Coffeehouses, Journalism, and the Rise of Modern Jewish Literary Culture (original) (raw)

The Urban Literary Café and the Geography of Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism in Europe

One of the best and most productive ways to grasp the problem of location in Hebrew and Yiddish modernism is through the prism of the urban European café. Cafés help chart the geography and spatial history of European modernism writ large, and they illuminate key aspects of modernity and modernism in general. This article discusses the cultural and literary significance of particular cafés, and three specific cities in which Hebrew and Yiddish interacted with other transnational modernisms: Odessa, Vienna, and Berlin. Before turning to café culture in these cities, it also sketches the historical specificity of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and places Hebrew and Yiddish modernism in relation to mainstream European modernism.

A Modern (Jewish) Woman in a Café: Leah Goldberg and the Poetic Space of the Coffeehouse

This article examines the complex role of the urban café in Leah Goldberg's poetic texts and Goldberg's place as a woman writer in Jewish café culture. The café appears as a real and imaginary " thirdspace " in both her poetry and her prose and as part of her activity as a writer, editor, essayist, and cultural and literary critic. The article investigates all these aspects of coffeehouse culture through three decades of Goldberg's career in Europe and in the Yishuv and Israel (especially in Berlin, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem), shedding new light on Goldberg's life and work and her unique place in modern Jewish culture.

Writing in a World of Strangers The Invention of Jewish Literature Revisited

Journal of Latin Cosmopolitanism and European Literatures, 2022

The question how to frame the world as asingle, objectivesystem that accommodates both oneness and asymmetry,has been a constant in human thought. In an attempt to avoid Westernteleologies, I propose to start at the opposite end and revisit the invention,in the early 1800s, of the small literary subspecies of Jewish literature. As Ihope to show, the Jews’ struggle to write themselves into the European canon highlightsvarious tensions within cosmopolitan literature that are being debated today: themeeting of unity and multiplicity; the nature of intersectionality; the searchfor cosmopolitan aesthetics; and the (im)possibility of inclusion withoutexclusion.Thispaper traces how the early Wissenschaftdes Judentums tried to advance Jewish emancipation by redefining thetraditional canon both in national and in universal terms. The result was aporous and synergetic Jewish literature croisée that was proud tocontribute to a synthetic ‘Totality of Literature.’ Building on Hegel and anticipat...

Producing Radical Presence: Yiddish Literature in Twenty-first Century Israel

2020

Shouldl iterature be taught as space of imagination or as at ool for buildingsocial conscience? This is aq uestion heard and asked often these days.Given the current challenges facing the humanities-declining enrollment,p rofit-based measures of educational success, technological incursions on learning practices, and publicl eaders who proudlya ssert that they do not read-manys cholars seek new ways to articulate the value of their profession, to defend literature in the public sphere. Martha Nussbaum has famouslyargued that the humanities are crucial for creating and maintaining a "people-sensitive democracy" (Nussbaum 2010,25). Not all are pleased with this line of thinking.Nussbaum'sdetractors complain that,inarguing for the ultimate "use" of the humanities, she echoes the instrumentalism of those who want to destroy these samef ields. Ben Saundersp uts it this way: "We value money instrumentally, because it allows us to consume other thingsthatwevalue intrinsically.Art and culture, Isuggest, are such goods: worth spending money on because we value them in themselves, rather than regardingt hem as investments expectedt op roduce some further benefit,e ither economic or political" (Saunders2 013,2 50). Iw ould like to movea wayf rom the dichotomyb etween instrumental outcomes (strengthening democracy) versus intrinsic value (aesthetic or experiential pleasure) by thinkinginstead about the capacity of literature to produce presence-an otion that has been richlyd evelopedb yt he critic Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.G umbrecht defines presencea s" as patial relationship to the world and its objects. Something that is 'present' is supposed to be tangible for human hands, which implies that,conversely, it can have an immediate impact on human bodies." (Gumbrecht 2004,xiii). Perhaps counterintuitively,since literaturei so ftenc onsidered an art of words rather than objects, Gumbrecht argues thatcertain texts have the ability to create presence, both by making readers more alive to the sensations of the moment that they are currentlyl iving, more attentive to the otherh uman faces before them and also by representing moments of the past,c alling them up into the physical space of here and now (Gumbrecht 2003). Ib elievet hat Yiddish literature has an especiallyv aluable presencet op roducetoday, particularlywhen taught in contemporary Israel. Ifirst arrivedatthis proposition in the spring of 2018, my first teaching at TelA vivUniversity.Aspart of an introductory course on Yiddish literature,Itaught the classic fiction, Di OpenAccess. ©2 020H annah Pollin-Galay,p ublished by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeC ommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

Disseminating Jewish Literatures Introduction

Introduction This volume is dedicated to the rich multilingualism and polyphonyo fJ ewish literarywriting.Itoffers an interdisciplinary array of suggestions on issues of research and teachingr elated to further promotingthe integration of modern Jew-ish literary studies into the different philological disciplines. It collects the proceedings of the Gentner Symposium fundedb yt he Minerva Foundation, which was held at the Freie Universität Berlin from June 27 to 29,2 018. During this three-days ymposium at the Max Planck Society'sH arnack House, more than fifty scholars from aw ide rangeo fd isciplines in modern philologyd iscussed the integration of Jewish literature into research and teaching. Among the participants weres pecialists in American, Arabic, German, Hebrew,H ungarian, Romance and LatinA merican,S lavic, Turkish, and Yiddish literature as well as comparative literature. The symposium was conceiveda nd carried out in cooperation between the Freie Universität Berlin,the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, TelA vivUniversity,the University of Haifa, and the University of Duisburg-Essen. One point of departure for the joint initiative resulting in the publication of this volume was ac onversation about the fact that there is no permanent chair for Hebrew literature in Germany. While Hebrew literature is asubjectatuniver-sities worldwide, it surprisingly seems to be somewhat neglected in Germany. When we conducted as ample examination of the course catalogues from the last ten semesters at the fifteen largest German universities in German,S lavic, American, Romance, and comparative literarystudies, we discovered thatJewish literatures weren ot adequatelyr epresented in academict eaching. As ar esult, studentsa re neither givent he chance to study key texts of world literature nor the literary works in which manyo ft he challenges of our present moment are negotiated. Further discussion with European colleagues made it evident that this is not aphenomenonrestricted to Germany:major modern Jewishtexts written in Arabic, French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, and Yiddish do not form an integralp art of their respective national philologies in Germany, Europe, Israel, Latin America,o rt he United States.A third issue under discussion was the state of diasporic literatures in courses on Hebrew literature in Israel. More generally, we observed that in our current BA and MA courses,the focus on teachingthe basic gist of relevant understudied texts leavesv ery little room to introduce our studentst oafuller rangeo fw orld literature. Similarly, our day-today teachingr outine sometimes neglects more profound methodological reflections. Thus, the editors of this volume have joined forces with scholars from different philological disciplines drawing on different historical focuses and methodological approachesinorder to develop con-OpenAccess. ©2 020, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsA ttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110619003-001 cretep roposals on how to address this lacuna, basedo nc ase studies from various languagec ultures. Despite its inherent transnationality,m uch of the researchi nto Jewish liter-atures continues to unfold within an ational framework-an approach thati s also traceable in hyphenated terms such as "Jewish-American" or "German-Jew-ish".I na ddition, the significance of analyzinga nd comparingw hat constitutes "Jewishness" in aGerman or Turkish, Christian or Muslim, literarycontext must be taken into account.The fact thatI slam has now become the second largest religious community in Europe shifts the discourse on Jewishl iteratures in unprecedented ways.Wem ust react to this.The process of modernization that Ju-daism has undergone, and which can be traced in its literaryh istory,o ffers ample opportunityt oc onnect with the challenges that Muslim cultures are facing .P reciselyb ecause our studentsh aved iverse backgrounds,wen eed to emphasize the numerous connections in ah istoricizing perspective rather thane s-sentializingc ulturald ifferences. Seeking to redefine and explore the sociological and culturalc onditions of different migrant experiences, diasporas tudies has unfolded new perspectives across disciplines in recent decades,a nd yet, as ystematic inclusion into the respective philological disciplines in Germany and Israel remains a desideratum. The volume at hand aims to develop ideas and concepts for bringing together different epistemological and textual approaches into the curricula and research programs of the corresponding departments of literary studies in Europe, Israel, and the States.J ewishl iteraturesf rom their ancient traditions to modernity-from the Bible, Mishna and Talmud, Kabbalah and Hasidism and beyond-chal-lengeour very notion of literature. Even works by authorsofJewish belongingin modernism alone-from Marcel Proust to Osip Mandelstam, from Bruno Schulz to Bernardo Kucinski, from Natalia Ginzburgt oH élène Cixous, from Paul Celan to Dan Pagis-not to mention contemporaryH ebrew,R ussian, and Pales-tinian writing in Israel, challengescholars to transcend the strict confines of national philologies and theirr espective disciplines. In his book From Continuity to Contiguity,D an Miron acknowledgest he fact that most authorsi nt he history of Jewish literary thinking came from multilingual environments and were deeplyi mmersed in the respective lingua franca in the literatures and cultures of their time.Such an observation is not without significance .M iron suggests the mappingo fa" modernJ ewish literaryc omplex" which is "vast,d isorderly,a nd somewhat diffuse",a nd which is "characterized by dualities,p arallelisms, occasional intersections, marginal overlapping, hybrids , similarities within dissimilarities, mobility, changeability" and more. While we share Miron'sp oly-perspectival conception of Jewish literatures, which challenges amonolithic, national understanding of what Jewish literature VI