Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation

Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation
Author: E. Miller Budick
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1998-09-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521635752

Explores the works of leading black and Jewish writers from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Color Me in

Color Me in
Author: Natasha E. Diaz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2019
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0525578234

Fifteen-year-old Nevaeh Levitz is torn between two worlds, passing for white while living in Harlem, being called Jewish while attending her mother's Baptist church, and experiencing first love while watching her parents' marriage crumble.

Klezmer America

Klezmer America
Author: Jonathan Freedman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2009-10-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 023114279X

Klezmer is a continually evolving musical tradition that grows out of Eastern European Jewish culture, and its changes reflect Jews' interaction with other groups as well as their shifting relations to their own history. But what happens when, in the klezmer spirit, the performances that go into the making of Jewishness come into contact with those that build different forms of cultural identity? Jonathan Freedman argues that terms central to the Jewish experience in America, notions like "the immigrant," the "ethnic," and even the "model minority," have worked and continue to intertwine the Jewish-American with the experiences, histories, and imaginative productions of Latinos, Asians, African Americans, and gays and lesbians, among others. He traces these relationships in a number of arenas: the crossover between jazz and klezmer and its consequences in Philip Roth's The Human Stain; the relationship between Jewishness and queer identity in Tony Kushner's Angels in America; fictions concerning crypto-Jews in Cuba and the Mexican-American borderland; the connection between Jews and Christian apocalyptic narratives; stories of "new immigrants" by Bharathi Mukherjee, Gish Jen, Lan Samantha Chang, and Gary Shteyngart; and the revisionary relation of these authors to the classic Jewish American immigrant narratives of Henry Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow. By interrogating the fraught and multidimensional uses of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness, Freedman deepens our understanding of ethnoracial complexities.

The Tenants

The Tenants
Author: Bernard Malamud
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2003-09-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1466804971

With a new introduction by Aleksandar Hemon In The Tenants (1971), Bernard Malamud brought his unerring sense of modern urban life to bear on the conflict between blacks and Jews then inflaming his native Brooklyn. The sole tenant in a rundown tenement, Henry Lesser is struggling to finish a novel, but his solitary pursuit of the sublime grows complicated when Willie Spearmint, a black writer ambivalent toward Jews, moves into the building. Henry and Willie are artistic rivals and unwilling neighbors, and their uneasy peace is disturbed by the presence of Willie's white girlfriend Irene and the landlord Levenspiel's attempts to evict both men and demolish the building. This novel's conflict, current then, is perennial now; it reveals the slippery nature of the human condition, and the human capacity for violence and undoing.

Black Harlem and the Jewish Lower East Side

Black Harlem and the Jewish Lower East Side
Author: Catherine Rottenberg
Publisher: Suny Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-01-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781438445229

Comprehensive analysis of how Harlem and the Lower East Side have been depicted over the course of the twentieth century in African American and Jewish American literature.

Anglophone Jewish Literature

Anglophone Jewish Literature
Author: Axel Stähler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 568
Release: 2007-09-14
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1134121415

Anglophone Jewish literature is not traditionally numbered among the new literatures in English. Rather, Jewish literary production in English has conventionally been classified as ‘hyphenated’ and has therefore not yet been subjected as such to the scrutiny of scholars of literary or cultural history. The collection of essays addresses this lack and initiates the scholarly exploration of transnational and transcultural Anglophone Jewish literature as one of the New English Literatures. Without attempting to impose what would seem to be a misguided conceptual unity on the many-facetted field of Anglophone Jewish literature, the book is based on a plurality of theoretical frameworks. Alert to the productive friction between these discourses, which it aims to elicit, it confronts Jewish literary studies with postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and other contemporary theoretical frameworks. Featuring contributions from among the best-known scholars in the fields of British and American Jewish literature, including Bryan Cheyette and Emily Miller Budick, this collection transcends borders of both nations and academic disciplines and takes into account cultural and historical affinities and differences of the Anglophone diaspora which have contributed to the formation and development of the English-language segment of Jewish literature.

Richard Wright

Richard Wright
Author: Keneth Kinnamon
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2006-03-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0786421355

African-American writer Richard Wright (1908-1960) was celebrated during the early 1940s for his searing autobiography (Black Boy) and fiction (Native Son). By 1947 he felt so unwelcome in his homeland that he exiled himself and his family in Paris. But his writings changed American culture forever, and today they are mainstays of literature and composition classes. He and his works are also the subjects of numerous critical essays and commentaries by contemporary writers. This volume presents a comprehensive annotated bibliography of those essays, books, and articles from 1983 through 2003. Arranged alphabetically by author within years are some 8,320 entries ranging from unpublished dissertations to book-length studies of African American literature and literary criticism. Also included as an appendix are addenda to the author's earlier bibliography covering the years from 1934 through 1982. This is the exhaustive reference for serious students of Richard Wright and his critics.

Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970

Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970
Author: Richard H. King
Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2004-08-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780801880667

To study this transition from universalism to cultural particularism, Richard King focuses on the arguments of major thinkers, movements, and traditions of thought, attempting to construct a map of the ideological positions that were staked out and an intellectual history of this transition.