Jewish Folklore Research Articles

“Let Me Tell You Some Stories, and You Will Record Them”: Dan Ben-Amos and the Study of Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

Abstract: Dan Ben-Amos (1934–2023) was associated with groundbreaking work beginning during the 1960s on concepts of context and performance and the paradigm shift in folkloristics with his groundbreaking essay “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context.” His odyssey from Israel to the United States, including formative experiences as a youth absorbing ideas about social reality and Jewish folklore as counterculture, has a profound influence on an equally profound shift in the understanding of Jewish experience as well as on the globalization of folkloristics as a discipline. In addition to interpreting his culminating work of the Folktales of the Jews series of books, this essay shows the continuation of his legacy in other projects he initiated or envisioned.

Between Two Worlds

Abstract This article examines how S. Ansky's 1918 play The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds and its subsequent adaptations on stage and screen appropriate Romeo and Juliet, transforming Shakespeare's tragedy, through Kabbalah and Jewish folklore, into one that ‘repairs’ the story of star-crossed lovers and the material world that they seek to escape. The Dybbuk is a ‘reparative tragedy’, one that intersects multiple levels of restoration, healing and repair. Generically, the play and its later stage and screen adaptations recuperate and refigure Shakespeare's tragedy; materially, it calls for the repair of past and impending trauma, suffering and severed human relationships. These levels, as well as others, culminate in the play's overriding spiritual one: the play follows the ‘reparative’ narrative of Kabbalah itself, with its goal of tikkun olam – to repair the world.

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Ring of Solomon by Aden Polydoros (review)

Reviewed by: Ring of Solomon by Aden Polydoros Sarah Sahn Polydoros, Aden Ring of Solomon. Inkyard, 2023 [256p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781335428639 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780369722614 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 4-7 When twelve-year-old Zach and his younger sister find a gold ring embossed with a Star of David at their local flea market, they know it'll be the perfect birthday gift for their mom, who loves to collect anything related to her Jewish heritage. It's not just any ring, however—Zach discovers that when he's touching it, he can talk to animals, and then a strange boy appears who identifies himself as Ashmedai, king of demons in Jewish folklore. Ash is on board to help Zach exact some payback on his bully Jeffrey, whose homophobic, racist, and antiSemitic harassment has made the seventh grade a living hell for Zach and his best friend Sandra. Other people are after the ring too, though, for considerably more sinister aims, and soon Zach, Sandra, and Ash are racing to avert the apocalypse. For all its action, this coming-of-age adventure stays close to home, centering on Zach's negotiation of his Jewish and gay identities and his growing friendship with Ash, who is by turns inscrutable as a thousands-years-old demon king and naïve and vulnerable like his [End Page 264] preteen counterpart. Zach's first-person narration veers between introspection and humor as he helps Ash try to navigate the modern world. Readers will only want to dive deeper into Ash and Zach's story and the world they inhabit—it's a good thing this is the opener to a planned trilogy. While they wait, Lamb's When the Angels Left the Old Country (BCCB 11/22) and Pasternack's Black Bird, Blue Road (BCCB 10/22) offer other recent incarnations of Jewish demons. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Jewish Cultural Studies by Simon J. Bronner

Reviewed by: Jewish Cultural Studies by Simon J. Bronner Jacqueline Laznow Simon J. Bronner. Jewish Cultural Studies. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021. xix + 458 pp. In Jewish Cultural Studies, Simon Bronner summarizes his long and prolific academic trajectory. The book consists of updated versions of his published work with additional new material dealing mainly with the digital world and COVID-19. Bronner focuses on three folklore and ethnographic themes, conceptualization, ritualization, and narration, while interrogating objects, patterns, frames, and practices identified as Jewish in North America. His aim is to discern what makes them Jewish, why, and by whom. By doing so, he draws the boundaries of what he conceptualizes as Jewish cultural studies, a separate but complementary entity to traditional Jewish studies. In addition, Bronner argues that general American cultural studies do not recognize Jews as an ethnic group and points to the struggles of Jewish cultural studies in North America to find its place in academia since the twentieth century. Bronner considers the book an example of what he calls “the Chutzpah of Jewish Cultural Studies” (1). Through case studies and personal narratives, he points to the complexity of defining what Jewish culture is nowadays, raising the need to dare to examine Jewish daily praxis and rituals while considering the local context and the outsider’s gaze. He points to the fact that Jews, outside of Israel, have always been a minority group concerned with the maintenance and representation of their heritage, which makes them a unique cultural group with its own frame of mind. Reference to contemporary Israel as a multicultural Jewish center where folklore and ethnography researchers face different challenges from those faced by American researchers adds some depth to the otherwise American-centered arguments. Nevertheless, the description in chapter 4 of the history of Jewish folklore research, with an emphasis on S. An-sky’s collection of Jewish folktales in early twentieth-century Europe, Dov Noy’s work in Israel, and Haya Bar-Yitzhak’s description of their legacy, lacks reference to any of today’s prominent Israeli folklorists who engage in Jewish cultural studies in Israeli academia. Moreover, from his American and postdiasporic perspective, Bronner states: “In America the tension between tradition and modernity is especially evident” (xiii). This determination is problematic, since in our digital world, well described by the author in chapter 10, Jewish communities mirror each other and appropriate modern traditions and rituals that suit their own cultural context, thus the tension between tradition and modernity affects all Jewish communities. One example of this tension is the debates over mixed-gender prayer at the Western Wall in Jerusalem between ultra-Orthodox and progressive Jewish streams. Another example is the issue of conversions performed by the Conservative and Reform movements in today’s Argentina despite a historic religious ban from 1927. The book consists of three parts. Part 1 discusses the formation of beliefs and ideas in the academy and in everyday life while pointing to the tangle between opposites: continuity and change, tradition and modernity, and past and future. Bronner argues that in the modern world, keeping and passing on tradition takes place to a great degree at home, while the media help promote traditions and rituals, sometimes altering them. He correctly argues, as many folklorists around [End Page 224] the world have shown, that ethnographic research on home praxis is enlightening. Thus, Bronner conducts an in-depth analysis of the dualities of “House” and “Home” while pointing to the cultural construction of the term “domestic” and the role of the stereotypical Jewish mother in Kitchen Judaism. Finally, he introduces the term: “Livingroom Judaism,” an exposition of Jewish symbols at home (79). Part 2 focuses on the ways rituals have been adapted, created, and imagined in modern Judaism. Bronner points to the traditional role of women in Jewish rituals but does not discuss gender issues in depth nor the leading part North American Jewish women took in breaking religious gender roles, mirrored in all Jewish communities around the world. Interpreting the bar mitzvah as a celebration that connects father and son, he portrays the ritual as a masculine expression of tradition in spite of the actual feminized synagogue. Bronner further...

Between Remembering and Forgetting in Adriana Altaras's Titos Brille (2011)

Abstract: This article considers how the demands of forgetting collide with the imperative for a coherent familial narrative in Adriana Altaras's memoir Titos Brille (2011; Tito's eyeglasses). Altaras's work engages with her family's post–World War II trauma between Croatia and Germany and points toward the parallel demands of national memory politics. The memoir grapples with the pressures of maintaining a story's continuity while reaching the limits of this project, as processes of recollection and omission are in constant tension. This article contextualizes Altaras's work within contemporary German memory politics and then considers Altaras's memoir in conversation with Astrid Erll's concept of traveling memory , Marianne Hirsch's work on postmemory, and the dybbuk figure of Jewish folklore. A feminist recognition of Altaras's distinctive role at the center of memory work, attentive to inequities based on gender and religious and national affiliation, deepens an understanding of the personal and political stakes of this mediation process.

Bulletin Blue Ribbons 2022

Bulletin Blue Ribbons 2022 Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor We were lucky this year to see a sizeable increase in the diverse identities and ideas represented in literature for youth, and with that in mind, we couldn’t help but expand our own award list—there were just too many stellar examples of our field’s growing inclusivity. In nonfiction, you’ll find a healthy variety of formats and subjects, from a picture book walk through the Mexihcah’s process of creating amoxtin to a biography of Octavia Butler in evocative concrete poems. Fiction spans genres and settings, featuring separately a grim, post-apocalyptic world as the backdrop for exploring trans identity; an amusement park as the spark for a romance from multiple perspectives; and the Monterey Bay Aquarium as the aquatic background for a heartwarming animal tale. Community is the backbone of this year’s picture book list, with family and friends coming together to plant gardens and a neighborhood of animals overcoming their first impressions to make a warm, welcoming place for everyone. We conclude this year with a bonus of short story collections, a format we are always thrilled to see thrive. Happy reading! FICTION Albert, Melissa. Our Crooked Hearts. Flatiron. Gr. 9-12 This searing exploration of a toxic mother/daughter relationship and its connection to magic is haunting and beautiful, full of messy girls drunk on messier magic and told with electric prose brimming with sharp metaphors. (June) Applegate, Katherine. Odder; illus. by Charles Santoso. Feiwel. Gr. 2-4 Inspired by true events, Applegate’s third-person narrative in verse delivers the playful but heartfelt story of Odder, a sea otter cared for at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium. (October) Callender, Kacen. Lark & Kasim Start a Revolution. Amulet/Abrams. Gr. 8-12 Lark must contend with the accidental revelation of Kasim’s love after he posts on their Twitter account; this rich world is peopled with loving and lovable characters, many of whom are Black and LGBTQIA+, and their voices respect the intensity with which teens consider racism, ableism, and transphobia. (September) Eagar, Lindsay. The Patron Thief of Bread. Candlewick. Gr. 5-8 To help her street gang survive on the streets of medieval France, chronically underestimated Duck apprentices to a blind baker to steal money but ends up warily reciprocating the baker’s care; this story of family and acceptance reaches a hopeful conclusion that is balanced by wry, but not bitter, complexity. (April) [End Page 171] Forest, Kristina. Zyla & Kai. Kokila. Gr 8-12 Zyla and Kai meet, date, and break up in this romance, which is elevated by Forest’s mastery of the narrative structure; she utilizes different tenses, points of view, and styles to demonstrate the unexpected ways human lives are interconnected. (June) Keller, Tae. Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone. Random House. Gr. 5-8 In this nuanced and compassionate book, seventh grader Mallory falls under the sway of queen bees and joins in their torment of Jennifer; a compelling author’s note illuminates the complicated motivations and devastating results of bullying. (April) Lamb, Sacha. When the Angels Left the Old Country. Levine Querido. Gr. 9-12 Steeped in both Jewish folklore and the Eastern European immigrant experience, this immersive story is carried equally by the propulsive plot and the winning trio at its center, as the demon Little Ash, the angel Uriel, and the firecracker of a human Rose leave Warsaw for the U.S. in the early twentieth century. (November) McCall, Guadalupe García. Echoes of Grace. Tu/Lee & Low. Gr. 10-12 Grace can experience “echoes” of past events, and a tragedy tips her into memories of a horrific sexual assault in this contemplative, haunting examination of internalized misogyny, victim-blaming, and the paralyzing ripples of trauma through generations. (June) Skinner, Nicola. Storm. HarperCollins. Gr. 5-8 This poignant story tackles grand themes of love, forgiveness, friendship, and even the meaning of life as readers meet twelve-year-old Frankie, who was killed in a tsunami and wakes up as a ghost to find her home has become a tourist spot. (February) Strong, Karen. Eden’s Everdark. Simon. Gr. 5-8 Grieving her mother’s death, Eden steps into a...

Sources of “Dibuk”: from Ethnographic Expeditions to the “Thunderstorm” by A.N. Ostrovskiy

“Dybbuk”, the masterpiece of Jewish dramaturgy, became the synthesis of the wide range of impulses from Jewish folklore to Russian classical drama. S. A. An-sky organized in 1912–1914 famous Jewish folklore and ethnographic expeditions to the shtels in the Pale of Settlement. The main results of the expeditions were “Dybbuk” as well as the ethnographic and local history programs. The paper is devoted to the emergence of S. A. An-sky’s play under the influence of his expeditions and ethnographic programs. The close substantial and structural interrelation of the play and the ethnographic programs of An-sky is shown. The influence of the Ethnographic Bureau of Prince V. Tenishev on the An-sky programs and his collecting work is investigated. The famous play “Thunderstorm” written by A. N. Ostrovsky was also the result of the ethnographic expedition as well as “Dibbuk”. It had also significantly influenced on “Dibbuk”.

When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb

Reviewed by: When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor Lamb, Sacha When the Angels Left the Old Country. Levine Querido, 2022 [408p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781646141760 $19.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 9-12 After centuries of studying Talmud in a tiny shtetl in Poland, Little Ash, a demon, decides it’s time to find some excitement, and with all the hubbub around the wonders of America, he decides that’s the place to find it. He manages to convince otherwise content Uriel, an angel also studying in the shtetl, that they’ll be doing a mitzvah by tracking down the baker’s daughter, who hasn’t been heard from since she left Warsaw for the United States. Despite their supernatural abilities, the two experience many of the hardships facing immigrants in the early twentieth century, including a deceitful man who’s selling papers to America (and whose soul Little Ash eats), a cruel doctor at Ellis Island (a demon whom they eventually kill), and a corrupted factory owner (who is haunted by a dybbuk). For most of their journey, they’re accompanied by sixteen-year-old Rose Cohen, who left her village after her best friend and romantic crush Dinah married a man. Steeped in both Jewish folklore and the Eastern European immigrant experience, this immersive story is carried equally by the propulsive plot and the winning trio at its center. For a demon, Little Ash is surprisingly sentimental and caring, and though there are certainly hints at romantic feelings between him and Uriel, the focus remains on their deepening bond as the two find themselves in harrowing situations. Rose is a delightful firecracker, never one to back down from a challenge, and her vim and vigor serve as a rallying cry when Little Ash and Uriel are at their lowest. The Jewish elements are seamlessly interwoven, with most explanations either in dialogue or in the appended glossary, and historical details are used judiciously to bring atmosphere but not lengthy exposition. A mashup of historical fiction and magical realism, this will find a satisfied audience in fans of both. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology: What, Why, and Whither

:The inspiration for and significance of field-based Jewish folklore and ethnology studies as a distinct branch of learning devoted to the understanding of tradition in relation to diasporic Jewish studies and folkloristics is traced back to the Talmudic directive to "Go out and see what the people do." The shapers of the field include S. An-Ski, Max Grunwald, Yoysef-Yehude Lerner, and Dov Noy along with theoretical influences of Franz Boas and Erving Goffman heralding a shift from textual sources to analyses of practice and performance. The characteristic definition, content, method, and theory of Jewish folklore and ethnological studies since the nineteenth century are analyzed as growing out of a concern for change and continuity to Jewish community and identity amid the force of modernization. Future trajectories of research and goals for the field are considered in the digital age in which new definitions of community and culture are emerging.

Yahrzeit … Haya Bar-Itzhak (1946–2020)

Yahrzeit … Haya Bar-Itzhak (1946–2020) Simon J. Bronner (bio) Haya Bar-Itzhak was a driving force behind this journal and a shaper of the global study of Jewish folklore and ethnology. In her teaching, writing, and editing, she brought into relief the long lineage of work in periodicals devoted to Jewish folklore beginning in the nineteenth century (Bar-Itzhak 2010, 16–26) and inspired the editors of Jewish Folklore and Ethnology (JFE) with a vision for a journal that would go beyond an audience of Jews to become indispensable for all folklorists and ethnologists. The JFE editors, indeed all who care about understanding tradition, lost a friend and mentor when she died at her home in Haifa, Israel, on October 25, 2020. An organizer par excellence, one of her last projects was bringing together fieldwork-oriented scholars from around the world in 2013 to forge connections in a conference around the Talmudic directive to "Go out and see what the people do" (BT Eruvin 14B) as a folkloristic rallying cry. The conference occurred the same year that her Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions in two volumes was published, which she took over from Raphael Patai. And now the editors of Jewish Folklore and Ethnology find themselves similarly continuing a trajectory from her to a new generation of scholars and readers. With health issues mounting for Haya, the book based on the "Going to the People" conference came out in [End Page 210] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Haya Bar-Itzhak, August 2007. Photograph by Simon J. Bronner. 2016 under the editorship of Jeffrey Veidlinger, but Haya's influence on the work is clearly evident, as it is on every page of this volume of the journal and many more in several languages across several continents. Haya was born in Berlin, Germany, on August 17, 1946 to Polish Holocaust survivors. After emigration to Israel, she received her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Haifa and finished her PhD in 1987 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a dissertation on "The 'Saints' Legend' as a Genre in Jewish Folk Literature" under the supervision of renowned folklore [End Page 211] professor Dov Noy. She returned to the University of Haifa as a professor and in 1992, became chair of the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature and in 1994, head of folklore studies and the Israel Folktale Archives. A peripatetic teacher and scholar who attracted admiring students and colleagues wherever she went, she held visiting professorships at Indiana University, University of Michigan, Penn State University, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California–Berkeley. In addition, she was a fellow of the Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig, Germany. She received numerous grants and awards for her work from organizations such as the Koret Foundation, Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, S. O. Sidore Foundation, and the Council for Higher Education of Israel. She had broad interests in folklore that spanned Eastern Europe, northern Africa, Israel, and North America, and having taken on the Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions, in many ways her parting gift—and challenge—to the field, her scope of work extended to the far-flung corners of the world. She maintained specialties in folk narrative, particularly legend and women's culture from ancient times to the present. Her research and publications in English, Hebrew, German, Polish, and Yiddish earned her renown globally for a conceptualization of ethnopoetics informed by the Jewish experience. Her authored books in English include Jewish Poland—Legends of Origin (2001), Israeli Folk Narratives: Settlement, Immigration, Ethnicity (2005), and with Aliza Shenhar, Jewish Moroccan Folk Narratives from Israel (1993). Her edited books include Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions, 2 volumes (2013), Pioneers of Jewish Ethnography and Folkloristics in Eastern Europe (2010), and with Idit Pintel-Ginsberg, The Power of a Tale: Stories from the Israel Folktale Archives (2019). In Hebrew, she edited Folklore and Ideology: Studies Dedicated to Prof. Aliza Shenhar (2014), Legends of Poland: Ethnopoetics and Legendary Chronicles (1996), and with Aliza Shenhar, Folktales from Beth-She'an (1981) and Folktales from Shlomi (1983). She also was the editor of...

Deprovincializing European Jewish Literature

Deprovincializing European Jewish Literature Allison Schachter A review of: Jewish Primitivism by Samuel Spinner. Pp. xiii 251+. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. Cloth, $65 Samuel Spinner's lucidly written new book, Jewish Primitivism, is an exciting new addition to a growing body of scholarship that has aimed to deprovincialize Eastern European Jewish literature through the lens of European literary modernism. These works include, but are certainly not limited to, Chana Kronfeld's ground breaking book, On the Margins of Modernism (UC Press, 1996); Shachar Pinsker's Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (Stanford UP, 2010); Allison Schachter's Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in the Twentieth Century (Oxford UP, 2013); Jordan Finkin's An Inch or Two of Time: Time and Space in Jewish Modernisms (Penn State UP, 2015); and Rachel Seelig's Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919–1933 (University of Michigan Press, 2016). All of these works read Jewish modernism as an aesthetic project enmeshed with broader European modernist developments. This broadly comparative approach has rescued Jewish literary studies from a sometimes limiting connection to Jewish national revival, making visible the cosmopolitan worlds these writers inhabited and their deep ties with their Jewish and non-Jewish contemporaries, whether in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, French or Russian. Spinner's book takes up this mantle by tackling a particularly thorny corner of the Jewish literary world: Jewish folklore and its influence on Jewish modernisms. When scholars turn to the folklorist elements of Jewish writing, the discussion too often turns to nationalism and ends there. Spinner's book chooses a different and promising path. He contextualizes Eastern European Jewish writers' investment in Jewish folklore in relationship to European primitivism. Reading Jewish writers as primitivists, he offers new and thought-provoking readings of a broad range of Jewish literary works. A central claim of the book is that Jewish primitivists approached this aesthetic movement from a minority perspective, resisting the orientalizing impulses of their Christian [End Page 283] European contemporaries. For Spinner, Jewish primitivism shares as much in common with Negritude as it does with German modernism. This is a complicated claim because of the diversity of works under consideration, which include not only the Yiddish writers, I. L. Peretz, S. Y. Ansky, and Der Nister, but also Else Lasker-Schüler and Alfred Döblin, Franz Kafka, and Uri Zvi Grinberg, to name a few. The book ties them all together by finding connections between the visual world of primitivism and the formal structures of modernist prose. Spinner reads these writers as part of a Jewish minority culture writ large. What does it mean to read such disparate writers as part of a shared minority literature? Jewish identity here becomes a central concept that goes sometimes undertheorized in the book. However, Spinner succeeds in highlighting how these writers engage with an overlapping series of aesthetic and political concerns about the meaning and form of Jewish difference. In this way, he makes an important case for reading them together. Primitivism serves as generative frame for linking these diverse writers and also for reframing Jewish folklorism in broader intellectual and political contexts. Primitivism as a frame, however, also elides women's participation in Eastern European Jewish literary culture, as I discuss towards the end of the review. The chapters offer provocative pairings that highlight how Jewish writers grappled with European colonial ideologies that could often be turned against Jews. Even when I remained skeptical about whether primitivism appropriately captured the modernist impulses of all of the writers involved, I found the readings to be compelling. They raised important question for me that the book introduces and complicates. Is Jewish modernist writing always written from a minority perspective? Did Jewish writers absorb the orientalist and racist presumptions of their European contemporaries or did their difference generate alternatives to orientalist assumptions about Africa or the Middle East? When the book is at its best, it shows how the writers themselves struggled with their own ambivalences towards the European primitivist project and what Spinner names Jewish primitivism Chapter one delves into the history of modern Jewish folklorism. Here Spinner asks a critical question for reframing the...

The Ghosts of Rose Hill by R. M. Romero

Reviewed by: The Ghosts of Rose Hill by R. M. Romero Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor Romero, R. M. The Ghosts of Rose Hill. Peachtree Teen, 2022 [452p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781682633380 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781682634462 $11.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 7-10 When her grades start slipping, sixteen-year-old Ilana Lopez is shipped off to Prague to stay with her aunt Žofie, with instructions from her parents to focus on her studies and give up playing the violin. To Ilana’s surprise, she’s mostly left to her own devices by her nonplussed aunt, and while wandering an abandoned Jewish cemetery near Žofie’s cottage, she meets Benjamin, a ghost of a boy now a century dead, and the two quickly form a deep bond out of shared loneliness. On a shopping trip, Ilana also encounters the enigmatic Rudolf Wassermann, not quite a ghost but most certainly supernatural, who gives her a violin and urges her to practice. Eventually, she discovers Benjamin’s connection to Wassermann and to the missing children under Wassermann’s care, and Ilana realizes she must contend with an evil that has stalked Prague’s streets for far too long. Dreamy verse makes for an organic introduction to ghosts and Jewish folklore but remains rooted in the history of Prague and Ilana’s struggles to negotiate her parents’ immigrant identities: her dad escaped from communist-controlled Prague and her mother from Castro’s Cuba. Vivid, unsettling metaphors evoke the horrors of oppression of Jews in Czechoslovakia, while Wassermann himself is the terrifying, haunting specter of violence born out of a lust for power. Readers of Podos’ From Dust, a Flame (BCCB 1/22) will find satisfaction in this mix of family drama, Jewish history, and the supernatural. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Work of Jewish Folklorist Solomon Beilin in the Context of the Development of Yiddish Culture in the 1920s–1930s

The article is the final part of a major study that featured the life and work of Solomon Kh. Beilin (1858–1942), a Jewish folklorist, ethnographer, and publicist, the Rabbi of the cities of Rogachev and Irkutsk, who was one of the first researchers to collect and systematize the Jewish folklore on the territory of the Russian Empire. The paper focuses on the post-revolutionary Yiddish works of Rabbi Beilin as part of the development of Jewish ethnocultural life in 1920s-1930s in the USSR, Lithuania, and Poland. The author worked in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Studies (New York) and studied Solomon Beilin’s Yiddish correspondence with the Jewish philologist and publicist Zalman Reisen, as well as with editors of several Yiddish periodicals. The analysis proved that Beilin’s post-revolutionary research was extremely productive, probably, due to the rise of the Yiddish language in 1920s–1930s. In that period, Solomon Beilin was also interested in various philological issues related to Yiddish grammar and spelling.

Ilya Heifetz’s violin concerto: revisiting the issue of the Jewish national identity

The article considers the instrumental creative work of a modern Russian-Israely composer Ilya Heifetz. His life and creative experience has two definite stages: Russian (before 1991) and Israely, and each of them is marked with the problem of reconsidering national roots in life and work. One of the examples of addressing this problem in Heifetz’s compositions of the Soviet period is his violin concerto. The author of the research considers the composer’s combination of the patterns of the academic genre and the intonational and structural peculiarities of Jewish folklore as an attempt to comprehend his national identity. The intonation and thematic analysis of the concerto compared with the composer’s statements distilled from his personal letters allows concluding about the presence of a concealed program revealing the problem of the history of the Jewish people and national character and reflecting the peculiarities of comprehension of their national identity by the subethnic group of Russian Jews. Since the main characteristic of this subethnic group is the Russian language and Russian culture perceived through it, the author of the research focuses on the way the peculiarities of the Russian composing school manifest themselves in this piece of music based on the Jewish intonations and genres.   

The Silence of Judaica

"The National Library of Poland holds a vast collection of Yiddish prints, both pre and post-war, issued mainly in contemporary and former territories of Poland. Thanks to the effort of the Library and years of digitizing the material, about 25 thousand Yiddish newspaper issues, hundreds of books, posters and leaflets were published online and made available for free at the Library’s digital library polona.pl. Although the researcher’s dream has not yet been fulfilled and the Yiddish OCR system has not yet been implemented in polona.pl, Yiddish scholars in Poland received a powerful and user-friendly research tool. Furthermore, by publishing scans of newspapers from big cities and smaller towns, polona.pl has revealed a forgotten or suppressed multi-linguistic and social landscape of pre-war Poland. Even if some Poles living in, for instance, present day town of Chełm knew about their town’s rich Jewish history and its importance in Jewish folklore already ten or so years ago, the image was surely vague. Today, by a single click, one can literally immerse oneself into the world of pre-war Polish-Jewish reality of a small town and – even withoutunderstanding Yiddish, but simply by browsing the papers and reading Polish fragments appearing there from time to time – find out that it was more complex than one might think [...]".

The Artist’s Destiny in Jewish Collective Memory: From Traditional Society to the Avant-Garde and Modernism

Abstract The destiny of an architect, painter, or carver working on the construction and decoration of an Eastern-European synagogue is a popular subject in Jewish folklore and literature. These stories are related to the international tale “The Giant as a Master Builder” (classified as АТ 1099), which Jewish storytellers adapted to their audiences. This paper discusses narratives circulated in traditional societies of Central-Eastern Europe, traces formal and meaningful changes that surface in Jewish records of these legends in the early twentieth century, and shows the further transformation of the subject in national-romanticist, avant-garde, and modernist artistic discourses of the twentieth century. The adaptation of this international theme within Jewish folklore helps us to interpret Jewish collective memory regarding the artist and his work on a sacralized object.

From the Tree of Knowledge & the Golem of Prague: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence Through Jewish Eyes

This paper discusses the regulation of artificial intelligence from a Jewish perspective, with an emphasis on the regulation of machine learning and its application to autonomous vehicles and machine learning. Through the Biblical story of Adam and Eve as well as Golem legends from Jewish folklore, we derive several basic principles that underlie a Jewish perspective on the moral and legal person-hood of robots and other artificially intelligent agents. We argue that religious ethics in general, and Jewish ethics in particular, show us that the dangers of granting moral person-hood to robots and in particular to autonomous vehicles lie not in the fact that they lack a soul – or consciousness or feelings or interests – but because to do so weakens our own ability to develop as fully autonomous legal and moral persons. Instead, we argue that existing legal persons should continue to maintain legal control over artificial agents, while natural persons assume ultimate moral responsibility for choices made by artificial agents they employ in their service. In the final section of the paper we discuss the trolley dilemma in the context of governing autonomous vehicles and sketch out an application of Jewish ethics in a case where we are asking Artificial Intelligence to make life and death decisions. Our novel contribution is twofold; first, we bring a religious approach to the discussion of the ethics of Artificial Intelligence which has hitherto been dominated by secular Western philosophies; second, we raise the idea that artificial entities who are trained through machine learning can be ethically trained in much the same way that human are – through reading and reflecting on core religious texts. This is both a way of ensuring the ethical regulation of artificial intelligence, but also promotes other core values of regulation, such as democratic engagement and user choice.

Идея этнопоэтики в современных исследованиях

<p>In recent decades, ethnopoetics has become one of the new philological disciplines. Its idea first appeared in the treatise of Nicolas Boileau “The Art of Poetry” (1674), in which the classicist theorist formulated the requirement of local and historical color in art. His rule was followed by many poets, playwrights and novelists of Modern history. In Anglo-American criticism, the term ethnopoetics was introduced in 1968. Jerome Rotenberg, who, along with Dennis Tedlock and Dell Himes, founded the principles and methods of studying American Indian poetry. In the 2000s. this concept has entered encyclopedic dictionaries in English and other European languages, but this word is still not in Russian terminological dictionaries. So far, the concept of poetics, which restricts the semantics of words forming a term, has received recognition. Already in the process of formation of ethnopoetics, its subject was expanded at the expense of middle Eastern and Jewish folklore, and later the oral creativity of other peoples. The word formation model (ἔθνος/ ethnos + ποιητική/poetics) cancels limited interpretations of the term. In modern usage, the term ethnopoetics is used in a wide range of meanings that have not yet been marked by lexicographers, but convey the full semantics of the words forming the term. The idea of ethnopoetics gave rise to not one, but several of its concepts. The author of the article develops his earlier understanding of ethnopoetics as a discipline that should study the national identity of the oral and written text, describe in the categories of poetics the specific things that make national literature national. It is characterized by concepts and conceptospheres, they form the mentality, reveal the cultural code of national literatures. The analysis of ethnopoetics opens up great opportunities in the comparative analysis of thesauri of different authors and their works.</p>

Rella Kushelevsky, Tales in Context: Sefer ha-ma’asim in Medieval Northern France (Bodleian Library, Ms. Bodl. Or. 135), trans. Ruchie Avital and Chaya Naor, with a historical epilogue by Elisheva Baumgarten. (Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology.) Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017. Pp. xviii, 798; many black-and-white figures. $84.99. ISBN: 978-0-8143-4271-8.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsRella Kushelevsky, Tales in Context: Sefer ha-ma’asim in Medieval Northern France (Bodleian Library, Ms. Bodl. Or. 135), trans. Ruchie Avital and Chaya Naor, with a historical epilogue by Elisheva Baumgarten. (Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology.) Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017. Pp. xviii, 798; many black-and-white figures. $84.99. ISBN: 978-0-8143-4271-8.Pinchas RothPinchas RothBar-Ilan University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 95, Number 2April 2020 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/708374 Views: 41Total views on this site Copyright 2020 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.