Bruce Zuckerman has transformed the way we look at ancient Semitic inscriptions. The series of articles included here honour his many contributions through discussions of a wide variety of inscriptional materials, Biblical texts, archaeology, lexicography and teaching methodology.
Offering an original reading of the book of Job, one of the great literary classics of biblical literature, this book develops a new analogical method for understanding how biblical texts evolve in the process of transmission. Zuckerman argues that the book of Job was intended as a parody protesting the stereotype of the traditional righteous sufferer as patient and silent. He compares the book of Job and its fate to that of a famous Yiddish short story, "Bontsye Shvayg," another covert parody whose protagonist has come to be revered as a paradigm of innocent Jewish suffering. Zuckerman uses the story to prove how a literary text becomes separated from the intention of its author, and takes on quite a different meaning for a specific community of readers.
This book comprises a series of ten essays written by the authors both individually and collaboratively. While the subjects of these essays are wide ranging, they share a common recognition that issues at the forefront of contemporary Jewish thought must be measured against the background of ancient traditions, which revisit rabbinic and biblical times and beyond. The intent of these essays is to illustrate how shadows of longstanding traditions continue to shade current perceptions. Double Takes challenges the reader's assumptions about modern Jewish thought by demonstrating how the past can be an unpredictable lens for the present-day. An examination of contemporary themes in a historical perspective reveals unanticipated, even disconcerting, refractions. The book appears in the Studies in the Shoah series as volume 26.
With this volume of the Casden Annual Review, we continue our policy of focusing on a single topic, and in this case the topic we have turned to is, quite literally, close to home: the Jewish role in California life. The aim of this volume is to stress the cultural aspects of the Jewish experience of coming to and living in the Golden State. While we cannot hope to present in this limited venue a comprehensive and detailed history of Jews in California, per se, it is our goal to consider a number of insightful perspectives on how the Jews, who settled in California, helped shape the Golden State's culture and were, in turn, themselves molded by cultural influences that were uniquely Californian. While this volume looks at the Jewish experience in California in general-nonetheless, particular emphasis is placed on Southern California. We begin our cultural history at a crucial moment in California history, the mid-nineteenth century in the after-glow of the California Gold Rush, where we encounter a European Jewish emigrant, fresh off the boat, who can (and did) get a chance to make a fortune in the pueblo of Los Angeles and, in doing so, helped define what California is. We conclude it with a personal, meditation from one of the latest group of refugees to come to the west, the Iranian Jews who were forced out of their ancient homeland some thirty years ago and who found in Southern California a particularly hospitable (yet no less difficult) place to transplant their cultural roots. In between, we are treated to a few choice snapshots of how life developed and changed for Jews in California as California itself evolved and grew. We firmly believe that there is something special about the Jewish role in California and even more so in Southern California-that here on the lower left-coast Jews have had an Americanization experience that is significantly different from that which Jews have had elsewhere in the USA. Conversely, Southern California would be quite a different place without the Jews who made it their home. Book jacket.
The Jewish Role in American Life examines the complex relationship between Jews and the United States. Jews have been instrumental in shaping American culture and Jewish culture and religion have likewise been profoundly recast in the United States, especially in the period following World War II.
This volume focuses on the special role that Jews played in reshaping the racial landscape of southern California in the twentieth century. Rather than considering this issue in terms of broad analyses of organizations or communities, each contribution instead approaches it by examining the activity of a single Jewish individual, and how he or she navigated the social terrain of a changing southern California. In particular, this volume is one of the first to take seriously the unique racial/ethnic makeup of southern California for Jewish activism, with a particular focus on the relationship between Jews and Mexican Americans in the area around Los Angeles. The Jewish individuals who are this volume's subjects represent a wide spectrum of backgrounds and perspectives, ranging from an elected official to an activist lawyer, and from a local businessman to a Democratic Party organizer. The volume culminates with an interview with one of the most beloved of local university rabbis, who has been operating in the ever-changing environment of higher education in Los Angeles over the past thirty years. While its overall message is one of optimism, the volume does not shy away from taking on some of the more vexed issues in the scholarship of racial/ethnic interaction. While Jewish activism in shaping local civil rights is thoroughly discussed, the specific and unequal dynamics of power within the civil rights community is also analyzed. The changing relationship of Jews to whiteness in southern California during the late twentieth century, in both geographic and political terms, shapes many of these ongoing relationships. Finally, the volume provides a unique historical perspective on our understanding of contemporary Los Angeles in all its ethnic complexity, and specifically in thinking through the future of Jewish role in urban southern California.
This volume of the Casden Institute's The Jewish Role in American Life annual series introduces new scholarship on the long-standing relationship between Jewish-Americans and the worlds of American popular music. Edited by scholar and critic Josh Kun, the essays in the volume blend single-artist investigations with looks at the industry of music making as a whole. They range from Jewish sheet music to the risqué musical comedy of Belle Barth and Pearl Williams, from the role of music in the shaping of Henry Ford's anti-Semitism to Bob Dylan's Jewishness, from the hybridity of the contemporary "Radical Jewish Culture" scene to the Yiddish experiments of 1930s African-American artists. Contents: Foreword (Gayle Wald); Introduction (Josh Kun); "Cohen Owes Me Ninety-Seven Dollars, and other Tales from the Jewish Sheet- Music Trade" (Jody Rosen); "'Dances Partake of the Racial Characteristics of the People Who Dance Them' : Nordicism, Antisemitism, and Henry Ford's Old Time Music and Dance Revival" (Peter La Chapelle); "Ovoutie Slanguage is Absolutely Kosher: Yiddish in Scat- Singing, Jazz Jargon, and Black Music" (Jonathan Z. S. Pollack); "'If I Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends' : Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and the Space of the Risque" (Josh Kun); "'Here's a foreign song I learned in Utah' : The Anxiety of Jewish Influence in the Music of Bob Dylan" (David Kaufman); "Jazz Liturgy, Yiddishe Blues, Cantorial Death Metal, and Free Klez: Musical Hybridity in Radical Jewish Culture" (Jeff Janeczco).
In the late nineteenth century in Europe and to some extent in the United States, the Jewish upper middle class--particularly the more affluent families--began to enter the cultural spheres of public life, especially in major cities such as Vienna, Berlin, Paris, New York, and London. While many aspects of society were closed to them, theater, the visual arts, music, and art publication were far more inviting, especially if they involved challenging aspects of modernity that might be less attractive to Gentile society. Jews had far less to lose in embracing new forms of expression, and they were very attracted to what was regarded as the universality of cultural expression. Ultimately, these new cultural ideals had an enormous influence on art institutions and artistic manifestations in America and may explain why Jews have been active in the arts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to a degree totally out of proportion to their presence in the US population. Jewish cultural activities and aspirations form the focus of the contributions to this volume. Invited authors include senior figures in the field such as Matthew Baigell and Emily Bilski, alongside authors of a younger generation such as Daniel Magilow and Marcie Kaufman. There is also an essay by noted Los Angeles artist and photographer Bill Aron. The guest editor of the volume, Ruth Weisberg, provides an Introduction that places the individual contributions in context.
Bruce By: Bruce Williams Bruce is a lesson to let people know you can change in your life. You don’t have to settle. You can choose life and choose GOD.
Music in Bruce Berger's poetry is more than subject matter, more than cadence; it is a metaphor for the examined life. A man's transformations are measured by the concerts he has witnessed. The depth of a woman's life is revealed by an unfinished painting that her son attempts to complete. A composer is gauged by his silences. Syncopating his measures, using poetic forms for their liberating sense of play, Berger makes music of the lives of a worker on a computerized assembly line, the developer of quark theory, and a father whose single remaining pleasure is crossword puzzles. Turning wordplay on such unpoetic subjects as practice rooms, embryo transplants, and money, Berger springs secrets from our uninspected commonplaces.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.