Jewish Writers Research Articles

‘Ostrich is a Fowl for any Matter’: The ostrich as a ‘strange’ fowl in Jewish literature

The size, strange body shape and behaviour of the ostrich aroused the imagination of the ancients, Jews and non-Jews, and therefore beginning from the classical era until recent generations, various legends and beliefs were attached to it. The ancients deliberated whether the ostrich is a bird or it is a cross between a bird and a four-legged creature. In this case, Jewish writings reflected an advanced and sometimes independent conception that the ostrich is a bird. A belief that is indeed partially based on reality has to do with the food of the ostrich. In ancient sources, the ostrich is described as eating glass or metal, and according to some testimonies, this is a major component of its food. Medieval literature includes another common belief that the ostrich is gifted with miraculous powers of sight and it can use these powers to hatch the eggs by staring at them. The general impression formed from the study is that the Jews were aware of legends that existed among the nations, and even used them in their study halls for halakhic discussions and to enrich their spiritual world.

Book Review: Women in Early Jewish Writings: Eileen Schuller & Marie-Theres Wacker, Early Jewish Writings

Book Review: Women in Early Jewish Writings: Eileen Schuller &amp; Marie-Theres Wacker, <i>Early Jewish Writings</i>

Purity in Early Judaism: Current Issues and Questions

The study of purity has become a crucial undertaking in the scholarly quest to understand the social and theological dimensions of early Judaism and the texts that early Jews both formed and were formed by. This article surveys scholarly literature on purity in ancient and early Judaism, in order to identify and address four areas of critical inquiry that ought to be taken into consideration when questions about purity arise in the study of early Jewish writings: (1) the conceptualization of purity as a symbolic system; (2) the distinction between kinds of purity (ritual, moral, and genealogical); (3) the relation of purity to the temple and, more broadly, to space; and (4) the function of purity to construct and maintain social identity. Attention to these critical issues promises to give clarity, direction and depth to scholarship on purity in early Judaism.

Sabbath-Temple-Eden

Despite repeated biblical mentions of the sanctity of the Sabbath and numerous imperatives to keep the day holy, there is little in rabbinic writings on the Sabbath reflecting these facets of the day’s observance. In contrast, Jewish writers from the Second Temple period and members of the Samaritan-Israelites actively sanctified the Sabbath by maintaining the day in a state of ritual purity. In this article, I reassess the exegetical and theological origins of this latter practice. I illustrate how non-rabbinic writers were attuned to the web of biblical connections between Sabbath, Tabernacle/Temple, and Eden, which they understood as bringing the Sabbath into the realm of cultic law. Just as access to the Temple demanded the ritual purity of the entrant, so too entering the Sabbath day. This “spatialization” of ritual time coheres with other known extensions of the domain of Temple laws. With these findings as a backdrop, I present the previously unexplained ritual purity tangents attested in Mishnah Shabbat as both responding to, and dismissing, the sectarian practice. This move coheres with an additional phenomenon, whereby the rabbis systematically disengaged the imperative to sanctify the Sabbath from the people. Whereas Jewish theologians see in the rabbinic Sabbath a temporal Temple, such an understanding is foreign to rabbinic literature and instead finds its best articulation in sectarian sources.

Psalms of Solomon as Resistance Poetry

Two trends in recent scholarship provide a new set of lenses that enable contemporary readers to appreciate more fully the contents and genre of Psalms of Solomon. On the one hand, scholars such as Richard Horsley, Anathea Portier-Young, and Adela Yarbro Collins have now explored the ways in which early Jewish writers engaged in a kind of compositional resistance as they grappled with their traditions in light of the realities of oppressive empires. These approaches enable us to consider the extent to which Psalms of Solomon also may embody a kind of resistant counterdiscourse for the community in which it was edited and preserved. On the other hand, scholars within biblical studies (e. g., Hugh Page) and beyond have examined the dynamics of the poetry of resistance. Such poetry has existed in many times, places, and cultures, giving a voice to the oppressed, protecting the memory of victims, and creating a compelling vision of a possible future in which the oppression is overcome. In this article the poetry of Guatemalan poet Julia Esquivel is interwoven with Psalms of Solomon to illustrate these dynamics and to illuminate the kinds of concerns that scholars like Barbara Harlow and Caolyn Forché have highlighted within the poetry of witness. Since Psalms of Solomon has yet to be explored through these dual lenses of resistance and resistance poetry, this article examines these early Jewish psalms in light of these scholarly trends. I argue that Psalms of Solomon can be understood as a kind of resistance poetry that enabled a community of Jews in the first century B. C. E. to resist the dominant discourse of both the Roman Empire and its client king, Herod the Great. The themes of history, identity, and possibility that pervade resistance poetry in other times and places are central features of Psalms of Solomon.

The Judgments of David Bergelson

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I read the Yiddish author David Bergelson’s statements at his secret trial through the lens of his own earlier fiction about Soviet justice, especially his novel Judgment. I examine Bergelson’s self-fashioning as a Jewish writer and how he uses his own Jewish background as a justification for his failures as a Soviet person. I offer some contextualization of Bergelson’s statements in light of other trials of other writers both before and after 1952, and compare his declaration of love for Yiddish with other, similar expressions. Bergelson does not merely defend himself, he creates a memory about his legacy for the future.

Behind the Seams: The “Colored Historian” of the White House and Her Parodists

The African American author Elizabeth Keckly has garnered signiicant attention in recent decades as a result of renewed interest in her memoir and exposé of the family of Abraham Lincoln, Behind the Scenes; or, hirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868). Meanwhile, the anonymous author who, writing as “Betsey Kickley,” viciously parodied her book in Behind the Seams; by a Nigger Woman Who Took in Work from Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Davis (1868) has remained an enigma. his essay identiies the mysterious author of Behind the Seams as Daniel Ottolengui, a Jewish newspaper correspondent and writer from Charleston, South Carolina. he parody was reprinted in 1945 by another pseudonymous author, identiied here as the Manhattan-based book dealer Charles P. Everitt. he contents and contexts of both editions of Behind the Seams illustrate the enduring inluence of Keckly's challenge to hegemonic narratives of American history.

Staging Encounters with Estranged Pasts: Radu Jude’s The Dead Nation (2017) and the Cinematic Face of Public Memory of the Holocaust in Present-Day Romania

This article provides a close analysis of Radu Jude’s The Dead Nation (2017), a documentary essay that brings together authentic archival sources documenting the persecution and murder of Jews in World War II. The sources include a little-known diary of Emil Dorian, a Jewish medical doctor and writer from Bucharest, a collection of photographs depicting scenes from Romanian daily life in the 1930s and 1940s, and recordings of political speeches and propaganda songs of a Fascist nature. Through a careful framing of this film in relation to Romanian public memory of World War II, and in connection to the popular new wave cinema, I will contend that Jude’s work acts, perhaps unwittingly, to intervene in public memory and invites the Romanian public to face up to and acknowledge the nation’s perpetrator past. This filmic intervention further offers an important platform for public debate on Romania’s Holocaust memory and is of significance for European public memory, as it proposes the film happening as a distinct and innovative practice of public engagement with history.

S. A. An-sky, 1915 Diary of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front

S. A. An-sky, <i>1915 Diary of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front</i>

The Prophet Muhammad

On 21 January1821, Heinrich Heine, in a letter to his friend Moses Moser, proclaimed that no poet has ever surpassed Muhammad: I must admit that you, great prophet of Mecca, are the greatest poet and that your Quran … will not easily escape my memory. 1 Heine was one of many romantic poets to admire Muhammad both as a prophet and a poet: indeed, for Heine as for Goethe, the prophet of Islam showed how thin the line was between prophet and poet. Heine admired the toleration that Muhammad showed towards those of other religions, in particular to Jews. For a number of nineteenth century Jewish writers, Muhammad, and medieval Islam more generally, became something of a foil for Christian Europe: various Jewish scholars, particularly those associated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, took a particular interest in Muhammad and the early history of Islam, often portraying the prophet as a reformer close to the true spirit of Judaism. Jews were not the only Europeans who expressed their admiration for the prophet of Islam: on the contrary, one finds Muhammad portrayed as a religious reformer, lawgiver, mystic and poet in many European writings, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 2 This facet of European orientalism is less known than the more negative portrayals, the indeed-common denigration of Islam and its prophet. For some scholars in religious studies, such as Tomoko Masuzawa, The European idea of Islam was curiously monolithic and, for the most part, consistently negative. 3 Yet in fact, European images of Islam and its prophet Muhammad are anything but monolithic, and are far from being invariably hostile. Part of the problem, as far as recent scholarship (particularly in English), has been the influence of the pathbreaking book by Edward Said, Orientalism, published in 1978. Said chronicles the representations of the Orient in nineteenth-and twentieth-century

The Forgetting of Cora Wilburn: Historical Amnesia and The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature

The Forgetting of Cora Wilburn: Historical Amnesia and <i>The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature</i>

Mapping Jewish American Literary Studies in the New Century

Mapping Jewish American Literary Studies in the New Century

Parking the Ark in Niagara Falls: Mordecai Manuel Noah and the Imposition of Meaning in Jewish American Literary History

Parking the Ark in Niagara Falls: Mordecai Manuel Noah and the Imposition of Meaning in Jewish American Literary History

Good writers, bad Jews: the “Jewish Question” among Hungarian Jewish intellectuals of the interwar period

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the perceived place of the Jewish writer in interwar Hungarian Jewish literature. Post-World War I Hungary suffered from the effects of a short-lived communist regime, and the Trianon Treaty by losing two-thirds of its territories and more than half of its population. Though previously Jewish communities had thrived in the country, these events caused resentment that manifested itself in the creation of anti-Semitic laws in 1920. Within this new context, assimilated liberal young Jewish writers posed the question of “what is a Jew,” reflecting on their Jewishness and Hungarianness at the same time and pondering about the value of each. They answered the question in their creative works, where they indirectly explored issues such as whether Jews are able to write Hungarian novels or whether only a Hungarian can do so; whether Jewish Hungarians could write Hungarian Jewish novels; whether Hungarianness and Jewishness are compatible or whether writing literature is preconditioned on identity. Through the lens of Aladár Komlós, this paper examines the way in which liberal and assimilated young Hungarian Jewish writers interpreted their place in Hungarian culture and society within the framework of these questions.

The Roads Taken

The Roads Taken Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi (bio) Standing in the wood-paneled library at the Yaddo Writers and Artists Retreat on a rainy day in the fall of 1989, I idly browsed the eclectic collection of books that had been placed there by former residents of this haven where solitude, natural beauty, and creature comforts have coaxed the best out of generations of artists. Suddenly, my eye caught a name: Chana Bloch. (The book was, as I recall, The Window, translations with Ariel Bloch of Dahlia Ravikovitch's poems.) I picked it up and started reading, now in earnest. I knew Ravikovitch's poetry, or at least I thought I did, until I met it in its English cloak and saw things I had never seen before in the original Hebrew. It was comforting to find a Jewish/Israeli voice among the American cadences in that library—especially as I was working at the time on an essay on the poetry of Dan Pagis and could find no echo, in that majestic retreat, of his German-accented and Holocaust-inflected Hebrew lines. But all the while, the name of the translator and the timbre of her voice were testing my brain and a synapsis struggled to form: was the young woman named Chana Faerstein, whom I had known years before in Jerusalem, now Chana Bloch the translator? With some effort, I unearthed her address (no email then) and wrote to Chana Bloch asking if she was, in her earlier incarnation, Chana Faerstein. And that is how Chana came back into my life on a gloomy autumn afternoon in Saratoga Springs, New York. From that day to this, with years and continents between us, she has never been far from my consciousness, though now it is death itself that separates us … We had started together at Leib and Esther Rochman's Jerusalem tisch in the mid-1960s, we women with English on our tongues, Yiddish in our DNA, and Hebrew in our hearts. We were surrounded in the Rochman home by the ghoulish graffiti of their daughter, Rivka Miriam, who would go on to become an accomplished poet but whose adolescent charcoal murals of emaciated figures from Over There belied the [End Page 21] energy, the humor, the melodies, and the stories that kept us coming back to Rochman's table. And then, Life happened, to us both. By the time we reconnected, we were each somewhat bruised but also much wiser—and funnier. We met over the years in our respective homes in Berkeley and Jerusalem; at a Jewish writers' conference in San Francisco; at a colloquium on the poetry of Yehuda Amichai in Durham, North Carolina. But most of our encounters were on the page, as I pored over Chana's translations of Ravikovitch and Yehuda Amichai, which she did with her namesake and soul sister Chana Kronfeld, and of the Song of Songs with her first husband, Ariel. Then, as Chana's own poetry began to accumulate, I came to realize that at nearly every turn in my own life, she had been there just before me and had managed to craft those intersections into magnificent verse: in divorce, in "late love" and remarriage, in the efforts to create something new and beautiful out of the fragments of our parents' (and then our own) broken and reconstituted lives, in our desire to transmit our secrets and struggles to our children in ways that would enable and not cripple them: I wanted to save the two of youfrom the misery that filled our house.Even smoke-blind,I saw your serious faces asking.It was you who saved me. Would it help youto know the scope of my confusions?The journals are full of secretsbut maybe you know them without my telling. The key to the safe is under the sugar bowl.1 That sugar bowl stands in all our kitchens … And then came the cancer. Helplessly, we witnessed Chana's dogged determination not to let the beast devour her spirit as it took chunks out [End Page 22] of her body. It was not in the clichéd "battle" against the Grim Reaper—as if...

Cosmopolitanism and the Jews by Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman

Reviewed by: Cosmopolitanism and the Jews by Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman Carsten Schapkow Cosmopolitanism and the Jews. By Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Pp. 343. Cloth $80.00. ISBN 978-0472130412. Cosmopolitanism and the Jews, coauthored by Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman, is an important scholarly contribution in which the authors provide a detailed analysis of the complex relationship between cosmopolitanism and the Jews. The book consists of eight chapters in which a good number of primary sources, mainly from the field of belles lettres, are analyzed. The book is organized in chronological order beginning with a theoretical introduction to the topic. Other chapters discuss cosmopolitanism during the Enlightenment, the nineteenth century in both Austria-Hungary and Germany, the interwar period with its new appreciation of a European idea, National Socialism and exile, German Jewish writers under Stalinist oppression, and finally "Russian Jews as the Newest Cosmopolitans." The title of the book is misleadingly general because the book focuses almost entirely on Jews writing in German; the exception is chapter 7, "Russian Jews as the Newest Cosmopolitans," which also takes into account Russian-Jewish authors writing in either German or American English. Based on what Gelbin and Gilman call contemporary "fluid identity" (5), their intention is twofold: First, to "look at how the Jews, however defined, come to shape the various contemporary models of cosmopolitans and how such models, in turn, come to redefine what is understood as Jewish" (5). Second, it is Gelbin's and Gilman's objective to shed light on how the cosmopolitan as a concept over 250 years "turned into a global elite at the turn of the twenty-first century" (1). With the focus on a cultural elite of Jewish writers, the second objective does not become entirely clear in the book. Each chapter emphasizes different writers' depiction of cosmopolitanism, [End Page 615] beginning with the Enlightenment, in which, according to the authors, the notion of cosmopolitanism came into being. And as they correctly express, "the rootless, nomadic, cosmopolitan defined the Jew in European consciousness among non-Jews and Jews alike and shaped Jewish identity politics" (256). Non-Jewish authors like Schiller and Goethe held dear a concept of cosmopolitanism that opposed any kind of nationalism. But Schiller and Goethe (among others) were also concerned about the changes wrought by modernity, which enabled the Jews to blend in and become less visible. Gelbin and Gilman are therefore correct to emphasize that non-Jewish, Enlightened German thinkers understood cosmopolitanism as a part of Enlightened German culture. The widespread longing for a nation state during the course of the nineteenth century troubled the more inclusive idea of cosmopolitanism toward the Jews as expressed by Enlightened, Jewish and non-Jewish, intellectuals. And skeptical voices regarding the Jews as cosmopolitans became ever more skeptical when asking whether Jews could actually express their loyalty to Germany. Through the close readings of multiple primary sources, the authors offer occasionally unexpected insight—from outsiders such as African American author W.E.B. Du Bois, then a graduate student in Berlin, who observed and described the minority complex of the Germans and applied it to the negative perception of the Jew as a cosmopolitan in his 1893 essay "The Present Condition of German Politics" (103). Another example is Thomas Mann, who saw himself in the tradition of Enlightened thinkers like Goethe and, together with many German Jewish writers, believed himself to represent the real and "healthy cosmopolitan" (146) German culture while living abroad during the Nazi period. But there were also writers like Stefan Zweig, who prioritized his loyalty to Germany over his cosmopolitanism, mainly because of external events like World War I and his time in exile. Or the many German Jewish authors who came to the heartbreaking realization that Stalinism had failed and found that the term "cosmopolitanism" how turned against the Jews. But non-Jews, too, became part of this cruel and perverted ideology, as the case of GDR politician Paul Merker shows. In these passages of the book the reader is fully immersed in these fascinating and painful stories. Unfortunately, however, the book fails to...

Dostoyevsky in Quasi-Jewish Garb: Crime and Punishment as Translated by Y. H. Brenner

The author analyses the Hebrew translation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment by Jewish writer Y. H. Brenner published in the early 20th century, the time when Modern Hebrew was forming. The article considers the linguistic peculiarities of the Hebrew text compared to the original. The author reveals considerable differences in the linguistic and stylistic methods. In his translation, Brenner uses excerpts from Jewish prayers as parallels to the original Orthodox prayers, phrases from traditional Jewish books, and elements of the Jewish way of life. For example, to translate Raskolnikov’s adamant decision to carry out his plan and kill the pawnbroker, Brenner uses a Talmudic expression with easily recognisable Jewish religious associations. By doing so, Brenner makes his translation sound more elevated than the original. Despite the stylistic and semantic deviations from the original, Brenner’s translation is very accurate in rendering the spirit of Dostoyevsky’s book: this is not a coincidence, since Brenner’s worldview was close to that of the Russian writer. The introduction of idioms and associations characteristic of the Hebrew world and borrowings from the Jewish Bible and Talmud adds Jewish colour to the dialogues and musings of the characters, which changes the style of the novel considerably and introduces a noticeable shift in its spiritual tonality. Despite all the differences between the translation and the original, the Hebrew text does transmit the special ambience of Dostoyevsky’s novel.

Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine by Lital Levy

Reviewed by: Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine by Lital Levy Riki Traum Lital Levy, Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. 360 pp. "Who will tell our story? We, who walk upon this night, driven out of place and myth. The myth that could not find a single one among us to testify that the crime had not taken place. If we are not we, then they are not they. But particulars are particulars—the thief's pretext." —Mahmoud Darwish1 Edward Said introduced the idea that postcolonial writers bear their past within them as "re-interpretable and re-deployable experiences in which the formerly silent native speaks and acts on territory taken back from the colonialist."2 His words resonate decades later, in the works of Israeli and Palestinian writers and poets. In many ways, Lital Levy's Poetic Trespass, which studies the inseparable paths of Hebrew and Arabic, starts exactly where the silent native Palestinian or Jewish writer locates the appropriate linguistic "territory" and speaks. Poetic Trespass profoundly identifies linguistic liminality within Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli literature and its interrelation with Mizraḥi literature. It brings together historical moments in which the past is abruptly taken and consequently dies, and the future is yet to be born and is hence questionable. In this context, the nakba, for the Palestinians, and the immigration to Israel, for Jews, are two focal and vivid examples. For Levy, however, this liminal stage creates poetic possibilities that deserve special scholarly attention. Moreover, these experiences have become points of encounter where a literary text meets its other, and historical circumstances generate circles of linguistic identity, by their own merits and crucial impact. The attention that Levy draws to this hyperawareness of language to its Other and to itself, as well as the different representations of this hyperawareness, unveils a crucial aspect in the contemporary Israeli politics of identity. In this context, the book presents Mizraḥi writers and poets who resist the politics of identity by rendering their linguistic identity as an open and heterogenic space.3 Levy then examines different linguistic strategies and practices emerge amid displacement of ethnocentric domain and recreate poetic visions and possibilities. No-man's-land, [End Page 331] a saturated term that becomes a theme in the book, becomes a palpable metaphor of the book's zone of study and exploration; "The cultural space of in-betweenness, encompassing contact zone and no-man's-land" (12). Although Levy anchors the term in its scholarly context, she clearly uses it as a zone and form of resistance and subversion. Poetic Trespass studies the complex multi-layered dialogue between Hebrew and Arabic and the cultural functions and meanings of Arabic in Modern Hebrew literature. This no-man's-land can be seen as the "forsaken zone" between Hebrew and Arabic, where writers and poets wander between the two languages, but also create alternative standpoints and political stances. At the foundation of the book lies the presumption that the migration between Hebrew and Arabic opens new cultural-cum-political "redemptive" possibilities, beyond the narrowly national ones, "where writers transgress the boundaries of language and identity inscribed in sociopolitical codes of the state" (3). This poetic insight is refreshing in itself and requires the clarification of the book's two conceptual axes. The first axis is the "hyperlanguage" that Levy coins and describes as "excessively performative, self-aware literary language" (12). Hyperlanguage is the exact dialogized state between Hebrew and Arabic which anchors the literary works discussed in Poetic Trespass in a wider socio-political concept. It is employed at different levels of visibility, but it illuminates the creative state of mind of its writer, who links "the political and the metaphysical." The second axis is the literature of no-man's-land, the subject of the book, and a literature that emerges in the bilingual interaction between the two languages. No-man's-land, in Hebrew, in Arabic, and in their relationship, evokes simultaneously political and mental intersections while translating the unclaimed and abstract political zone into a palpable and visible literary space, now inhabited by the...

Chaos in Babel: Reconfiguring Biblical Archetypes in Monique Bosco's Babel-Opéra

Monique Bosco was a prolific author of numerous novels, short stories, and poems, and was recognized as one of the key Jewish writers in Montreal, a small minority group of immigrant intellectuals who wrote in French.... In many of Bosco’s works, readers can observe a particular fascination with the ancient past, especially a preoccupation with the Old Testament and such biblical archetypes as Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Moses, Miriam, Job, and Lot’s wife. However, Bosco deviates from the traditional representation of these biblical figures, as she revises them to reflect the contemporary crisis of exile and geographical displacement—seminal elements associated with the Jewish Diaspora.

The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany by Jonathan O. Wipplinger

Reviewed by: The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany by Jonathan O. Wipplinger Sharon M. Wailes and Monika Herzig Jonathan O. Wipplinger. The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany. U of Michigan P, 2017. 311 pp. Paper, $39.95. Jonathan Wipplinger presents a thorough analysis of the impact of jazz as a musical art form rooted in African American culture on the young democracy of Germany, specifically the city of Berlin. His research digs [End Page 174] deep into articles, news reports, publicity materials, concert programs, and also translations of the poetry of Langston Hughes, while also providing an analysis of the political context in order to document the impact of the arrival of jazz as a symbol for American culture. Wipplinger refutes the commonly held notion that legitimate African American jazz was unknown in Weimar Germany apart from its "diluted commercial imitations" (12). Furthermore, he argues that the overwhelming publicity that symphonic jazz and the white band director Paul Whiteman received in Weimar Germany eclipsed the presence of African American jazz artists, leaving the initial impression that Germans were unfamiliar with African American jazz. Wipplinger offers a badly needed alternative narrative in which the musical contributions of African American jazz performers and composers become visible and in which the complexity and "messiness of cultural transfer" are acknowledged (13). The modernism of the 1920s, observed in Dadaism and expressionism, was largely facilitated through the cultural friction associated with jazz that allowed the development of a new identity. During this dynamic period, American Sam Wooding and his jazz orchestra from New York premiered in Berlin. Wooding's presence points to an influence on Weimar culture of African American jazz directly from America. Wipplinger discusses the strong (both positive and negative) reception of the group and then moves to the theoretical level, engaging with modernist theory. He uses the concept of aural shock, based on the theories of Theodore Adorno and Walter Benjamin, along with socially constructed ideas of Blackness and images of the modern metropolis in his analysis. Wipplinger acknowledges Adorno's negative writings on jazz but nonetheless applies his theories, deliberately reading Adorno "against the grain" (70), a valid move consistent with the book's innovative approach. The paradoxical juxtaposition of the modern and the primitive was found in jazz—the machination and noise of the modern city reflected in the instrumentation and overwhelming nature of jazz, and Blackness in its associations for Weimar Germans with the syncopated rhythms of the "jungle" representing the primitive—yielding the concept of a "techno-primitive hybrid" (45). Wipplinger also argues that perceptions (and misperceptions) of African American musicians in Weimar Germany influenced modernist thought. With the rise of the Nazi party, racial discrimination led to the rejection of jazz. Nazis conflated Blackness, modern jazz, and Jewishness, as shown in an image at the exhibition Entartete Musik (Degenerate music), [End Page 175] depicting a caricature of a black saxophonist with a large hoop earring and a Star of David on the lapel (234). Yet German Jewish writers and artists were attracted to jazz because they saw parallels between the plight of African Americans in American culture and their own circumstances as outcasts. In uncovering an alternative narrative of history, Wipplinger also engages with gender directly. His chapter on Girlkultur discourse of the mid-1920s analyzes a new conception in which the feminine was cast as the foreign, even threatening other. Although the dancing girls of the era were white, Fritz Giese posits a primitive black ancestry to their rhythmic dancing. The ideas surrounding Girlkultur give jazz, race, and gender an interrelatedness that was perceived to drive the process of modernity. A thorough, in-depth document of the impact of jazz culture on the Weimar Republic, The Jazz Republic satisfies a need to see jazz from a transnational perspective and can function in the classroom as a springboard for fruitful discussion of German modernism and the complexity of cultural exchange. Wipplinger offers a list of alternative figures on the Weimar jazz scene whose presence can serve as an antidote to the prominent white males featured in textbooks for German foreign-language instruction. His narration supplements the usual...