A quarter of a century after Isaac Bashevis Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature it is time to take stock of his achievement. Penetrating studies of his fictional and autobiographical works by leading scholars in the field reveal that for all the acclaim he has received on the basis of the English versions of his works, no adequate evaluation of Bashevis's significance can be made without careful examination of the original Yiddish texts. Critical readings assess inter alia his themes and motifs, the impact of Kabbalah on his work, reflections of society in his original Polish homeland as well as his place within the context of contemporary Jewish American letters and the canon of modern Yiddish and Hebrew writing.

A collection of essays that explores magical realism as a momentary interruption of realism in US ethnic literature, showing how these moments of magic realism serve to memorialize, address, and redress traumatic ethnic histories.

Yiddish literature and culture take a central position in Jewish literatures. They are shaped to a high degree, not least through migration, by encounter, transfer, and transformation. Translation, sustained by writers, translators, journalists amongst others, encompasses besides texts also discourses, concepts and medialities. The volume's contributions negotiate this dynamic field between Yiddish studies, translation and world literature in different spatial and temporal contexts. The focus on translation in Yiddish literature and culture allows insights into the glocal Yiddish cultural production as well as it delivers incentives to current transdisciplinary cultural theories.

Many people who have thought about God have not thought about animals, or about the relationship between the two. But among those who have are some of the most celebrated religious thinkers, including Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Tryon, John Wesley, John Ruskin, Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, and Paul Tillich. This volume comprises 24 scholarly studies that detail challenges to the dominant anthropocentrism of most religious traditions. The editors have brought together Jewish, Unitarian, Christian, transcendentalist, Muslim, Hindu, Dissenting, deist, and Quaker voices, each offering a unique theological perspective that counters the neglect of the nonhuman. Animal Theologians is divided into three parts starting with the pioneers who first saw a relationship between animals and divinity, those who contributed to the expansion of social sensibility to animals, and ending with the work of contemporary theologians. The essays in this volume use contextual and historical background to describe what led animal theologians to their beliefs, and then pave way for further developments in this expanding field. This volume is an act of reclaiming different religious traditions for animals by recovering lost voices.

This multicultural reference work on Jewish folklore, legends, customs, and other elements of folklife is the first of its kind.

This volume offers an examination of varied forms of expressions of heresy in Jewish history, thought and literature. Contributions explore the formative role of the figure of the heretic and of heretic thought in the development of the Jewish traditions from antiquity to the 20th century. Chapters explore the role of heresy in the Hellenic period and Rabbinic literature; the significance of heresy to Kabbalah, and the critical and often formative importance the challenge of heresy plays for modern thinkers such as Spinoza, Freud, and Derrida, and literary figures such as Kafka, Tchernikhovsky, and I.B. Singer. Examining heresy as a boundary issue constitutive for the formation of Jewish tradition, this book contributes to a better understanding of the significance of the figure of the heretic for tradition more generally.

Collections of interviews with notable modern writers

Are the literary works of Polish Jews one unified literature in three languages: Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish, or is the literal corpus of each of these languages a separated literary and cultural phenomenon? Twenty-seven scholars from Europe, the United States, and Israel explore different aspects of the multilingual literature of Eastern European Jews, with a particular focus on the trilingual literature of Polish Jews until World War II. The work of the great Yiddish and Hebrew writer Isaac Leib Peretz (1852–1915) represents the center of the book, though it does not concentrate solely on Peretz’s work, but, rather, discusses the oeuvre of other unique authors in the cultural space of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe generally, and in Poland particularly. The book looks at this issue from three aspects, namely the literal, cultural, and historical, and also examines the dialogue of Polish Jewish literature with other languages and cultures.

A fascinating study of the picaresque protagonists of Yiddish literature and their minority authors