The Literary, Cultural, and Historical Significance of the 1937 Biblical Stage Play The Eternal Road

The Literary, Cultural, and Historical Significance of the 1937 Biblical Stage Play The Eternal Road
Author: Jonathan C. Friedman
Publisher: Edwin Mellen Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2004
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

In academic circles, the play is relatively well known, although it has not received the kind of attention that scholars have paid to works such as The Threepenny Opera, Forty Days of Musa Dagh, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Reinhardt's most often performed theatrical production.

Weill's Musical Theater

Weill's Musical Theater
Author: Stephen Hinton
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2012-04-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0520951832

In the first musicological study of Kurt Weill’s complete stage works, Stephen Hinton charts the full range of theatrical achievements by one of twentieth-century musical theater’s key figures. Hinton shows how Weill’s experiments with a range of genres—from one-act operas and plays with music to Broadway musicals and film-opera—became an indispensable part of the reforms he promoted during his brief but intense career. Confronting the divisive notion of "two Weills"—one European, the other American—Hinton adopts a broad and inclusive perspective, establishing criteria that allow aspects of continuity to emerge, particularly in matters of dramaturgy. Tracing his extraordinary journey as a composer, the book shows how Weill’s artistic ambitions led to his working with a remarkably heterogeneous collection of authors, such as Georg Kaiser, Bertolt Brecht, Moss Hart, Alan Jay Lerner, and Maxwell Anderson.

Carrying a Big Schtick

Carrying a Big Schtick
Author: Miriam Eve Mora
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2024-05-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814349641

Jewish masculinity as a diverse set of adaptive reactions to masculine hegemony and the political, religious, and social realities of American Jews throughout the twentieth century. For twentieth-century Jewish immigrants and their children attempting to gain full access to American society, performative masculinity was a tool of acculturation. However, as scholar Miriam Eve Mora demonstrates, this performance is consistently challenged by American mainstream society that holds Jewish men outside of the American ideal of masculinity. Depicted as weak, effeminate, cowardly, gentle, bookish, or conflict-averse, Jewish men have been ascribed these qualities by outside forces, but some have also intentionally subscribed themselves to masculinities at odds with the American mainstream. Carrying a Big Schtickdissects notions of Jewish masculinity and its perception and practice in America in the twentieth century through the lenses of immigration and cultural history. Tracing Jewish masculinity through major themes and events including both World Wars, the Holocaust, American Zionism, Israeli statehood, and the Six-Day War, this work establishes that the struggle of this process can shed light on the changing dynamics in religious, social, and economic American Jewish life.

Atrocities on Trial

Atrocities on Trial
Author: Patricia Heberer
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2008-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0803210841

These essays are organised into four sections, dealing with the history of war crime trials from Weimar Germany to just after World War II, the sometimes diverging Allied attempts to come to terms with the Nazi concentration camp system, the ability of postwar societies to confront war crimes of the past and the legacy of war crime trials.

Rainbow Jews

Rainbow Jews
Author: Jonathan C. Friedman
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2007
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780739114483

Rainbow Jews deals with the intersection of gay and Jewish identity in American and Israeli film and theater, from the 1960s to the present. Its main area of interest is the extent to which Jewish creative voices in the performing arts have constructed multidimensional images of, and a welcoming public space for, the gay, lesbian, and transgendered community as a whole. Through a close reading of the texts of numerous American and Israeli plays and films (some famous, but mostly lesser known), the author evaluates some of the key conventions and tropes that have been employed to construct, critique, and reflect the social reality of the connection between Jewishness and gay identity in the United States and Israel. Secondarily, the author explores ways in which gay-Jewish playwrights and filmmakers have assisted the re-evaluation of sexual norms within Judaism over the past three decades, inspiring and reinforcing measures across the spectrum of belief geared towards integrating Jewish members of the GLBT community into the overall Jewish historical narrative.

Teaching Jewish American Literature

Teaching Jewish American Literature
Author: Roberta Rosenberg
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1603294465

A multilingual, transnational literary tradition, Jewish American writing has long explored questions of personal identity and national boundaries. These questions can engage students in literature, writing, or religion; at Jewish, Christian, or secular schools; and in or outside the United States. This volume takes an expansive view of Jewish American literature, beginning with writing from the earliest colonies in the Americas and continuing to contemporary Soviet-born authors in the United States, including works that engage deeply with religious concepts and others that embrace assimilation. It invites readers to rethink the nature of American multiculturalism, suggests pairings of Jewish American texts with other ethnic American literatures, and examines the workings of whiteness and privilege. Contributors offer varied perspectives on classic texts such as Yekl, Bread Givers, and "Goodbye, Columbus," along with approaches to interdisciplinary topics including humor, graphic novels, and musical theater. The volume concludes with an extensive resources section.

Book Review Index

Book Review Index
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1080
Release: 2005
Genre: Books
ISBN:

Every 3rd issue is a quarterly cumulation.

Performing Difference

Performing Difference
Author: Jonathan C. Friedman
Publisher: University Press of America
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2008-12-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0761842675

Performing Difference is a compilation of seventeen essays from some of the leading scholars in history, criticism, film, and theater studies. Each author examines the portrayal of groups and individuals that have been traditionally marginalized or excluded from dominant historical narratives. As a meeting point of several fields of study, this book is organized around three meta-themes: race, gender, and genocide. Included are analyses of films and theatrical productions from the United States, as well as essays on cinema from Southern and Central America, Europe, and the Middle East. Topically, the contributing authors write about the depiction of race, ethnicities, gender and sexual orientation, and genocides. This volume assesses how the performing arts have aided in the social construction of the 'other' in differing contexts. Its fundamental premise is that performance is powerful, and its unifying thesis is that the arts remain a major forum for advancing a more nuanced and humane vision of social outcasts, not only in the realm of national imaginations, but in social relations as well.