Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe - Jewish Culture and Contexts

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Biographical Note: Benjamin Nathans is Ronald S. Lauder Endowed Term Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Gabriella Safran is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. She is the author of Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire and coeditor (with Steven Zipperstein) of The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century. Table of Contents: Preface--David B. RudermanIntroduction: A New Look at East European Jewish Culture--Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella SafranPART I. VIOLENCE AND CIVILITY1. Jewish Literary Responses to the Events of 1648-1649 and the Creation of a Polish-Jewish Consciousness--Adam Teller2. "Civil Christians": Debates on the Reform of the Jews in Poland, 1789-1830--Marcin Wodzi?skiPART II. MIRRORS OF POPULAR CULTURE3. The Botched Kiss and the Beginnings of the Yiddish Stage--Alyssa Quint4. The Polish Popular Novel and Jewish Modernization at the End of the Nineteenth and Beginning of the Twentieth Centuries--Eugenia Prokop-Janiec5. Cul-de-Sac: The "Inner Life of Jews" on the Fin-de-Siecle Polish Stage--Michael C. SteinlaufPART III. POLITICS AND AESTHETICS6. Yosef Haim Brenner, the "Half-Intelligentsia," and Russian-Jewish Politics, 1899-1908--Jonathan Frankel7. Recreating Jewish Identity in Haim Nahman Bialik's Poems: The Russian Context--Hamutal Bar-Yosef8. Not The Dybbuk but Don Quixote: Translation, Deparochialization, and Nationalism in Jewish Culture, 1917-1919--Kenneth Moss9. Beyond the Purim-shpil: Reinventing the Scroll of Esther in Modern Yiddish Poems--Kathryn HellersteinPART IV. MEMORY PROJECTS10. Revealing and Concealing the Soviet Jewish Self: The Desk-Drawer Memoirs of Meir Viner--Marcus Moseley11. The Shtetl Subjunctive: Yaffa Eliach's Living History Museum--Jeffrey ShandlerList of ContributorsIndexPublisher Marketing: Culture Front Representing Jews in Eastern Europe Edited by Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella Safran For most of the last four centuries, the broad expanse of territory between the Baltic and the Black Seas, known since the Enlightenment as "Eastern Europe," has been home to the world's largest Jewish population. The Jews of Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Galicia, Romania, and Ukraine were prodigious generators of modern Jewish culture. Their volatile blend of religious traditionalism and precocious quests for collective self-emancipation lies at the heart of "Culture Front." This volume brings together contributions by both historians and literary scholars to take readers on a journey across the cultural history of East European Jewry from the mid-seventeenth century to the present. The articles collected here explore how Jews and their Slavic neighbors produced and consumed imaginative representations of Jewish life in chronicles, plays, novels, poetry, memoirs, museums, and more. The book puts culture at the forefront of analysis, treating verbal artistry itself as a kind of frontier through which Jews and Slavs imagined, experienced, and negotiated with themselves and each other. The four sections investigate the distinctive themes of that frontier: violence and civility; popular culture; politics and aesthetics; and memory. The result is a fresh exploration of ideas and movements that helped change the landscape of modern Jewish history. Benjamin Nathans is Ronald S. Lauder Endowed Term Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of "Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia." Gabriella Safran is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. She is the author of "Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire" and coeditor (with Steven Zipperstein) of "The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century." Jewish Culture and Contexts 2008 336 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-4055-9 Cloth $65.00s 42.50 World Rights Religion, History Short copy: Bringing together contributions by historians and literary scholars, "Culture Front" explores how Jews and their Slavic neighbors produced and consumed imaginative representations of Jewish life in chronicles, plays, novels, poetry, memoirs, museums, and elsewhere.

Contributor Bio:  Nathans, Benjamin Benjamin Nathans is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He edited the Russian-language "Research Guide to Materials on the History of Russian Jewry (Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries) in Selected Archives of the Former Soviet Union "(1994), compiled by G. M. Deych. Contributor Bio:  Safran, Gabriella Gabriella Safran is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. She is the author of the prize-winning book" Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire "(Stanford University Press, 2000). Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History and Director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford University. He has published widely on modern Jewish history, and he is at work on a cultural history of East European and Russian Jewry from the eighteenth century to the present.