Full Description
Providing an assessment of Jewish identity, this volume presents critical engagements with a number of Jewish writers and filmmakers from a variety of European countries, including Austria, France, Germany, Poland, and the UK. The novels and films discussed explore the meaning of being Jewish in Europe today, and investigate the extent to which this experience is shaped by factors that lie outside the national context, notably by the relationship to Israel. As the recent attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and the targeting of a Jewish supermarket in Paris, demonstrate, these questions are more pressing than ever, and will challenge Jews, as well as Jewish writers and intellectuals, as they explore the answers.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Jewish Culture and History.
Contents
Foreword Introduction 1. Negotiating Jewish identity in an asemitic age 2. Standing apart/being a part: Cixous's fictional Jewish identities 3. Frenchness, Jewishness, and 'integration' in Karin Albou's La Petite Jérusalem 4. 'Becoming English': assimilation and its discontents in contemporary British-Jewish literature 5. Antisemitism and Israel in British Jewish fiction: perspectives on Clive Sinclair's Blood Libels (1985) and Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question (2010) 6. Lost in Third Space? Narrating German-Jewish identity in Maxim Biller's autobiography Der gebrauchte Jude (2009) 7. The persistence of nostalgia? When Poles miss their Jews and Israelis yearn for Europe 8. Is there an 'Israeli Diaspora'? Jewish Israelis negotiating national identity between Zionist ideology and diasporic reality 9. Growing up Jewish in Austria: a personal testimony
