contributors make a compelling case for the distinctive vantage point of the non-native adept of Hebrew. In his memoir-essay of devoted apprenticeship to Hebrew, personal and professional, the late literary scholar Alan Mintz writes of "near-nativeness" as a fruitful position from which to wrestle with Hebrew language and literature. "There is a lot that I miss by virtue of not being a native," he concludes, "but as a near native there is a lot that I can see that the native will never appreciate." (226) In a similar vein, Adam Rovner finds in his students' mis-readings of Hebrew literature an opening up of the field of meaning—a spur to engaged classroom discussions and fuel, too, for his own thinking about what it means to mediate art in academic settings. This book vigorously argues for the intellectual and cognitive benefits [End Page 141] afforded by a degree of perpetual outsider-ness to the Hebrew language. What is more, many contributors insist that studying Hebrew per se, especially against the grain of nativeness, provides unique advantages to teachers and...

David Fogel no Centro da Periferia

Após o fim do esplendor dos tempos ibéricos medievais, dos quais os judeus participaram plenamente, sob os governos islâmicos, o renovado impulso cultural da língua hebraica somente eclodiria ao final do século XVIII, com a Hascalá ou o Iluminismo Judaico, na Alemanha. Surgiu então uma literatura hebraica na Europa, seguidora dos padrões europeusda época, em forma e conteúdo. O modelo de língua adotado pelos escritores hebreus eram a Bíblia e o Talmud. O hebraico falado renasceria só na Palestina britânica durante a primeira metade do século XX, onde as migrações judaicas iniciais planejavam fundar um novo país para viverem. Fogel e outros, ainda na Europa, fizeram a linguagem da Bíblia adquirir osotaque da contemporaneidade.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) and Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant

What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) and Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant

Neoliberal Riskscapes and Preemptive Poetics in Orly Castel-Bloom’sDolly City

AbstractFocusing on Hebrew writer Orly Castel-Bloom’s novel Dolly City (1993), as well as on her short stories published in the same period, this essay analyzes how neoliberal principles of risk management, primarily risk privatization and speculation, shape postmodernist literary genres and techniques. It argues that Dolly City reflects, thematically and formally, a shift between two biopolitical models of governance: from a welfare model based on a calculable and statistical futurity and on communal sacrifice, to a neoliberal model grounded in a speculative futurity and a zero-risk principle of preemption. Dr. Dolly, the narrator of the novel, who suffers from the neoliberal “illness of improbable possibilities,” applies this preemptive principle to language itself, creating what this essay defines as “preemptive poetics:” a literalized and material approach to language that protects it from the infinite improbable possibilities of figurative expression. Dolly City traces the postmodernist problem of the destabilized text, detached from any knowable intention, to neoliberal political-economic principles of risk management.

From Avraham to Avraham

From Avraham to Avraham Avraham Holtz Avraham (Alan) Mintz approached me about six months before his untimely death to announce that his new book on Agnon's ʿ Ir umelo ʾ ah was going to be dedicated to me and to Avraham (Arnold) Band. Three Avrahamim together.1 "How come?" I asked. "It's what I want," he answered. As they say, how does one reply when informed of such an honor? As they say, כנגד רצונו של אדם אין טענות. One cannot object to another person's wishes. Alan went on to say that a book launch was being planned at JTS, and that he wanted me to speak in Hebrew at the event. I said to him, "Look, I'm not going to feel comfortable doing that. You're dedicating the book to me. I wouldn't feel comfortable talking about a book that's dedicated to me. I'm used to speaking, but not about myself." "Even so," Alan said. "What does that mean, 'even so'?" I asked. "Even so," he repeated, "I want you to speak in Hebrew." "But ninety-eight percent of the people there won't understand me!" I retorted. "Doesn't matter," he said. "I want you to speak in Hebrew, a short speech, only five to seven minutes." "But you agreed that ninety-eight percent of the people there won't understand me!" I repeated. [End Page 420] "It doesn't matter," he replied. "I want you to speak in Hebrew. Those who understand will understand. Those who don't understand, it'll be their loss." So fierce was Alan's love of the Hebrew language and his dedication to it that he wanted others to see that it meant something to make that effort to speak and to understand the language. He expressed the intensity of his special relationship with Hebrew in his brilliant essay in Mosaic (April 17, 2017), "My Life with Hebrew." This article has now been faithfully translated into Hebrew and will soon appear in the journal Ha ʿ ivrit, a publication of the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem. How could I possibly refuse his request that I speak in Hebrew? You can ask my wife, Toby, with whom I shared my quandary. How does one go about discharging such a task? It's very strange indeed to be asked to get up and speak in front of a group that doesn't comprehend what you're saying, especially when speaking about matters that touch your soul so deeply. But that's what he asked of me, and that was what I was going to have to do. I began to think about what I might say, and we agreed that we would speak more about it closer to the date of the event. Meanwhile, the tragedy of his passing befell us all, and it was decided that the book launch event would now become a memorial gathering. Once again: a difficult situation. What can one possibly say at such an occasion? Given that the book was dedicated to the two of us, Band and me, I would have to say something about the book. But what? Well, here it is. I had told Alan that he was the only person who could have succeeded in convincing the Guggenheim Foundation that Agnon's stories were part of world literature. Due to his comprehensive knowledge of English and European literature, as well as his profound understanding of contemporary literary theory and criticism, Alan demonstrated that Agnon, the Hebrew writer, is a world-class author. Hence their support for his book. And that was true. Only Alan could have accomplished that feat. I was so honored by our relationship and our many wonderful meetings. When his book Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry came out, I read it from cover to cover and complimented him, of course, and told him that Avraham Epstein, whom he mentions in the book—another Avraham—was my teacher at an institution that no longer exists, the Herzliah [End Page 421] Hebrew Teachers Institute in New York. Alan was so excited to hear this. He said, "You saw that I mention him in the introduction to the...

Introduction

Introduction Sheila E. Jelen I first met Alan Mintz when I was looking at graduate programs in Hebrew literature. It was 1993, and he was teaching at Brandeis. We met for lunch in the faculty dining room, where Alan impressed me with his soft-spoken intensity. I was very young, very concerned at that meeting that my soup might be hiding non-kosher chicken in its murky depths, yet Alan patiently asked all the right questions of me—questions that helped shore up my confidence. In the end, I chose not to go to Brandeis, but Alan remained a presence in my life as a teacher, a mentor, and a friend. He moved to JTS soon after our first encounter, and I went off to Berkeley, but our paths crossed again and again. Most fortuitously, when I interviewed for my first job at the University of Maryland, I learned that Alan had preceded me there. Throughout my years in training, both as a graduate student and as a young faculty member, Alan sat me down time and again to share his wisdom on how to balance participation in others' projects with a focus on my own, how to make the most of my limited time for scholarship in the years during which I was raising young children and teaching new courses. Alan's writings opened up the field of Hebrew autobiography for me, helping me to conceptualize its relationship to modern Hebrew narrative. He taught me about Hebrew writers in America, something few others were teaching at that time. Through it all, Alan taught me to be unafraid as an American within a field of mostly Israeli scholars. [End Page 387] One of the most important things I learned from Alan was that it might be possible for me to find new things to write about within the field of Holocaust criticism from my unique perspective as a scholar of Hebrew literature. I had, for many years, found that my most inspired teaching was on the subject of Holocaust literature, but I hesitated to build my career on it. My first book, on Devorah Baron, circled around and around the issue of her traumatic sense that she had abandoned the world of her mothers in Eastern Europe before its violent end and participated in its demise by moving to Erets Yisraʾel. Her stories never addressed the Holocaust directly, apart from a few oblique references to the evil that befell the community of which she wrote, but I couldn't help remarking in my work on Baron that her stories grappled with the Holocaust in a way that was yet to be named and analyzed. I have since come to call that dynamic "salvage poetics," a poetics that straddles the ethnographic and the literary, that deals with loss through attempts to salvage what remains of the destroyed culture. What does all this have to do with Alan? On several occasions when passing through town, Alan stayed with my family in Maryland for Shabbat. On one particular occasion—I remember it was winter because Alan thought he had left a favorite hat and scarf at my house, which I never did find—as we were walking home from synagogue, Alan and I got into a conversation about my latest project. For years, I had been inching closer and closer to my understanding of salvage poetics, theorizing the ethnographic role of allusions to iconic Yiddish stories in modern Israeli novels as a means of salvaging Eastern European culture for Israelis. Alan suggested that I consider writing about the Holocaust in Hebrew literature instead of skirting the issue. It was on that walk, I believe, that the notion of a salvage poetics was born. A few years after that conversation, in 2012, I saw a notice in The New York Times that Alan had won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on S. Y. Agnon. The description of Alan's project as it appears on the Guggenheim website reads as follows: The research project for which he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship focuses on the late work of S. Y. Agnon, the great Hebrew writer and Nobel laureate in literature. Between the end...

Alan Mintz, <em>z”l</em>

Alan Mintz, z"l Barry W. Holtz In November of 1961, the New England region of United Synagogue Youth (USY) held its annual fall regional convention in Brookline, Massachusetts at Congregation Kehilath Israel, where my family belonged, and where I was a member of the USY chapter. We were responsible for hosting that conference, so all of us kids got to meet and greet the various groups from around New England that showed up at the synagogue. It was there and then that I met Alan Mintz. We were both fourteen years old. He was in the ninth grade, and I was in the tenth. That fact turned out to be the beginning of a lifelong joke. He'd say, "You know, I am a month older than you," and I would reply, "But I'm a year ahead in school … and I always will be." I remember that moment from 1961 and always have, as if it were yesterday. It was, one might say, "friendship at first sight." For the next fifty-six years, there was never a time when Alan was not part of my life. So I want to write about Alan as a friend, knowing that others are exploring his extraordinary accomplishments as a scholar and teacher. When Alan was elected national president of USY a few years after our first meeting, he arrived by train—I think from Chicago—and my family picked him up at the station. Because it was too late to get to his home in Worcester, and he was exhausted, he slept over at my house. My sister and I chanted "Hail to the Chief" as he entered the house. All through high school he would come to Brookline for Simh.at Torah, and we would go together from dancing at the Bostoner Rebbe's to dancing at the Talner Rebbe's. [End Page 424] We were friends when he founded Response Magazine in 1966, and he invited me to join the editorial board and come to the founding meeting. We were still friends when I didn't come to the meeting because I thought that the long bus ride wasn't worth the schlepp, and he wrote me a really angry letter about skipping out on that. Alan, I'm so sorry. You were right; I should have come. He forgave me even after I suggested that he call the magazine "Commentary for Teens." He knew my parents and my sister, and I knew his parents and his brother, Lenny. I don't have many friendships that go back that long and with so much of our lives shared. I crashed in his apartment at 106th and Amsterdam back when he was a student. This apartment was so dilapidated that, when I went to sleep the first night, he said, "One word of advice. If you get up in the middle of the night, don't turn on the light." "Why?" I asked. "You really don't want to see all the cockroaches," he replied dryly and shut off the light. That was Alan in his student days. Alan and I travelled parallel career paths: both of us got doctorates in English literature, and both of us subsequently moved into the Jewish academic world. As many know, Alan devoted a great deal of energy in his career to the work of the Hebrew writer S. Y. Agnon. This included the anthology of Agnon stories that he and Anne Hoffman edited some years ago, as well as The City and its Fullness, the large collection of late Agnon stories that Alan worked on with James Diamond, z"l and Jeffrey Saks, that came out in 2016. (His book Ancestral Tales, a study of Agnon's Buczacz stories, came out shortly after his sudden death.) Alan's death came, so sadly, at the height of his powers and reputation as a scholar and literary critic. Sadly, he will not get to fully enjoy the accolades he has accrued both here and abroad. Where he was in his career at the time when he passed is illustrated for me in the boldness of an idea for a book that he sent me...