Constructions of 'the Jew' in English Literature and Society

Constructions of 'the Jew' in English Literature and Society
Author: Bryan Cheyette
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1995-10-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521558778

Combining cultural theory, discourse analysis and new historicism with readings of the works of major contemporary authors, this study concludes that "the Jew" is characterized unstereotypically as the embodiment of uncertainty within English literature and society.

Constructions of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society

Constructions of
Author: Bryan Cheyette
Publisher:
Total Pages: 301
Release: 1993
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521443555

Literary critics and cultural historians have for too long written the question of race out of mainstream accounts of English literature. In Constructions of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society Bryan Cheyette combines cultural theory, discourse analysis and new historicism with close readings of works by Arnold, Trollope and George Eliot, Buchan and Kipling, Shaw and Wells, Belloc and Chesterton, T. S. Eliot and Joyce to argue that the Jew lies at the heart of modern English literature and society: not as a stereotype, but as the embodiment of confusion and indeterminacy.

Coming Out Jewish

Coming Out Jewish
Author: Jon Stratton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 564
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1134597061

Like many Jews of our generation, Jon Stratton grew up in a family more concerned about assimilation than about preserving Jewish tradition. While he could easily 'pass' among non-Jews, he found himself increasingly torn between his fear of not belonging and a deeply-felt commitment to his family's past. Coming Out Jewish examines the unique challenge of constructing an identity amid the clash between ethnicity and conformity. For many Jews, the idea of full assimilation ended with the Holocaust. But the pressure to adapt to the mainstream, Stratton eloquently argues, remains powerful, especially for those with anglicized names, assimilationist parents, a history of recent immigration, or ambivalent experiences of themselves as Jews. With reference to the work of Daniel Boyarin, Ien Ang, and Homi Bhabha, among others, Stratton offers fresh analysis on a wide range of topics, including the Jewish origins of pluralism in the US, anti-Semitism in Germany, the Jewishness of sitcoms like Seinfeld, and the Yiddishization of American culture since World War II. More than a book about Jews and Jewishness, Coming Out Jewish smartly and accurately mines the Jewish experience in the West to give voice to the issues of migration, Diaspora, assimilation and identity that affect those, displaced and 'othered', around the world.

British Jews and Imperial Service

British Jews and Imperial Service
Author: Stephanie M. Chasin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2023-12-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0755603192

In the wake of the devastating WWI, three Jews headed the most valuable territory in the British Empire in addition to a strategically important new addition. Edwin Montagu held the position of Secretary of State for India, Rufus Isaacs (Lord Reading) was the newly appointed Viceroy of India, and Herbert Samuel arrived in Jerusalem as the first High Commissioner of Palestine. Their appointments came at a time of great upheaval as Indian nationalists clamoured for independence, pan-Islamists fought to keep the defeated Ottoman Empire intact and the sultan in Constantinople, and Zionists sought to build on the wartime promise by the British government to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine in face of opposition by Palestinians and pan-Islamists. The task of tackling these issues was made all the more difficult by accusations that Jews were not loyal to the British Empire and its goals, a view promoted by the appearance of the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion in English translation. This book follows this web of divisive imperial politics, and nationalist and pan-Islamist aspirations in India and Palestine, through the lives and work of these three men whose efforts were coloured by the post-war fear of a declining empire that was being corroded from within.

An Unfortunate Coincidence

An Unfortunate Coincidence
Author: Didi Herman
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199229767

This book examines the depiction of Jews and Jewishness in modern English law, revealing the role of racial and religious understandings in legal decision-making. It challenges both assumptions about tolerance and neutrality in English law and any simple narrative of anti-Semitism, charting the ambivalent status of Jewish identity in the law.

The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture

The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture
Author: Nadia Valman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 19
Release: 2007-04-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139464213

Stories about Jewesses proliferated in nineteenth-century Britain as debates about the place of the Jews in the nation raged. While previous scholarship has explored the prevalence of antisemitic stereotypes in this period, Nadia Valman argues that the figure of the Jewess - virtuous, appealing and sacrificial - reveals how hostility towards Jews was accompanied by pity, identification and desire. Reading a range of texts from popular romance to the realist novel, she investigates how the complex figure of the Jewess brought the instabilities of nineteenth-century religious, racial and national identity into uniquely sharp focus. Tracing the narrative of the Jewess from its beginnings in Romantic and Evangelical literature, and reading canonical writers including Walter Scott, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope alongside more minor figures such as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy, Valman demonstrates the remarkable persistence of this narrative and its myriad transformations across the century.

British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932-40

British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932-40
Author: Daniel Tilles
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2014-11-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472505689

This book explores the use of antisemitism by Britain's interwar fascists and the ways in which the country's Jews reacted to this, examining the two alongside one another for the first time and locating both within the broader context of contemporary events in Europe. Daniel Tilles challenges existing conceptions of the antisemitism of Britain's foremost fascist organisation, the British Union of Fascists. He demonstrates that it was a far more central aspect of the party's thought than has previously been assumed. This, in turn, will be shown to be characteristic of the wider relationship between interwar European fascism and antisemitism, a thus far relatively neglected issue in the burgeoning field of fascist studies. Tilles also argues that the BUF's leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, far from being a reluctant convert to the anti-Jewish cause, or simply a cynical exploiter of it, as much of the existing scholarship suggests, was aware of the role antisemitism would play in his fascist doctrine from the start and remained in control of its subsequent development. These findings are used to support the notion that, contrary to prevailing perceptions, Jewish opposition to the BUF played no part in provoking the fascists' adoption of antisemitism. Britain's Jews did, nevertheless, play a significant role in shaping British fascism's path of development, and the wide-ranging and effective anti-fascist activity they pursued represents an important alternative narrative to the dominant image of Jews as mere victims of fascism.

Between ‘Race’ and Culture

Between ‘Race’ and Culture
Author: Bryan Cheyette
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 1996
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804728534

Jøden i engelsk og amerikansk litteratur

Rethinking European Jewish History

Rethinking European Jewish History
Author: Jeremy Cohen
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2008-11-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1800345410

The major cultural, ideological, and social changes that have occurred in Europe in the past century have generated widespread reassessment of European history in terms of its presuppositions, its methodologies, its directions, its emphases, and its scope. This timely volume looks at the Jewish past in the spirit of this reassessment. It points to a new framework for the study of Jewish history and helps to contextualize it within the mainstream of historical scholarship.