In this sparkling debut, a young critic offers an original,
passionate, and erudite account of what it means to feel
Jewish-even when you're not. Self-hatred. Guilt.
Resentment. Paranoia. Hysteria. ...Overbearing Mother-Love. In this
witty, insightful, and poignant book, Devorah Baum delves into
fiction, film, memoir, and psychoanalysis to present a dazzlingly
original exploration of a series of feelings famously associated
with modern Jews. Reflecting on why Jews have so often been
depicted, both by others and by themselves, as prone to "negative"
feelings, she queries how negative these feelings really are. And
as the pace of globalization leaves countless people feeling more
marginalized, uprooted, and existentially threatened, she argues
that such "Jewish" feelings are becoming increasingly common to us
all. Ranging from Franz Kafka to Philip Roth, Sarah Bernhardt to
Woody Allen, Anne Frank to Nathan Englander, Feeling
Jewish bridges the usual fault lines between left and right,
insider and outsider, Jew and Gentile, and even Semite and
anti-Semite, to offer an indispensable guide for our divisive
times.
The article reflects on Derrida's project as partly characterised by the effort to invent a language capable of responding to a post-war situation of aporia whose double-bind he seems to have felt ...most acutely refracted in his always anxious identifications and denials regarding his own situation as a post-war 'Jew'. The article examines the intersections between the 'Jewish' element of his autobiography and his philosophical practice and argues with critics who have sought to 'play up' or 'play down' the significance of this relation in his work. The article further considers the emphasis Derrida places on his private life and looks at a number of instances where Derrida implies that what seems least important (marginal or trivial) in his writing may be the site of his most 'global' claims. Finally, the article argues that Derrida, like Freud, suffered from a condition that I diagnose as 'circumcision anxiety', which, unlike castration anxiety, concerns the relationship with the sibling rather than the father and fears not abandonment so much as the consequences of election or love.
This article examines interdisciplinary phenomena relating to the so-called 'return of religion' alongside a contemporaneous and possibly reactive trend, the 'return of realism', as reflected in the ...recent stir caused by publishing sensations such as Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, John Gray's Black Mass, and James Wood's How Fiction Works. The article goes on to argue, with reference to Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, and Derrida, that our critical moment is marked by the necessity of acknowledging the limited power of thought or intellection to change or correct certain structures of belief, here named ineradicable. It will then be suggested that, similar to religion, realism possesses an ineradicable element of faith that can be detected in the persistence of religious ideas about endings within contemporary culture. While claiming that it is ultimately impossible to have any real knowledge of death, the article considers the significance of death's recurrent appearance as a source (or fantasy) of secular wisdom, functioning in various discourses as a 'God term'.
Introduction Baum, Devorah
Feeling Jewish,
08/2017
Book Chapter
There’s a joke Jews sometimes like to tell about the moment when two non-Jews, Tom and Dick, bump into each other in the street:
TOM: How are you?
DICK: Fine, thanks.
Ha! Just imagine not being ...Jewish! “Fine, thanks!” What a blast!
What the joke’s really about, of course, is Jewish fantasies of how social relations between gentiles must surely be. So breezy. So easy. Straightforward questions always answered positively, identities forever stable, no one even suspecting it might be otherwise. No one, that is, except the teller of a joke hinting at just such a suspicion … what if
Conclusion Baum, Devorah
Feeling Jewish,
08/2017
Book Chapter
Feeling Jewish can often sound like a byword for feeling funny: both funny peculiar—strange, odd, out of place—and funny haha: Moishe’s exaggerated sense of threat and permanent state of hysteria; ...talk about over the top, he’s hilarious! But how “all alone” is Moishe really? Is it possible that he’s only wound up feeling that way because everyone around him keeps insisting they’re just “fine”? Everyone, including Itzhik, whose response I can well imagine: “Why are you always so neurotic, Moishe? You see anti-Semites everywhere. Even when there’s no proof. You’ve really got to stop being so insular. I’m
Baum, my family name, means ‘tree’ in German, probably because my ancestors worked in forestry. When my great-uncle Jack was five his father, Henoch, who was then in Poland running an unsuccessful ...grocery shop, sent his sister to Warsaw to ask the owner of a new timber mill if he could be the forest manager. She returned with a letter of recommendation that so excited Henoch he ran into a neighbour’s house to show it to them. Jack’s memoir describes what happened next: ‘In a flash that letter disappeared … Nobody knows how the letter vanished, it was a complete
WINNER of the Association of Jewish Libraries' Judaica Reference AwardProvides critical overviews of the main writers and key themes of Anglophone Jewish fiction
This collection of essays represents ...a new departure for, and a potentially (re)defining moment in, literary Jewish Studies. It is the first volume to bring together 28 chapters covering a wide range of American, British, South African, Canadian and Australian Jewish fiction.
The volume is divided into 3 parts - American Jewish Fiction; British Jewish Fiction; and International and Transnational Anglophone Jewish Fiction - but many of the essays cross over these boundaries and speak to each other implicitly, as well as, on occasion, explicitly. Extending and redefining the canon of modern Jewish fiction, the volume juxtaposes major authors with more marginal figures, revising and recuperating individual reputations, rediscovering forgotten and discovering new work, and in the process remapping the whole terrain. This volume opens windows onto vistas that previously had been obscured and opens doors for the next generation of studies that could not proceed without a wide-ranging, visionary empiricism grounding their work.
Key FeaturesHighlights the rich diversity of the field and identifies its key themes, including immigration, the Diaspora, the Holocaust, Judaism, assimilation, antisemitism and ZionismAnalyses the main trends in Anglophone Jewish fiction and situates them in historical contextDiscusses the place of Anglophone Jewish fiction in relation to critical debates concerning transatlanticism and transnationalism; ethnicity and identity politics; postcolonial studies, feminist studies and Jewish StudiesWith a preface by Mark Shechner, the volume's contributors include Vicki Aarons (Trinity University, Texas), Debra Shostak (Wooster College, Ohio), Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia), Efraim Sicher (Ben-Gurion University), Phyllis Lassner (Northwestern University), Sue Vice (University of Sheffield), Lori Harrison-Kahan (Boston College), Ruth Gilbert (University of Winchester), Beate Neumeier (University of Cologne) and Sandra Singer (University of Guelph)
...the 'survivor' is 'viewed less as an individual whose mode of life needs to be understood and interpreted than as a new kind of material object, identity, or type of person' (From Guilt 68). ...According to Mowitt, the mutual reinforcement of Trauma Studies and Psychoanalysis occurs because both are self-generating discourses with no objective réfèrent other than that which appears through the exercise of their own frameworks. The advantage of morality, as Mowitt understands it, rests in the way the moral spokesperson stands apparently beyond the reproaches of the partisan or merely political. ...the moral advantage of trauma is that, by virtue of its universal claims, it can silence all opposition or dissent: trauma claims to speak from beyond private or particular 'interests' in a supra-political way. Jewish identity is thus guilty insofar as any identity must be counted traumatic for those whose only hope for the future rests in resisting the determinations of the past. Since 1948 it has been customary for many, including many Jews, to identify 'Jewish interests' with those of the modem State of Israel.
