This is an exciting time for North American Jewish literature. In the past ten years, there has been an explosion of writing by new and established authors. In the field of fiction alone, the shelves have filled with titles by such fine talent as Pearl Abraham, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Myla Goldberg, Ehud Havatzelet, Dara Horn, Jonathan Safran Foer, Joan Leegant, Tova Mirvis, Jon Papernick, Jonathan Rosen, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and many others, as well as new works by veteran writers such as Allegra Goodman, Thane Rosenbaum, and Steve Stern. Add to these names the preeminent Cynthia Ozick, and don’t forget Philip Roth, whose productivity continues unabated and whose latest novels include some of his strongest work ever. A variety of striking themes has come to the fore in this new wave of literary creativity. Notable trends include an unprecedented attention to religion (especially Orthodox Jewish life); a fascination with women’s lives and with questions of gender and sexual orientation; a concern with the experiences of the second and succeeding generations of the Holocaust; a nostalgia for and rediscovery of the old country; a consideration of new Americans in the 1980s and 1990s; and a rethinking of what it means to be a Jew in Israel and in the Diaspora.

One of the most significant phenomena in the course of modern Jewish history is undoubtedly the astonishing success of the hasidic movement in winning and retaining large numbers of followers. What is even more remarkable is that this process took a relatively short time to come to fruition: It is widely agreed that at the death of the Ba‘al Shem Tov (who is often still regarded as the founder of the movement) in 1760, his circle numbered no more than a few dozen initiates, but by the 1820s, the movement had become dominant in the Jewish society of large swathes of eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine and Galicia.1 Many different explanations for this success have been proposed: Hasidism's attraction has been variously perceived as a result of its being a movement of religious revival and reform, a movement of social protest and class struggle, a movement popularizing elite Jewish mystical thought, and a movement of social reconstruction.2 In terms of social structure, all scholars agree that Hasidism's main innovation—and a major factor in its success—was the creation of the figure of the zaddik: a charismatic spiritual leader who acts as an intermediary between the individual hasid and God and provides answers to all problems, whether they are spiritual or earthly.3 However, relatively little attention has been paid to the social organization of the early hasidic movement as a whole, which allowed Jews from all over eastern Europe to find their place and nurture their new identity as hasidim.4 My goal here is to examine the development of Hasidism as a social movement from the perspective of the structures that it created to solidify the bond between the zaddik and the hasid. In particular, I shall focus on the ways in which the new movement overcame the geographic barriers separating Jews in different parts of eastern Europe.

One of the most unusual episodes in the annals of Hebrew printing involved the first Jewish printers in Poland—Samuel, Asher, and Elyakim Helicz—who began to print in Cracow or, more likely, in neighboring Kazimierz, in 1534.1 Within a year of opening their business, the brothers had produced five relatively short titles, all of which were first editions and four of which were the first Yiddish books ever printed. After about a year of work, the Helicz brothers gave up publishing only to return to the trade about three years later, when they published several classic—and more substantial—rabbinic works in quick succession. However, it was not Samuel, Asher, and Elyakim Helicz who returned to the Hebrew publishing business in Cracow in 1538 but rather Paul, Andreas, and Johannes Helicz, neochristiani.2

That Jewish literature in North America is an altogether secular venue has long been regarded as a truism among many influential literary scholars. Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, the fiction of Jewish immigrants and their progeny wrote its way into American and Canadian culture through narratives that captured the process of acculturation by distancing itself from Jewish traditional practices, construed mockingly or nostalgically as relics of a European life left behind, a wellspring of historical or textual memories that oppress or elevate. The few departures from this trend—fiction that represents Judaic ritual and experience sympathetically, with complexity and depth—are exceptions that prove the rule: Chaim Potok’s novels, for example, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the close of the twentieth century, and a handful of women novelists negotiating Jewish feminism in stories and novels of the 1980s and 1990s.

Since the late nineteenth century, scholars have tried to explain Karaism in light of comparative scripturalist trends in the history of religion. These trends manifest a common desire to reinstate the revelational text (i.e., the Hebrew Bible, the Qur'an) as the sole basis for religious law and practice. They deny or considerably delimit, on the other hand, the role of “received tradition” (i.e., Jewish torah she-be‘al peh, Islamic Sunnah) as an independent or complementary source of religious authority and legislation. Consequently, the Karaites’ rejection of Jewish oral law as codified in the Mishnah and Talmud and their attempt to reinstate the Hebrew Bible (in its entirety) as the binding source for Jewish law and religious practice, have often been described as the Jewish variation on the theme of sola scriptura.1

The Haskalah of the late eighteenth century, it is often observed, dealt a major blow to many traditional Ashkenazic institutions, including the rabbinate. Formerly extolled by their communities in nearly God-like superlatives—such as “Chief shepherd, a dignitary in the land … Prince among princes in Torah and wisdom”—rabbis became the object of trenchant criticism during this period. The maskilim, formerly denizens of the yeshivot, cast special aspersion on rabbis and their assertion of the authority of Jewish law, charging that the rabbinic insistence on stringencies and legal minutiae was the source of all that was wrong with Diaspora Jewish life. Much of the critique of the rabbinate targeted the culture of yeshiva learning that supported it; the maskilim promoted the study of philosophy, science, Hebrew literature, and the scientific study of Judaism. Often, this literary and philosophical assault on the authority, role, and Talmud-centeredness of the rabbinate took the form of a critique of arranged marriages and the unequal status of women in Jewish law.

I met Simcha Jacobovici in 1998 while doing my dissertation research in Uzbekistan. Long-haired, fair-skinned, and dressed in American garb, he was clearly an outsider like myself, and we introduced ourselves. I told him I was a cultural anthropologist doing fieldwork among the Bukharan Jews. He told me that he was a filmmaker collecting footage for a documentary about the ten lost tribes. I had heard the theory that the Bukharan Jews were among the lost Israelite tribes, but I considered it far-fetched and had trouble taking Simcha's enthusiasm about the possibility seriously.

In recent years, we have witnessed a significant increase in writing by scholars and literary and cultural critics on the genre of the comic book, corresponding to an increased legitimacy given to the comic book industry and its writers and artists more generally. Part of this phenomenon no doubt stems from the attention lavished on the field by mainstream fiction and nonfiction writers who consider comic books a central part of their own and America’s cultural heritage, such as Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem. It may also stem from the changing nature of the industry’s finances, which now employ a “star system” revolving around writers and artists, not merely the major companies’ storied characters; though the days of the big houses that control the major characters are by no means gone, in the last two decades, numerous specialty imprints have been developed to publish characters that are owned outright by writers and artists, to say nothing of profit-sharing deals with major stars, even at some of the major companies.

The Cinquecento was marked by the emergence of expanded and more formalized structures of self-government in Italy's Jewish communities. It is from this century that we begin to have written capitoli (constitutional agreements) and pinkasim (record books).2 By the middle of the century, as Robert Bonfil has demonstrated, the office of community-appointed rabbi had been created and regularized.3 Intense internecine struggles broke out for control over the new institutions, and contemporary rabbinic responsa attest to the slow and sometimes tortuous manner in which early modern Jews felt their way toward new working arrangements, procedures, and understandings.4

In his study Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks defines plot as that which “makes us read forward, seeking in the unfolding of narrative a line of intention and a portent of design that hold the promise of progress toward meaning.” Plot proves to be a rich and multifaceted concept to explore in reading Philip Roth’s novel The Plot against America (2004), in which counterfactual histories, personal plotlines, a cluster of subplots, and the reader’s awareness of metanarrative (“masterplot”) all contribute to the complex shaping of the text.

Last year, a friend drew my attention to the lyrics of a famous song in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, the composer’s first attempt in 1956 to write the “Great American Opera.” The song, “I Am Easily Assimilated,” remains one of the best-loved musical numbers from the play and includes the following lines: My father came from Rovno Gubernya.But now I’m here, I’m dancing a tango….My father spoke a High Middle Polish.In one half-hour I’m talking in Spanish:Por favor! Toreador!I am easily assimilated.I am so easily assimilated. The irreverent lyrics are often credited to Bernstein himself and refer to the biography of his father, Sam, who immigrated to America from the province (gubernya) of Rovno. This Jewish tango exhibits a musical pastiche of Hispanic and Klezmer traditions in its instrumentation and displays a manic shift from Russian to English to Spanish that mirrors the composer’s playful notation that it be played “Moderato Hassidicamente.” The song is both a parody of and a monument to the assimilatory spirit. My friend, however, thought I would be interested in the song because my last name is Rovner; he expected that I would want to track down Bernstein’s reference to the area, Rovno, that lent my family its patronymic.

Natan Zach, a prominent subversive Israeli poet, began publishing his poetry in the mid-1950s, together with a group of young poets who felt obliged to transform Hebrew poetry. This group included poets and critics such as Moshe Dor, Arye Sivan, Yehuda Amichai, David Avidan, Gershon Shaked, and Benjamin Harshav (Hrushovski). They published their first poems and essays in Likra't (Toward), a journal that they founded, and their group took on the same name. Only four issues of the journal appeared between 1952 and 1954. Zach was one of the outstanding poets in this group. His first book of poetry, Shirim ri'shonim (Early Poems), was published in 1955. His second book, Shirim shonim (Diverse Poems, 1960), totally changed the Israeli canon in terms of its themes and its poetic texture.

A. B. Yehoshua's growing eminence as one of Israel's foremost literary artists has been attended by his emergence as one of the more powerful voices of the secular Zionist left. A highly self-aware writer, Yehoshua has been scrupulously deliberate in separating the intellectual pragmatism of his political writing from the imaginative structures and aesthetic integrity of his literary works. But the generic distinction between polemical essay and imaginative fiction does not preclude overlapping areas of concern as well as a common basis of values and beliefs. Consequently, Yehoshua's essays often prove to be useful means of enhancing the understanding of his fictional works.

The 1980s saw the introduction of postmodern literary theory into the field of rabbinic literature, in particular into the study of midrash, which began to be explored as anticipating or aligning with many of the claims of modern literary theorists. This new interest intersected oddly at times with the prevailing historicist mode of inquiry. For many scholars, the notion of textual indeterminacy supported the idea of the interpreter of the text as essentially an “eisegete,” who reads the text from his or her own historically embedded perspective, rather than as an exegete, who at least attempts to find out what the text “really means.” Thus, scholars who embraced this new perspective often rejected an inquiry into midrash as biblical interpretation in the classic sense of the word. “No one believes anymore,” someone pointed out to me after a session on midrash in a conference during the mid-1980’s, “that texts have meaning.”

The Book of Ben Sira is a wisdom composition written in Hebrew toward the beginning of the second century BCE. It is well preserved in a Greek translation that, according to its prologue, was done by the author’s grandson, and a Syriac translation of a few hundred years later is preserved in the Peshitta. Between fragments found at Masada and in the Cairo Geniza, some 60 percent of the book survives in Hebrew.

In August 1956, Nikita Khrushchev took part in a meeting with a delegation of Canadian communists. Discussing the wave of repression against Jewish intellectuals during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Soviet leader mentioned that he had supported Stalin's decision not to give the Crimea to Jews because it would have created a springboard for attacks on the Soviet Union. Apart from being paranoid about the Soviet Jews' loyalty to the young state of Israel and its imperialist backers, Khrushchev had, as his remark revealed, another paranoia that was characteristic of the Kremlin decision-makers: distrust of the peripheries. Khrushchev and his advisors knew that their totalitarian regime was not such a monolith as it might appear in the eyes of foreign observers, especially because visitors were seldom allowed to travel to the outskirts of the Soviet empire and did not know that some areas had features of fiefdoms. The post-Soviet disintegration of the communist empire confirmed the Kremlin denizens' misgivings.

Though much has been done in the past half century to clarify boundaries and crossing points on the religious-intellectual maps of “Ashkenaz” and “Sepharad,” a large body of evidence that advances this complex exercise in cultural cartography has been wholly neglected: supercommentaries on Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah. Though it was produced in that part of Europe that Jews came to call (perhaps under Rashi’s influence) “Ashkenaz,” the Commentary traveled to points far and wide. Among the diverse responses that it elicited in its new homes, the vast supercommentary literature that came to surround the Commentary stands out. Though scholars working in diverse cultural orbits produced this literature, Sephardic and Ashkenazic writers created most of it. This genre continues to flourish, at times in new forms. Yet although some of the major rabbinic figures (e.g., Judah Loew of Prague) produced Rashi supercommentaries, and although these works reflect significant trends in premodern Judaism, the genre’s neglect among scholars has been well-nigh total.

In this new book, the author of Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe broadens the scope of his earlier acclaimed work. Moving beyond early childhood and schooling, Marcus devotes chapters to the other major stages of the Jewish life cycle (bar mitzvah, marriage, and death). While seeking to present “a comprehensive guide to Jewish rites of passage,” the book also aims to sustain a general thesis: that ritual inventiveness is a persistent pattern of traditional Jewish culture.

In Gender and Jewish Difference, Lisa Lampert proposes that we consider a “hermeneutical woman” alongside the well-documented “hermeneutical Jew” that underpins literary constructions of Christian theology in patristic, medieval, and Renaissance texts (10). The “hermeneutical Jew,” a term coined by Jeremy Cohen, is the originary Christian—the Jew who brought the Christian to “the book” and all its exegetical possibilities but who is incapable of seeing the spirit beyond the letter of the law. The hermeneutical woman is, according to Lampert, the hermeneutical Jew's mate, so to speak; she is another major locus of symbolic projections of the Christian self onto the “other.” Both the hermeneutical Jew and the hermeneutical woman are, as Lampert puts it, “hermeneutically handicapped” (43); they read—the Jew because of his literal-mindedness, the woman because of her feeble-mindedness—with spiritual impediments. They are also, within medieval Christian fiction and drama, profoundly “embodied,” threatening the very foundations of Christian faith—conversion, incarnation, and transubstantiation. According to Lampert, these three tenets of faith, which exist on the border of the body and the spirit, represent ambiguous moments in Christian theology, and they are best captured by “the woman” and “the Jew,” who serve as figures of the spirit subsumed by the body, of transcendence gone awry.