Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660-1830

These well-known lines, uttered silently by the Mother of Exiles in Lazarus’s celebrated sonnet, mounted on a bronze plaque inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, and excerpted on countless souvenir knickknacks now on sale at the museum shop, are a turning point in the history of Jewish American literature. I mean by this several things, historical and historiographical. Most basically, to call something a turning point means by definition that we understand something significant to have existed beforehand as well as afterward. We all know what came afterward—from Abraham Cahan and Mary Antin, to Anzia Yexierska, Michael Gold, Henry Roth, and Clifford Odets, to Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and on and on to Austin Ratner and Joseph Skibell, the latest winners of the Sami Rohr Prize. But even among those of us who are scholars of Jewish American literature, few pay much attention to what came before Emma Lazarus penned her now canonized lines.1 So by referring to these lines as a turning point, I want to acknowledge The WreTched refuse of JeWish AmericAn LiTerAry hisTory m ch eL P. KrAm er Ba-Ilan UnersIty

The Wretched Refuse of Jewish American Literary History

During the late 19th century, the first portrayal of a Jewish woman on the American stage occurred in Leah the Forsaken. This successful production subjugated the Jewess by filling the title role with Kate Bateman, a non-Jewish actress, thus presenting a sanitized and palatable Jew for the middle-class Christian audience.

Kate Bateman: Sanitizing the Beautiful Jewess

Ida Rubinstein (1885–1960) was a mystery; variously viewed as a Hebrew princess, a queen of mime and a female dandy in the guise of a dancer, she performed both on and off the stage of high society in the early 1900s, making her mark on the international public and contributing to changing attitudes about women, art and dance movement aesthetics. Virtually untrained as a dancer, but mistress of the seductive gesture learned from the West (but honed in the East), Rubinstein knew just how to capture the Western eye, and she spent a fortune playing to it. The luxury of extreme wealth certainly helped open the doors to her artistic fame, and she was fortunate to be included in the sensational triumphs of the Ballets Russes as it was received by a sophisticated and enthusiastic Parisian audience. In this paper, I examine the sources from which Rubinstein received the inspiration and training that led to her artistic successes and discuss the context of her approaches to movement, gesture and spectacle. Overall, I reflect upon the various ways in which her Jewishness and privileged upbringing in the twilight of Imperial Russia affected (or did not affect) her decadent lifestyle and enhanced and/or limited aspects of her remarkable career as a dance performer, producer and influential patron of the arts. To what extent was she seen to “perform” the Jewess with its stereotyped roles of temptress and exotic other, reflecting the fin de siecle figure of la belle Juive with its powerful collapsing of distance between staged representation and real life?

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/nashim.26.122

Ida Rubinstein: Dancing Decadence and "The Art of the Beautiful Pose"

abstract: In this article I explore Allegra Goodman’s 2010 novel The Cookbook Collector, which has received no critical attention. In part the novel is extremely timely in that it signals our contemporary concern with materiality, in which digitalization seems to portend the erasure of print culture and at the same time cause a reactive and romantic embrace of tangible physical texts. At another level, the novel also attempts to re-address the position and role of Judaism during the dotcom boom and bust era of 1999–2002. I argue that while compared to Goodman’s earlier works this novel appears to situate Judaism peripherally, it in fact endorses what I term a strong Jewish “sensibility” because of its focus on texts (letters and cookbooks in particular, Torah as a more implicit backdrop). I examine the presentation of texts as archives (as sites of memory and also as anticipatory absences), texts as both utterances and material objects, the relationship between texts and terrain (the natural landscape), and texts and temporality, noting the way that Judaism seems to offer, in the novel, a reconciliation of memory (physical text versus uttered text), and identity (collective versus individualistic).

Text, Terrain, and Temporality: Re-exploring Judaism in Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector

In Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, the character of Rebecca refuses to be circumscribed by the discourses of orientialism, anti-semitism and idealism. Rebecca's specifically Jewish female sexuality escapes the binary oppositions of East/West, past/present, Christian/alien, subject/object, and pure/tainted that would seek to contain her. Jewish female desire creates an instability in Scott's text that is only temporarily resolved through Rebecca's expulsion. This article argues that Scott uses cultural markers such as a yellow turban, a diamond earring and a silver casket in order to render the Jewish woman reliably visible in an attempt to relieve the tension created by a character who defies categories and conventions.

The ‘Distinction of the Beautiful Jewess’: Rebecca of Ivanhoe and Walter Scott's Marking of the jewish Woman

This essay examines two contemporary first novels by Jewish women in relation to Allegra Goodman as a model for depicting religious practice sympathetically. I argue that Goodman (Kaaterskill Falls), Dara Horn (In the Image) and Ruchama King (Seven Blessings) portray religion, spirituality, and religious learning as integral to women's lives. This focus contrasts with writers who portray the transition toward secularity, anxious relations toward being a Jew, or the struggle to assimilate in other, perhaps prior, strands of Jewish writing. I offer contextualized close readings of the negotiation between the religious and the secular focused on the gendered symbols of water and tefillin and the fraught relation between women's bodies and their minds. The last decade has seen a spate of remarkable first novels by Jewish women. Two such novels that concern us here are Dara Horn's award-winning, phantasmagorical fiction of several generations of intertwined families in In the Image (2002) and Ruchama King's Seven Blessings (2003), which describes the baal tesbuvah (religious returnee) movement and religious dating scene of Americans in Israel. Both novels can be seen in fruitful relation to an immediate precursor, Allegra Goodman's Kaaterskill Falls (1998), a breakout first novel in which Goodman created a provocative yet heartening historical fiction of ajewish ultra-Orthodox community. The salient feature of this writing is the return of contemporary Jewish women to religious practice, to ajewish sense of self and community, and to ajewish spirituality and family. In contrast to the mid-century Jewish writers, many of whom portrayed a more secular and rootless world as a result of a more anxious relation to their status as Jews, Goodman, Horn, and King embrace-even celebrate-religion; they unabashedly seek and revere spirituality and convey the importance of women's learning and intellect through their characters and narratives.2 My analysis of the novels by Horn and King will demonstrate how Allegra Goodman's KaaterskM Falls may be viewed as a precursor to both texts. Yet these offspring are radically different. Horn's novel, with a postmodern sensibility, moves fluidly through generations and timeframes, linking periods and people through an elaborate symbolic system. King's gritty, emphatically realist work immerses readers in the world of religious learning while enacting its own lessons in maturity, passion, honor, and connection. The analysis also shows how each book, though depicting "Tradition Reborn," focuses on the negotiation between the secular and the religious to a different end. If, as Sanford Pinsker contends, Goodman's "characters ... struggle within the restrictions of traditional Judaism," they ultimately accept those restrictions in order to remain "within."3 Horn's characters, however, struggling more with the sense of a loss of tradition than of constrained practice, work to revive a Jewish culture and tradition perceived as abandoned. King's characters, finally, focus more on personal fulfillment, as they embrace the constraints of traditional Judaism yet struggle to reconcile beliefs with desires and societal expectations. If Goodman's depiction of ultra-Orthodoxy conveys a message of duty to family and community superseding duty to self, King's book conveys the opposite message, yet allows room for a duty to self to exist within traditional Judaism through Jewish study. Horn's novel calls for honoring tradition, but values familial connections and personal practices beyond any ready-made religious systems whose authenticity is questioned. Tradition Reborn In a sociological observation referred to as'Hansen's law," the third generation remembers what the second generation tried to forget. Dara Horn, who wrote her first novel in between college and graduate school, "started noticing the phenomenon of people [her] age deciding to become more religious than their parents." She explains, in contrast to the generation of more rebellious writers set on assimilation and universal recognition that preceded her, "[f Jor my generation, the way to rebel against your parents is to become Orthodox. …

"Diving into the Wreck": Binding Oneself to Judaism in Contemporary Jewish Women's Fiction

The Sublimity of the Jewish Type: Balzac’s Belle Juive as Virgin Magdalene aux Camélias

Legends of Rebecca: Ivanhoe, Dynamic Identification, and the Portraits of Rebecca Gratz

Ludwig Robert is best known today as the brother of salonniere Rahel Levin Varnhagen. Through Baroness Sophie von Grotthus he came to have his first play performed in Goethe's Weimar. The play was called Die Tochter Jephtbas [Jephthah's Daughter]. Set in biblical times, the play actually dramatises the transgressive nature of nineteenth-century Jewish women's mobility. In this essay I analyse the correspondence surrounding Robert's play and read the play in relation to Bible stories, Goethe's literary creations and German adaptations of Shakespeare. The circumstances surrounding the play's production, the flouting of some representational conventions, and the heritage of the playwright and his patroness combine to provide insight into the complexity of German—Jewish and gendered relations in the early 1800s.

Transgressive Mobility, Gender and Jewish Patronage: The Case of Ludwig Robert's Die Tochter Jephthas

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