conversations reconstructions heterosexuality

books:

Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Contraversions: Critical Studies in ...

1 review
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

University of California Press, 2000

Wandering Jews
In recent years, a seemingly endless variety of poetic and political signifiers have been invoked in attempts to describe the experiences of dispossession, minorities, and regions: border, creolization, transculturation, transnationalism, hybridity. These spatial/historical paradigms are often at the crux of cultural debates in much the way that W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness ...

The Hyena People: Ethiopian Jews in Christian Ethiopia (Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish ...

2 reviews
Hagar Salamon

University of California Press, 1999

Well-done, but incomplete
Excellent academic account of Ethiopian Jewish-Christian rivalry in native Ethiopia. The author has conducted "exit"-style interviews, anthro style, with Ethiopian Jewish emigrees to Israel, once settled in the Holy Land, about their experiences with Christian neighbors back in Ethiopia. The info gleaned is priceless, unsettling, and invited as many questions as answers. The profundity of the ...

A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Contraversions, 1)

4 reviews
Daniel Boyarin

University of California Press, 1997

Boyarin's Conception of St. Paul's Flesh and Spirit
This work is one of the most insightful to appear upon Paul the Apostle in years. Recognizing that specifically Lutheran and generally Protestant understandings of Paul have been knowingly or unknowingly anti-Jewish, Boyarin sees beyond mere church theologizing toward the issues that motivated Paul to write: the exclusive nature of a community based on Jewish lineage vs. transcultural worship of ...

Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Contraversions - Critical ...

2 reviews
Daniel Boyarin

University of California Press, 1997

Boyarin is wild--Salkin goes one step further
This is one of the best Jewish books that I have read recently. The best thing about Boyarin is that he has this ability to really synthesize the Jewish male ethos. I don't agree with his anti-Zionism, though...After reading this I read Rabbi Jeff Salkin's new book Searching for My Brothers: Jewish Men in a Gentile World. Salkin goes further than Boyarin, and even quotes him. Salkin believes ...

Language in Time of Revolution (Contraversions: Jews and Other Differenc)
Benjamin Harshav

Stanford University Press, 1999

This book on culture and consciousness in history concerns the worldwide transformations of Jewish culture and society and the revival of the ancient Hebrew language following the waves of pogroms in Russia in 1881, when large numbers of Jews in Eastern and Central Europe redefined their identity as Jews in a new and baffling world. Reviews “With his customary versatility and lucidity Harshav has given us . . . a host of new and ...

Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov (Contraversions ; 5)

1 review
Moshe Rosman

University of California Press, 1996

A new classic in Hasidic history
Professor Rosman succeeds at portraying the Ba'al Shem Tov, Israel ben Eliezer of Miedzyboz, in his environment of the Polish-Lithuanian shtetls and in the midst of the politics and economics of the Jewish kahal, and the Polish, post-Russo-Swedish War nobility. He also succeeds in separating the BeShT fables from the realities, and succinctly disproves the authenticity of the "BeShT's letters." ...

On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Contraversions : Critical Studies in Jewish ...

1 review
Chana Kronfeld

University of California Press, 1996

best book i've read on modern hebrew poetry
an excellent study of hebrew modernism as well as a fierce critique of contemporary constructions of modernism which focus mainly on "central" literary traditions.

The Politics of Canonicity: Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew Poetry (Contraversions: Jews and Other ...
Michael Gluzman

Stanford University Press, 2002

The Politics of Canonicity sheds new light on the dynamics of canon formation in modern Hebrew literature. It explores the ways in which literary culture—as site and as tool—participates in the production of national identity. The aesthetic paradigms, political ideologies, and social interests that privilege certain texts and literary modes are reexamined within the framework of the conscious and deliberate practices of Zionism to ...

Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (Contraversions: Jews and Other ...
Charlotte Fonrobert

Stanford University Press, 2002

Perhaps more than any other aspect of rabbinic literature, the laws about and discussions of menstruation have polarized current discussions of gender relations in Jewish culture. Is the designated impurity of menstruation sexist? Or does ritual absence from sex during menstruation encourage a rhythmic reaffirmation of conjugal intimacy? This book offers a new perspective on the extensive rabbinic discussions of menstrual impurity, female ...

God's Beauty Parlor: And Other Queer Spaces in and Around the Bible

2 reviews
Stephen Moore

Stanford University Press, 2002

Queer - and very very good
Here are four papers, of a distinctly dubious nature, that were written by Professor Moore over a number of years (and having gone through a number of versions) that are now presented in conjunction with Moore's interest, no, fixation with the sexual and the aesthetic. These papers are dubious from an academic perspective because although the subjects be biblical, and although Moore be a ...

The Chosen Body: The Politics of the Body in Israeli Society (Contraversions: Jews and Other Differenc)
Meira Weiss

Stanford University Press, 2002

This book examines how the social and cultural paradigms of contemporary Israel are articulated through the body. To construct a panoramic view of how the Israeli body is chosen, regulated, cared for, and ultimately made perfect, the author draws upon some twenty years of ethnographic research in Israel in a range of subjects. These include premarital and prenatal screening, the regulation of the body and its imagery among appearance-impaired ...

The Meaning of Yiddish (Contraversions: Jews and Other Differenc)

1 review
Benjamin Harshav

Stanford University Press, 1999

Insight into Yiddish language and culture
In The Meaning Of Yiddish, Benjamin Harshav (Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Yale University) has written an impressive work of scholar erudition and insight into the major aspects of the Yiddish language and culture. Professor Harshav reveals where Yiddsh came from and what it has to offer contemporary Jewish culture, even as it is starting to die out ...

Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Askenazi Judaism in Sixteenth - through Nineteenth-Century Prague ...
Sylvie-Anne Goldberg

University of California Press, 1997

To date, remarkably little research attention has been paid to the development of Jewish beliefs and rituals about illness and death. Crossing the Jabbok presents an illuminating study of such views and practices among Ashkenazi Jews (1500s-1800s) and is one of the first works to apply history of mentalités methods to a topic in Jewish cultural studies. Focusing on Prague, then the center of Central and Western European Jewry, the author ...

Conversations with Dvora: An Experimental Biography of the First Modern Hebrew Woman Writer (Contraversions - ...
Amia Leiblich

University of California Press, 1997

The life of Dvora Baron (1887-1956) evokes both inspiration and mystery. She was born in a Russian shtetl , the precocious daughter of a rabbi. Her intellectual gifts garnered her an education usually reserved for boys, and she soon proved a brilliant writer, widely published while still in her teens. At age twenty-three she immigrated to Palestine, married a prominent Zionist journalist, and joined the literary intelligentsia of the emerging ...

Independence Park: The Lives of Gay Men in Israel (Contraversions: Jews and Other Differen)

2 reviews
Amir Fink, Amir Sumaka'i Fink

Stanford University Press, 2000

revealing, entertaining, and thought provoking!
I have read the draft of this book, and it is undoubtedly one of the most revealing, enlightening and entertaining writings on modern gay life in Israel. A must not only for readers interested in gay culture, but for anyone who wants to know more about young people - gay or straight - in modern Israel. The book comprises of a tapestry of interviews, whose translation artfully captures all ...

The Sinner and Amnesiac: The Rabbinic Invention of Elisha ben Abuya and Eleazar ben Arach (Contraversions: ...
Alon Goshen-Gottstein

Stanford University Press, 2000

Elisha ben Abuya is one of the most intriguing figures in early rabbinic literature, consistently capturing the Jewish imagination as the arch-heretic, apostate, and great sinner. Because of the vague nature of the rabbinic sources relating to him, later generations, particularly in modern times, have been able to project upon him the visions of whatever they saw as either negative or ideal in the figure of the rebel apostate. This book ...

A Prophet Reads Scripture: Allusion in Isaiah 40-66 (Contraversions: Jews and Other Differenc)

1 review
Benjamin Sommer

Stanford University Press, 1998

Thoughtful exploration of the Hebrew prophetic tradition
Deutero-Isaiah occupies a significant place in the cast of Hebrew prophets. He is at once of the same generation of the great exilic prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah, while at the same time a seminal figure for the lesser prophets. His quest to legitimize his message comprises a lyric corpus that poetically alludes to his predecessors. Prof. Sommer successfully examines Deutero-Isaiah's ...

First Converts: Rich Pagan Women and the Rhetoric of Mission in Early Judaism and Christianity
Shelly Matthews

Stanford University Press, 2002

It has often been said that rich pagan women, much more so than men, were attracted both to early Judaism and Christianity. This book provides a new reading of sources from which this truism springs, focusing on two texts from the turn of the first century, Josephus’s Antiquities and Luke’s Acts. The book studies representation, analyzing the repeated portrayal of rich women as aiding and/or converting to early Judaism in its various ...

Black Fire on White Fire: An Essay on Jewish Hermeneutics, from Midrash to Kabbalah (Contraversions, Critical ...
Betty Rojtman

University of California Press, 1998

Using the tools of contemporary semiotic theory to analyze classical rabbinic hermeneutics and medieval mystical exegesis, Betty Rojtman unveils a striking modernity in these early forms of textual interpretation. The metaphor from rabbinic literature that describes the writing of the Torah--black fire on white fire--becomes, in Rojtman's analysis, a figure for the differential structures that can be found throughout rabbinic discourse. Moving ...

The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania

5 reviews
Gail Kligman

University of California Press, 1998

Vai, Alexandru, n-a fost atat de rau!
I'm an American woman living and working in Romania, and I have to disagree with Alexandru. From all I hear from my friends both male and female, this book isn't off-target at all. It IS true that many people say Ceasescu's policies didn't affect their lives "all that much", but the people who did have unwanted pregnancies or were harassed because they didn't have enough children were and ...

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