Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon

Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse

Edited by Justin Daniel Cammy

Edited by Dara Horn

Edited by Alyssa Quint

Edited by Rachel Rubinstein

    • Introduction

      • Part I: Making a Canon

    • Writing Jewish
      Hillel Halkin
    • Knocking on Heaven’s Gate: Hebrew Literature and Wisse’s Canon
      Alan Mintz
    • Holocaust Literature: Foreshadowings and Shadowings
      David Aberbach
    • Of Jews and Canons: Further Thoughts
      Ilan Stavans
    • A Jewish Artistic Canon
      Ezra Mendelsohn
    • Judging The Judgment of Shomer: Jewish Literautre versus Jewish Reading
      Justin Cammy
    • The Judgment of Shomer or The Jury Trial of All of Shomer’s Novels
      Sholem Aleichem, translated by Justin Cammy

      • Part II: Reading Wisse’s Canonical Authors

    • Daniel Deronda: “The Zionist Fate in English Hands” and “The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews”
      Edward Alexander
    • The Pleasure of Disregarding Red Lights: A Reading of Sholem Aleichem’s “Monologue ‘A Nisref’”
      Dan Miron
    • The Hershele Maze: Isaac Babel and his Ghost Reader
      Sasha Senderovich
    • The Open Suitcases: Yankev Glatshteyn’s Ven Yash Iz Gekumen
      Avarham Novershtern
    • Seductions and Disputations: Pseudo-Dialogues in the Fiction of Isaace Bashevis Singer
      Miriam Udel-Lambert
    • Gimpel the Simple and on Reading from Right to Left
      David G. Roskies
    • Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Short Story “Androgynous”
      Susanne Klingenstein
    • Building Bridges Destined to Fall: Biological and Literary Paternity in Appelfeld’s The Ice Mine
      Philip Hollander
    • Life/Writing: Aharon Appelfeld’s Autobiographical Work and the Modern Jewish Canon
      Naomi B. Sokoloff
    • Henry Roth, Hebrew, and the Unspeakable
      Hana Wirth-Nesher
    • The Modern Hero as Schlemiel: The Swede in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral
      Michael Kimmage

      • Part III: Conversations Across Canons and Between Texts

    • Innovation by Translation: Yiddish and Hasidic Hebrew in Literary History
      Ken Frieden
    • Creating Yiddish Dialogue for “The First Modern Yiddish Comedy”
      Marion Aptroot
    • The Smoke of Civilization: The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Sh. Y. Abramovitsh’s Di Klyatshe
      Marc Caplan
    • Yiddish Canon Consciousness and the Dionysiac Spirit of Music
      Jed Wyrick
    • Joyce’s Yiddish: Modernism, Translation, and the Jews
      Rachel Rubenstein
    • The Transmission of Poetic Anger: An Unexploded Shell in the Jewish Canon
      Janet Hadda
    • Guilt, Mourning, Idol Worship, and Golem Writing: The Symptoms of a Jewish Literary Canon
      Emily Miller Budick

      • Part IV: Interventions: Expanding Wisse’s Canon

    • What’s So Funny about Yiddish Theater? Comedy and the Origins of Yiddish Drama
      Jeremy Dauber
    • Naked Truths: Avrom Goldfaden’s The Fanatic of the Two Kuni-Lemls
      Alyssa Quint
    • Memory as Metaphor: Meir Wiener’s Novel Kolev Ashkenazi as Critique of the Jewish Historical Imagination
      Mikhail Krutikov
    • Shmuel Nadler’s Besht-Simfonye: At the Limits of Orthodox Literature
      Beatrice Lang Caplan
    • Chava Rosenfarb and The Tree of Life
      Goldie Morgentaler
    • Fiddles on Willow Trees: The Missing Polish Link in the Jewish Canon
      Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska
    • The Kvetcher in the Rye: J. D. Salinger and the Challenges to the Modern Jewish Canon
      Leah Garrett
    • Israeli Identity in a Post-Zionist Age
      Yaron Peleg

      • Part V. Writers, Critics, and Canons

    • Bellow’s Canon
      Jonathan Rosen
    • The Eicha Problem
      Dara Horn
    • The Grand Explainer
      Cynthia Ozick

    • Ruth Wisse Bibliography
    • Contributors
  • Cover: Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon

Justin Daniel Cammy is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at Smith College.

Dara Horn is the author of the novels In the Image and The World to Come.

Alyssa Quint is Professor of Jewish Literature, Princeton University.

Rachel Rubinstein is Jeremiah Kaplan Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish-American Literature and Culture, Hampshire College.