Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

Sax, Benjamin Elliot.

2014 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

doi:

This article considers Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay on Karl Kraus and explores how Benjamin uses Kraus (who was Theodor Lessing’s classical example of a self-hating Jew) to explain how Jewish theology can be transformed into secular Jewish cultural identity through quotation. Benjamin does this by focusing on what he believes to be the “Jewish” style of quotation in Kraus’s writing, or what George Steiner has termed a “hermeneutic of citation.”

Sax, Benjamin Elliot.

2014 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

doi:

Abstract: This article considers Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay on Karl Kraus and explores how Benjamin uses Kraus (who was Theodor Lessing’s classical example of a self-hating Jew) to explain how Jewish theology can be transformed into secular Jewish cultural identity through quotation. Benjamin does this by focusing on what he believes to be the “Jewish” style of quotation in Kraus’s writing, or what George Steiner has termed a “hermeneutic of citation.”

Meyers, Helene.

2014 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

doi:

<i>Paper Clips</i>, a prize-winning 2004 Miramax documentary directed by Elliot Berlin and Joe Fab about a Holocaust collecting project that culminated in the Children’s Holocaust Memorial in Whitwell, Tennessee, strives to do necessary and well-intentioned memory work. However, it also illuminates culturally overdetermined forms of forgetting and self-fashioning that too often accompany Holocaust memorialization in white, Christian communities. <i>Paper Clips</i> exemplifies the ways in which Holocaust education can unwittingly foster competing victimization narratives between blacks and Jews, sanitize both European and U.S. history, and serve subtle but pernicious forms of supersessionism. This essay argues that ethically responsible Holocaust memorialization in the twenty-first century requires critical analysis of the specifically Christian and Jewish desires addressed by such a popular documentary.

Meyers, Helene.

2014 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

doi:

Abstract: Paper Clips , a prize-winning 2004 Miramax documentary directed by Elliot Berlin and Joe Fab about a Holocaust collecting project that culminated in the Children’s Holocaust Memorial in Whitwell, Tennessee, strives to do necessary and well-intentioned memory work. However, it also illuminates culturally overdetermined forms of forgetting and self-fashioning that too often accompany Holocaust memorialization in white, Christian communities. Paper Clips exemplifies the ways in which Holocaust education can unwittingly foster competing victimization narratives between blacks and Jews, sanitize both European and U.S. history, and serve subtle but pernicious forms of supersessionism. This essay argues that ethically responsible Holocaust memorialization in the twenty-first century requires critical analysis of the specifically Christian and Jewish desires addressed by such a popular documentary.

Tsai, Mei-Yu

2014 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

doi:

This essay draws on critical theories of post-Holocaust testimony and postmemory in conjunction with the emerging sociological concept of “empathetic identification” to investigate the implications of trauma healing in Anne Michaels’s <i>Fugitive Pieces</i>. The novel features two protagonist narrators—Jacob Beer, a child survivor of the Holocaust, and Ben, a child of Holocaust survivor parents—each acknowledging the moral imperatives to remember the painful past of the Holocaust as well as the need to envision the possibility of coming to terms with the horrors of the past. Contrary to Holocaust literature that focuses on the irredeemable breakdown in the psyche, <i>Fugitive Pieces</i> makes it the central motivating aim to ponder the complex and bewildering experience of healing. With two memoirs—Jacob’s and Ben’s—each addressing the traumatic memory for the dead and to the living, <i>Fugitive Pieces</i> is characteristically structured as a model of the witnessing process, a process that aims to move beyond the isolation imposed by trauma. As a theoretical starting point in my reading of <i>Fugitive Pieces</i>, I turn to the psychoanalytical theory of testimony and postmemory—especially the works of Dori Laub and Marianne Hirsch— to examine how testimony in association with empathetic identification can help sustain life after massive trauma.

2014 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

doi:

Abstract: This essay draws on critical theories of post-Holocaust testimony and postmemory in conjunction with the emerging sociological concept of “empathetic identification” to investigate the implications of trauma healing in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces . The novel features two protagonist narrators—Jacob Beer, a child survivor of the Holocaust, and Ben, a child of Holocaust survivor parents—each acknowledging the moral imperatives to remember the painful past of the Holocaust as well as the need to envision the possibility of coming to terms with the horrors of the past. Contrary to Holocaust literature that focuses on the irredeemable breakdown in the psyche, Fugitive Pieces makes it the central motivating aim to ponder the complex and bewildering experience of healing. With two memoirs—Jacob’s and Ben’s—each addressing the traumatic memory for the dead and to the living, Fugitive Pieces is characteristically structured as a model of the witnessing process, a process that aims to move beyond the isolation imposed by trauma. As a theoretical starting point in my reading of Fugitive Pieces , I turn to the psychoanalytical theory of testimony and postmemory—especially the works of Dori Laub and Marianne Hirsch— to examine how testimony in association with empathetic identification can help sustain life after massive trauma.

Dennis, Geoffrey W.

2014 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

doi:

Abstract: Recent scholarship has identified multiple levels of interplay between American Jews and sequential art stories (comics). Many comics are now widely understood to be artifacts of the evolving Jewish American experience; this interplay is understood to have grown out of the cultural history, sociology, and social-psychology of the Jews who created, produced, and consumed these comics. But relatively little research has been done on the appropriation and incorporation of Jewish Tradition (Heb. Mesorah ) in comics and how this incorporation mirrors the changing relationship of Jewish culture to American (predominantly Protestant) culture. Using textual and visual criticism, supplemented by the selective application of Jewish studies, mythological studies, sociology, and feminist theory, the authors offer insight into an aspect of that appropriation by tracking a single figure from Jewish folklore that comic writers and artists have drawn on, again and again: Lilith, first wife of Adam, hypersexual transgressor, demon mother, infanticide, and evil personified. Lilith’s trajectory and revision through pulp visual narratives over the past forty years sees her evolve from the traditional demon harridan into a feminist antihero, a mother seeking redemption from her daughter, and, eventually, an American superhero teammate. Her literary-visual transformations offer a pop culture perspective on Jewish Tradition’s evolution from a despised to an accepted element in American culture. Moreover, the continuous hybridization of Lilith’s story with Christian motifs, classical mythology, contemporary issues, and American history is a marker of a larger rapid and distinctively American assimilation of Jewish Tradition into the American intellectual and imaginative canon.

Dennis, Geoffrey W.

2014 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

doi:

Recent scholarship has identified multiple levels of interplay between American Jews and sequential art stories (comics). Many comics are now widely understood to be artifacts of the evolving Jewish American experience; this interplay is understood to have grown out of the cultural history, sociology, and social-psychology of the Jews who created, produced, and consumed these comics. But relatively little research has been done on the appropriation and incorporation of Jewish Tradition (Heb. <i>Mesorah</i>) in comics and how this incorporation mirrors the changing relationship of Jewish culture to American (predominantly Protestant) culture. </p><p> Using textual and visual criticism, supplemented by the selective application of Jewish studies, mythological studies, sociology, and feminist theory, the authors offer insight into an aspect of that appropriation by tracking a single figure from Jewish folklore that comic writers and artists have drawn on, again and again: Lilith, first wife of Adam, hypersexual transgressor, demon mother, infanticide, and evil personified. Lilith’s trajectory and revision through pulp visual narratives over the past forty years sees her evolve from the traditional demon harridan into a feminist antihero, a mother seeking redemption from her daughter, and, eventually, an American superhero teammate. Her literary-visual transformations offer a pop culture perspective on Jewish Tradition’s evolution from a despised to an accepted element in American culture. Moreover, the continuous hybridization of Lilith’s story with Christian motifs, classical mythology, contemporary issues, and American history is a marker of a larger rapid and distinctively American assimilation of Jewish Tradition into the American intellectual and imaginative canon.

Ofrat, Gideon.

2014 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

doi:

Abstract: In this seminal article, translated for the first time into English, Gideon Ofrat poses and answers the question, why is there a lack of true Surrealism in Palestinian-Israeli art and literature while all the other major trends of twentieth-century literature and art found echoes in Palestinian-Israeli culture. Ofrat contrasts Israeli views on bodies and letters, light and darkness, dream and reality, memory and frozen consciousness, redemptive history and the prison of memory, meaning and paradox, and hope and abject despair—all considered in the perspectives of biblical-rabbinic Judaism, surrealist writing and art, and the Holocaust. He concludes by contrasting Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion and Salvador Dali’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross and Corpus Hypercubus .

Ofrat, Gideon.

2014 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

doi:

In this seminal article, translated for the first time into English, Gideon Ofrat poses and answers the question, why is there a lack of true Surrealism in Palestinian-Israeli art and literature while all the other major trends of twentieth-century literature and art found echoes in Palestinian-Israeli culture. Ofrat contrasts Israeli views on bodies and letters, light and darkness, dream and reality, memory and frozen consciousness, redemptive history and the prison of memory, meaning and paradox, and hope and abject despair—all considered in the perspectives of biblical-rabbinic Judaism, surrealist writing and art, and the Holocaust. He concludes by contrasting Marc Chagall’s <i>White Crucifixion</i> and Salvador Dali’s <i>Christ of Saint John of the Cross</i> and <i>Corpus Hypercubus</i>.