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Stealth Stamma: Queer Time and Affect in the Babylonian Talmud uses queer theory to tease out overlooked aspects of the Babylonian Talmud, shedding light on specific discursive impulses for meaning-making and, especially, subversion of Torah law. The queer Talmudic methods I draw out and discuss are the stamma’s stealth argumentation, a non-linear orientation to temporality, and the use of affective interruption for complicating the discourse. I argue that, in turn, the Talmud and its methods can serve as a cultural case study useful to queer theorists via the practice of discursive subversion as a response to oppressive power structures. Alongside textual analysis and theory, I also incorporate autoethnography toward a reading of Talmud that is queerly embodied and a reading of queer that is, in part, constituted by my deviant relationship to the Talmud. I argue that the interpretive possibilities for understanding this critical cultural text can only be expanded by upending the exclusivity that has defined Talmud study for centuries.The dissertation is comprised of an introduction, three chapters, and an epilogue. My introduction first lays the foundation for my usage of the term “queer” throughout the dissertation and the ways that it is and is not bound to identity. Then, I argue that queer readings of Talmud must strive to attune to the pre-institutional charismatic impulses that characterized the rabbinic project before the Talmud’s cultural ascendance and canonization. Chapter 1, “Stealth Subversion in the Talmud: The Case for Queer Readership,” utilizes queer theories about visibility, performativity, and especially, the trans notion of "stealth" in order to construct a model queer Talmud reader whose orientation to vulnerability and attunement to the stakes of visibility make them more sensitive to the radical “stealth” innovations being made in the stamma’s construction of the discourse. Chapter 2, “The Talmud as Queer Archive: Claiming Power through Discourse,” uses theories of queer historiography and queer temporality to look at the Talmud's orientation to time and history, arguing that alternative relationships to time, such as non-linear, nonbiological inheritance and inter-generational dialogue, are themselves queer expressions of resistance, comprising a particular discursive strategy for undermining hegemonic power structures whose authority and legitimacy are endowed by a particular imagined past. Chapter 3, “Affective Pedagogy and Discursive Prosthesis in the Bavli,” looks at one strategy in the Talmud that I term the "affective interrupter," as an overlooked method for meaning-making that interrupts a more “objective,” detached discourse in favor of a more holistic approach accounting for the lived consequences of the topic at hand and the insufficiency of reason and language alone to account for the whole of human experience. The discussion in this chapter is organized primarily around Talmudic excerpts related to disability, as affective interruption is a Talmudic pattern that in some cases interferes with ableist discussions, and it is in these cases that affective interruption holds the most liberatory potential for subversive readings. I discuss the Talmud’s use of disability as a kind of "discursive prosthesis" that pushes argumentation forward but which neglects the lived experiences of disabled people and the impacts of Talmudic legal discourse on the lives of disabled people. The Epilogue zooms out to argue that subverting discourse evolved as a method extracted from the Talmud to become a characteristically Jewish way of responding to unjust power structures.

This dissertation examines the intersections of lyric poetry and piyyut (medieval Hebrew liturgical poems) in two historical contexts where the genre of lyric and the notion of the "East" have been placed in a false dichotomy. The first half of the dissertation traces the evolution of the terms "lyric" and "piyyut" in the Middle East and Europe from the Hellenistic period to the nineteenth century, focusing on Hebrew, German, and English literature, scripture, and philosophy. The second half leaps forward to the contemporary work of two Israeli-Mizrahi poets of Moroccan descent, Erez Biton (b. 1942) and Shimon Adaf (b. 1972), exploring how these poets generate lyric poetics and piyyutic intertextuality and how they channel the conventions of these genres to communicate and challenge Mizrahi identity politics.The dissertation's central conclusion is mirrored in both halves, revealing how the term "lyric" has been defined by European actors as a medium of individual autonomy and how this definition has been used to argue that poets of non-European origins lack the capabilities and dispositions needed to create lyric consciousness in their work. This is evident in nineteenth century lyric theory in Germany and England, where "oriental" poetry (mainly in Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian) is often defined as too devotional or disposed to despotism; and in the State of Israel, where Mizrahi poetry is frequently segregated from the main corpus of Hebrew Literature as critics accuse it of being too prosaically committed to its thematic materials and sociological positioning within Israeli ethno-economic stratification.By returning to the discursive origins of the lyric genre and treating it as a malleable cognitive concept, the dissertation demonstrates the contingency of the notion of lyric as the medium of autonomous expression. This approach shows that lyric self-consciousness has always been accessible through means other than total autonomous individuation, especially intertextual poetic techniques that generate heteronomous self-expression. In this vein, the dissertation illustrates how classic piyyut offers polyphonic intertextual rhyming structures and how modern Mizrahi poets channel this staple of piyyut into constituting original lyric personhood structures. This methodological emphasis allows us to see piyyut is a variant model of lyric poetry and to analyze Mizrahi poetry by focusing on its lyric forms and not only its content.To substantiate these large claims, the dissertation makes several overarching arguments throughout its chapters: During medieval times (fourth to fourteenth centuries) in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean basin, poetic devices began to appear more frequently across various languages from both Semitic and Indo-European families. These devices (e.g., rhyme, acrostics, alliteration) contributed to making poetry “denser” or more “artificed.” This density was achieved using fewer words and shorter lines that carried more meaning through formal and intertextual techniques, allowing words to possess meanings far beyond their denotation. As these devices developed across different cultures, by the 14th century, the poetic corpora of European and Middle Eastern languages had become more similar than ever before. In Europe, these devices were incorporated into genres described contemporaneously or retrospectively as lyric forms (e.g., ode, ballad, sonnet).During Europe's Enlightenment and Romantic periods, a new focus on “oriental poetry,” specifically poetry in Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew, fostered a rich intellectual conversation about the lyric. Based on the notion of the lyric as the least mimetic classical genre, and with the influence of the long East-West development of dense verse, this dialogue allowed thinkers to first conceive of lyric poetry as a genre that mediates through self-expression the universal aesthetic apprehension of the world and particular cultural differences. This discourse marked Western lyric poetry as a literary medium of autonomous expression while deeming oriental poetry as inherently heteronomous.The history of this conversation, which intermingled lyric theory and Orientalism is often overlooked. Yet, it is crucial for understanding the twentieth and twenty-first century persistent assertions that lyric poetry is an inherently secular and autonomous genre. By retracing the origins of this idea, the dissertation identifies an alternative path that views religious, heteronomous poetry such as piyyut as capable of generating lyric self-consciousness through different means.Intertextual rhyme is the primary device for piyyutic lyric self-consciousness, combining midrashic exegesis with alliterative sound-play norms. This device creates an expansive, open interpretive field, inviting readers to engage with the poem by connecting similar-sounding phrases, in-text meanings, and the interplay of evoked texts that clarify or contradict one another. Poetry is thus made “lyrical” by enabling words and allusions to work together to produce novel, indeterminate meanings. In doing so, piyyut and piyyut-like poetry do not assume autonomy or primacy as prerequisites for lyric consciousness, as they inherently rely on other texts and speakers to generate meaning.In post-1948 Israel, hegemonic groups have used the concept of lyric to marginalize Mizrahi poetry, often treating it as a thematic supplement rather than a core component of Hebrew poetics. Recent approaches to Mizrahi literature do better by arguing for this poetry’s recognition as minor literature within Hebrew literature or as a manifestation of Israeli cultural hybridization. Without negating these perspectives, my dissertation emphasizes the importance of examining Mizrahi literature as poetry unto itself and not only by the labor it performs towards other aspects of Hebrew literature and culture. This can be achieved by reading Mizrahi poetry for its lyric forms, particularly the new formations of lyric personhood and the revitalization of piyyutic intertextuality.I exemplify this approach through the works of Erez Biton and Shimon Adaf. In Biton's poetry, I trace his engagement with piyyut from his early works in the 1960s and 1970s, highlighting his development of a lyric epistemology shaped by societal stratification and oppression. Biton’s poetic code, characterized by piyyutic intertextuality, multilingualism, and irony, reveals the contingency of supposedly objective language and exposes alternative configurations of meaning by emphasizing the gap between hegemonic language and the reality it fails to describe. I also situate Biton’s lyric practice within and against the poetics of the Israeli Statehood Generation, particularly Natan Zach, to demonstrate the intergenerational dynamics linking his work to the preceding major generation of poetry. By doing so, I establish Biton’s place in the dual lineages of piyyut and modern Hebrew poetry.Adaf’s writing, particularly in the poetry volume Aviva-No (2009) and the novel Frost (2010), demonstrates efforts to channel piyyutic writing conventions to transcend biographical readings and achieve a Mizrahi phenomenology not constrained by colloquial identity discourse. In a dual endeavor to find the alterity central to his idea of identity and to find how melancholic writing can sublimate absence into presence, Adaf uses piyyutic intertextuality to provide a complex understanding of identity committed to specific biographical events without being confined to the idea of a biography. In these writings, Adaf interrogates and pushes to its limit the recent trend of biographic poetry by offering a structure of lyric personhood that relates to life history in the same indeterminate way that tradition refers to scripture. By examining these works, the dissertation challenges traditional identity politics that emphasize fixed notions of sameness. Instead, it promotes a radical understanding of identity that embraces alterity and fluidity, offering a nuanced perspective on how self-expression can offer lyric forms that manifest collective identities and histories. My research highlights the significant yet often overlooked role of piyyut in modern Hebrew literature, arguing for its relevance and transformative potential in contemporary poetic expressions. Engaging with scholars like Chana Kronfeld, Gil Anidjar, Haviva Pedaya, and Lital Levy, this dissertation redefines the scope of "New Hebrew Literature," challenging the secularized assumptions that have historically governed the field. It advocates for a rethinking of this literary category, emphasizing the interconnectedness and mutual influence of diverse literary traditions, integrating secular literary origins and traditional liturgy. This approach fosters inclusivity and diversity, encouraging an open-ended exploration within Hebrew literature that honors its European and Middle Eastern roots, recognizing the rich tapestry of cultural and poetic exchanges that have shaped its evolution.

This thesis explores the presence of Pagan religious iconography within the zodiac mosaic at the sixth century CE Beth Alpha synagogue in present day Israel/Palestine. Pagan imagery was adapted from the dominant Roman culture to adhere to Jewish monotheistic beliefs, by using Helios imagery to refer to God or the Messiah. The Jewish community at Beth Alpha utilized the broader Pagan imagery of Helios, the zodiac, and the seasons to explain aspects of their time, place, and personhood in a way that fit within Pagan and Christian cultures. This paper additionally uses literary sources to connect imagery on Beth Alpha’s mosaic floor to broader Late Antique Judaism. The author argues that the imagery is reminiscent of David as the prayer and liturgical leader of the Jewish people. This paper concludes by arguing for the modern scholar to view these mosaics as neither solely decorative nor religious. The Beth Alpha mosaics are a unique insight into the transformation of foreign motifs into Jewish material religion and culture interpretations of God and David.

Jewish humor, a modern Ashkenazi survival mechanism in the face of antisemitism, has recently been mobilized on digital streaming platforms by American women writers and performers, becoming a crucial mechanism of resistance to antisemitism and systemic misogyny. I analyze the narrative techniques and characters in Jewish humor employed by content creators to explore ethico-political questions raised by twenty-first-century media representations of Jewish American women. This dissertation maps the historical, technological, and economic factors that engendered these tropes. Following the influx of digital streaming platforms from 2005 to 2008, comedic content creators such as Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson (creators of Broad City) and Rachel Bloom (creator of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) began to mount productions with explicit representations of Jewish rituals, cultures, and subjects for niche audiences. These content creators adapted traditional motifs of Jewish humor by infusing their work with contemporary, popular feminist sensibilities and applying narrative tactics specific to digital technology. They infused their work with intertextual allusions (or brief, tongue-in-cheek insider references) to Jewish holidays, history, and feminist issues without explanation or contextualization. They inspired more established writers and performers (including Jenji Kohan (creator of Orange Is the New Black), Joey Soloway (creator of Transparent), and Natasha Lyonne (co-creator of Russian Doll)) addressing broader audiences, to incorporate similar references as Easter eggs or deep cuts to promote transmedia viewer engagement. These content creators developed and refined techniques such as parodies of older media representations of Jewish life (which include older antisemitic and misogynistic stereotypes, especially the Jewish American Princess and Jewish mother figures) to expose their limitations. Digital content creators engage in feminist midrash, a mode of storytelling, inspired by a form of biblical exegesis, that aims to answer and explore difficult ethical questions.In addition to fulfilling the requirements of a traditional, full-length dissertation, my project experiments with an innovative creative/critical writing methodology. My novel about a Jewish family in Los Angeles, incorporates all of the narrative techniques adopted by twenty-first-century comedic content creators to explore ethico-political questions raised by media representations of Jewish American women.

Over the last five decades, numerous renditions of J.S. Bach's St. John Passion have been met with fervent opposition, eliciting protests, scathing critiques, boycotts, and even the outright cancellation of concerts. These reactions stem from a pervasive perception of embedded anti-Semitism within the text of the composition. While various performances have attempted to contemporize this work through pre-concert dialogues, innovative staging, or generic textual adjustments, the efficacy of these efforts in completely expunging the anti-Semitic rhetoric or eradicating collective memories of the work's problematic performance history has been limited. This dissertation undertakes a multifaceted inquiry, drawing upon historical research explaining the genesis of John's gospel, a critical examination of anti-Semitic currents within the Lutheran tradition, and a comprehensive analysis of the St. John Passion's seminal role in shaping the evolution of the Passion Oratorio genre. Through this investigation, the imperative of preserving this musical opus within modern performance contexts is articulated, alongside a delineation of the necessary alterations essential for its continued relevance.The crux of this scholarly endeavor lies in an alternative translation for the anti-Semitic rhetoric in Bach’s St. John Passion, including a novel translation of John’s Passion narrative tailored for composers seeking to engage with this material. While extant scholarship has delved into the peculiar prevalence of the Greek term "hoi Ioudaioi" ("the Jews") in John’s gospel and the inherent problematic nature of employing terms such as "Jüden" and "Juden" within Bach’s composition, few scholars have ventured forth with concrete solutions tailored for modern performance. Furthermore, a noticeable gap exists in the availability of Johannine Passion narratives attuned to Jewish sensibilities and intended for musical adaptation. By offering alternative renderings of Bach’s St. John Passion and an English iteration of the Johannine Passion, this dissertation aspires to furnish performers and audiences alike with a pathway to engage with the essence of the Passion narrative, unfettered by anti-Semitic text and associations.

This project examines the ways knowledge organization (KO) and the formation of devised (Kempton 1981) knowledge organization systems (KOS) influence the classification of food and diet-related health conditions. The epistemic and ethical issues explored throughout these investigations, however, reach far beyond the boundaries of the given cases to ask foundational questions about perception, cognition, and the organization of experience, all of which are positioned as uniquely KO processes. Heuristic reasoning, tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966), and perceptual categorization are of particular interest, and the three concepts are approached as organizational activities rooted in the formation of standards of similarity (Quine 1969), pattern identification, and attribute substitution (Kahneman and Frederick 2002). Throughout this work, the epistemological, ontological, and sociological dimensions of knowledge organization (Hartel and Hjørland 2003) are assessed alongside relevant cognitive factors.Critical discourse analysis and frame theory are used to conduct four primary food-related case studies. In Chapters 4 and 5, Jewish dietary laws (kashruth) are analyzed through a historical and cultural lens; viewing kashruth as an organizing structure for social tacit knowledge, I consider methodological approaches for identifying and analyzing tacicity within a KOS. In Chapter 6, I discuss the KO qualities of the body mass index (BMI) and question the social and epidemiological implications of health heuristics rooted in the utilization of BMI classifications. I conclude by conceptualizing a KO theory of referential transference—a process in which tacit knowledge becomes embedded within devised KOS through a form of heuristic substitution—using a selection of U.S. legislative categories and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans as exploratory examples.

In this dissertation, I contend that, though Lebanon has long been imagined as a haven of diversity in the Middle East, only recently has the country’s once-flourishing Jewish community been considered by state powers and the public as a representation of local cosmopolitanism. During the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90), Jewish synagogues, neighborhoods, schools, and cemeteries faced the same threats of destruction and abandonment as the greater built environment. Lebanese Jews, who stood at roughly 14,000 in the decade prior to the war, now almost exclusively live in the diaspora. Today, Jewish spaces have been refurbished by developers, repaired by diasporic groups, and adapted to house refugees of Palestinian and Syrian origin. To understand how diverse relationships to the spaces of an absent minority group influence concepts of belonging among the Lebanese body politic, I consider how those interfacing with Jewish sites reflect on their prior histories and articulate their own aspirations through processes of multidirectional memory. The Introduction to the dissertation introduces Lebanon, its Jewish past, and the main questions and research modalities of the dissertation. Chapter One narrativizes Lebanon’s Jewish history within the broader scope of imperial projects and the development of a Lebanese state and national identity. Within this framework, I pay particular attention to the growth of a communal Jewish identity, especially within the scope of the hardening of ethno-religious affiliations into the sole legitimate category of political representation. Chapter Two accounts for the transformation of Wadi Abu Jamil—Beirut’s historic Jewish neighborhood and the location of the country’s only rehabilitated synagogue—vis-a-vis the violent spatial metamorphosis of the surrounding central district since the official cessation of the civil war. I chronicle the process of co-designing a Wadi Abu Jamil walking tour with a Lebanese architect that examined both its Jewish history and its current inaccessibility. In Chapter Three, I focus my analysis on photographs pertaining to Beirut’s historic Jewish neighborhood and its central synagogue. I address the ways in which the mobilization of collective nostalgia through the circulation of these snapshots on three Lebanese Jewish Facebook groups provides a realm for debating, challenging, and reconstructing concepts of belonging as they relate to remembering while remembering a shared homeland from the diaspora. Chapter Four addresses the quotidian transformations of Lebanon’s formerly Jewish neighborhoods, and the ways in which these sites are entangled with varying nationalisms, crises, dislocations, and local political contestations. This chapter draws on ethnographic material from Sidon in order to consider how non-Jewish “cultural brokers”—those who, through voluntary involvement or the happenstance of interacting with/living in formerly Jewish spaces—are charged with the role of interpreting and preserving the histories of these sites. In the dissertation, I assert that these individuals serve as “cultural brokers”; through voluntary involvement or the happenstance of living in and around formerly Jewish spaces, they interpret and preserve the histories of these sites. I also analyze how political parties and elite state actors mobilize a Lebanese-Jewish past within a narrative that posits a uniquely Lebanese cosmopolitanism as essential to moving beyond ethno-sectarian violence. By examining notions of ‘Jewishness’ within the post-war state, I show how everyday interactions with the built environment construct discursive and social spaces within which people grapple with notions of social difference. The research for this dissertation was carried out over 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork. My fieldwork combined multiple methodologies in order to contend with the afterlives of Jewish spaces in Lebanon, including life history interviews conducted with interlocutors; numerous semi-structured and informal interviews; research conducted in institutional, private, and nontraditional archives; participant observation and “webservation;” visits to formerly Jewish sites across Lebanon; and photographic and experimental visual documentation.

This dissertation demonstrates the midrashic character and principles of John’s visions through comparisons to midrashic traditions, with a new translation and commentary of Revelation 21 and 22, and by analyzing John’s visions as midrash on the Genesis cosmogony. As a depiction of an end-of-the-world apocalypse, John’s visions are usually placed in the apocalyptic genre; however, the midrashic approach can mitigate the apocalyptic view of the text and encourage environmentalism and stewardship of the planet (as a home for the new Jerusalem). The midrashic approach also integrates Jewish and Christian depictions of the heavenly Jerusalem, reversing the scholarly “parting of the ways.” Including John’s visions among midrashic traditions suggest early evidence of a divine bride: the city actualized as a Jerusalem bride is a precursor to the Kabbalistic Sabbath bride; Jerusalem as a tabernacle-city rather than temple-city connects to the etymology of God’s presence, the Shekinah. In midrashic tradition, the heavenly Jerusalem exists as a primordial creation, preserved along with or as Eden, and intertwined with the earthly Jerusalem. Jerusalem above is quantumly entangled with Jerusalem below in ritual, cult, existence, divine presence, and cosmography. Jerusalem is “on earth as it is in heaven” and vice versa, “in heaven as it is on earth.” John’s Jerusalem on earth is the same as the Jerusalem in heaven; it is the nomadic temple: the tabernacle, which descends from heaven to earth, literally creating “heaven on earth.”

Scholars have long considered how Ottoman Jews have been racialized as ethnographic subjects, but they have barely begun to examine their subjectivities and works as ethnographers themselves. Nor have they incorporated Jews’ contributions to the Ottoman project of ethnography within Ottoman and Middle East Studies. This research explores how Ottoman Sephardic travelers and teachers, rabbis and writers produced, circulated, and marshaled ethnographic and racial knowledge in service of different visions of reform. By reading ethnographic texts, it uncovers how Ottoman Sephardic Jews—who themselves could be doubly racialized as both Jews and as those deemed “Orientals”—adopted and adapted racializing discourses and how they represented themselves and Others. Drawing on Ladino, Hebrew, French, and Ottoman Turkish texts—including travelogues and memoirs, rabbinic responsa and photography, literature and the popular press—it attends to the racialized, gendered, and classed politics of cultural representation that emerge in Ottoman Sephardic ethnography.This study begins by reading anthropological notions of race and evolution that appeared in the Ottoman Sephardic press to understand what race meant to Ottoman Sephardic Jews (chapter 1). Sephardic writers translated these ideas about race, civilization, and progress into practices of racialization, enacted within the Ottoman provinces in relation to other imperial subjects, including other Jews (chapter 2). Travel accounts from Ottoman Palestine reveal how Sephardic travelers circulated newly imagined geographies of race in response to global capitalism. Yet Sephardic reformers also applied ethnographic and racial ideas within their own communities in the urban centers of the empire, which surfaces in autoethnographic works on superstition (chapter 3). Such racializing logics and discourses spread in part through the Franco-Jewish Alliance Isra�lite Universelle, which I reframe through the analytic of race (chapter 4). Finally, this study traces the afterlives of Ottoman Sephardic ethnography as it carried into the twentieth century and the global Sephardic diaspora after the collapse of the Ottoman empire (conclusion). This demonstrates how racial discourses were not just social constructs, but created political realities with material consequences for peoples’ lives long after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

My dissertation argues for a joint literary historiography of Yiddish and Spanish texts within Jewish Argentine literature. I situate my work within the existing (and marginalized) corpora of literary criticism for Jewish Argentine literature in Spanish and Yiddish, which have historically remained isolated from each other. I propose a bilingual Yiddish/Spanish canon for Jewish Argentine literature that is self-critical from its inception. I choose “origins,” “others,” and “afterlives” both as thematic and symbolic markers within the literature that I study, but also as phrases that shape a literary canon itself. By considering the figurative, translational, and intertextual strategies that are used complicate these phrases, I destabilize any easy or singular understanding of what it means to represent Jewish-Argentine literature and its communities.Establishing an originary, foundational, or first presence is paramount to the authority of literary canons and their claims to representation. My dissertation begins with a study of the so-called originary works of Jewish Argentine literature in Spanish and Yiddish respectively: The celebrated (and critiqued) Los Gauchos Judíos (1910) and the forgotten Yiddish-language memoir of Mordechai Alpersohn (an agricultural colonist; first volume published in 1922). I revisit these works, which have never been studied comparatively, and discuss the contested nature of beginnings themselves. I suggest that Gerchunoff’s translations, misquotations, and anachronisms yield an intertextual collage that fictionalizes Jewish-Argentine life on the pampas; close reading thus renders the erasure that the work performs in order to be first. In the Yiddish memoir, I show that Alpersohn and his fellow agricultural colonists use the act of translation to domesticate what is foreign to them. “Home” for the colonists is the Jewish discursive universe (described by Benjamin Harshav in The Meaning of Yiddish) that contains so many other exiles within it. In fact, it is the oppositional constructs of “home” and “exile” themselves that wander in both of these works, which in turn contests the premise of autochthonous literature itself and the category of a foundational or first work.The next chapter of my dissertation examines “Others;” in particular, the literary treatment of the figure of the prostitute in the Yiddish play “Ibergus” by Leyb Malakh and the book of poems Versos de Una … by the pseudonymous Clara Beter (both works were published in 1926). In both works, the prostitute asserts that she belongs at once to everyone and to no one, and this condition makes her an excellent metaphor for metaphor itself. The prostitute is employed both as a metaphor for other phenomena, and also shrouded in figurative language. This dual use of prostituion as a source and target metaphor reveals a complex and ever-shifting terrain upon which supposedly stable identity categories are built. I use the word “prostitute” instead of “sex worker” to reinforce the degree to which these works deal with their characters as tropes, but I also identify the way that prostitutes weave in and out of positions of limited agency. The last chapter of my dissertation examines the notion of literary afterlives in Yiddish literature, especially in the Argentina-focused volumes of the Musterverk fun Der Yidisher Literatur (Model Works of Yiddish Literature, 1957¬–1984) edited by Shmuel Rollanski. I discuss the work of three different writers featured in the Musterverk—namely, Avrom Moshkovitsh, Nahon Millertski, and Mimi Pinzón. I consider the way that excerption, translation, biographical discussion, and criticism all have a profound influence on our reception of both the pieces and the authors themselves. Critical sources rely heavily on figurative language to evoke supposedly literal ends and afterlives, and the critical sources themselves participate in shaping the end and afterlives of their subjects.

This dissertation focuses on the Inquisition trials of cryptoJews in New Spain. In 1589, Francisca de Carvajal, her son Luis and daughters Catalina, Leonor and Ysabel, were arrested in Mexico City for keeping Jewish traditions. On Sunday, December 8, 1596, they were burnt at the stake in the city market. Francisca de Carvajal was a descendant of Portuguese Jews that converted to Christianity in 1496. While it is true that convert identities were diverse, I claim that Francisca, her family and friends were cryptoJewish (secretly Jewish) because they passed on a Jewish memory. In the medieval period, this was done through liturgy (prayers, songs and texts) and rituals (holidays and extra fast days). By examining the minutes of the hearings, and the comments of the inquisitors on the margins, the confessions of converts and accusations of their friends and family, I study with great detail the cultural and identity features of this persecuted minority group in New Spain.Chapter one examines the Jewish holidays of the Sabbath, Passover, and Yom Kippur that conversos observed, and the extra fast days they also identified as Jewish. Examples of the liturgy include Luis’ cryptoJewish siddur (prayerbook) based on Jewish texts extracted from a Christian bible, and Leonor’s recital of the Song of Moses before inquisitors. Chapter two looks at the abstention from pork and pork products (when possible), food preparation for the Sabbath, and knowledge of ritual slaughter as cryptoJewish identifiers. For example, Francisca defatted and bled her meat. Chapter three analyzes the secret languages, prayers, texts, and songs that Francisca, her family and friends used as part of their liturgy. While some of the prayers and songs were Sephardic in origin, others were cryptoJewish renditions composed by Luis de Carvajal, appropriated from Christian texts. Chapter four identifies the moment conversos learned about their secretly Jewish identity and began to receive instruction as their Bar/Bat Mitzvah event (which differed greatly from the celebration in normative Judaism). They not only waited —for example— for the Messiah but believed that the Messiah would come and free them from their captivity in the lands of idolatry. In conclusion, this dissertation argues that conversos preserved some Jewish liturgy and rituals, created new ones, and utilized Christian sources for a true cryptoJewish experience.

ABSTRACTThe Last Galician SwitchboardBy James Forest ReidThe Last Galician Switchboard is an interactive multi-screen video installation that follows a switchboard operator haunted by family left behind in Eastern Europe. The piece incorporates familial letters and excerpts from Yiddish theatre, literature, and folklore to offer an interactive glimpse into life during wartime, Jewish experience, and forced relocation. Upon entering the installation room, participants can interact with an analogue switchboard to listen to audio recreations of historical communications between Jewish refugees during the first World War, voice-acted excerpts from Yiddish folklore, and remastered ethnographic recordings. Simultaneously, participants can watch a collage of thematically related archival stock footage projected on three different screens. This thesis project merges fictional and documentary sources in order to create an accessible understanding of a complex culture haunted by stories of resistance, perseverance, and survival.

This paper will examine various types of rhetoric that have been used throughout history to isolate and target Jews. The first is the voice of authority or kerygma, observable in canonized scripture, what Northrop Frye termed the “rhetoric of God.” Next is the rhetoric of paranoia, traditionally used by politicians to persuade people to adopt a defensive position against the imagined threat of certain groups. This is particularly popular on social media, which creates a sense of community through the shared fears of its participants. Third, and perhaps most insidious, is the largely invisible rhetoric of consubstantiality, that is, the use of coded rhetoric to create a “safe space” for more radical hate speech that often results in heinous acts of violence. In conclusion we will examine some on-the-ground examples of ways that scholars and faith leaders are using rhetorical tools such as careful translation, socially sensitive hermeneutics and the personal narrative to overcome the negative uses of persuasive speech.

This dissertation analyzes the fluid, contingent, and unstable social and cultural roles of Sephardi Jews in the twentieth century United States. Specifically, this study examines the individuals and communities of Los Angeles, California and the breadth and depth of their local, national, and global relationships. As purveyors of “Oriental” goods and entertainment, merchants in and residents of a racially fragmented metropolis, or cultural and political activists and leaders, these Jews - individually and collectively - drew on diverse strands from their palimpsestic identities to shape and manage their position in Los Angeles, the United States, and the world. Based on communal and organizational archives, personal correspondence, press, census records, oral histories, and more, a complex portrait emerges of the contested and fungible experiences of American Sephardi Jews.

Conflict in Israel and Palestine is typically characterized as a binary phenomenon. This paper interrogates this binarism. It recognizes instead that Ashkenazi hegemony operates as a major generative force of oppression and conflict in Israel and Palestine. It considers the multiplicity of populations, whether Israeli, Palestinian, migrant or refugee, and suggests how their common patterns of disenfranchisement and oppression might be leveraged in the cause of conflict resolution. We will explore a structure of dominance that affects multiple non-dominant groups in the region: Palestinians, Mizrahi Jews, migrants, and LGBTQ Israelis and Palestinians. Finally, this approach suggests a way forward: uniting a coalition of these currently disempowered groups, with the aim to transform the conflict by addressing the root cause: the persistent hegemony of one group, Ashkenazim, in political, civic, and social structures.

In this dissertation, I examine the Hebrew Bible as a cultural product, analyzing the diachronic text formation practices therein as acts of cultural memory. Whereas approaches to cultural memory tend to focus on continuity, I turn my attention to forgetting, arguing for the forgotten as a site of fecundity—while remembering makes texts present across time, forgetting is the mechanism that allows meaning to change and multiplicities to converge, forming cultural text into a portable and durable cultural symbols. In this project, I center the scribes writing into the text as agents within the tradition who perform this kind of memory work as they redact, add to, or insert text into their inherited literatures.This dissertation is made of three case studies that address selected pericopes from three of the main literary genres in the Hebrew Bible: pentateuchal law (Exod 34:11-17), prophetic poetry (Isa 2), and historical narrative 1 Sam 13-15). Each study integrates an eclectic methodology, drawing from the methods traditional to biblical studies (text-criticism, redaction-criticism, philology, etc.) along with theories of cultural memory and intertextuality. I begin each case study by making an argument concerning the text’s composition history, and I proceed to analyze the secondary layer as an act of cultural memory that brings the text forward in time, but which also changes the text and its potentialities moving forward. This change, I argue, is part of what allows syntheses between cultural texts to converge into cultural symbols, which can be described as extra-textual hermeneutical assumptions by which readers approach the text. Those which I suggest are active in these case studies are Canon, Isaiah as Seer, and Divine History.

AbstractVoicing the Shekhinah: The Ḥabad Discourse in the Seventh GenerationbyShmaryahu BrownsteinDoctor of Philosophy in Near Eastern StudiesDesignate Emphasis in Jewish StudiesUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Daniel Boyarin, ChairWhile much work has been done on the history and thought of Ḥabad Hasidism, there has been insufficient attention paid to the interconnectedness of the two areas, particularly as it relates to the seventh Ḥabad rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Much scholarship on Schneerson’s thought does not adequately apprehend the subtle nuances of his philosophy, sufficing with analyzing his overt declarations without excavating the structures and patterns of his thinking. To greater regret, works that deal with the history and sociology of Ḥabad under R. Menachem Mendel’s influence often focus almost exclusively on the political aspects of his undertakings, paying little attention to his scholarship altogether. The present dissertation seeks to provide a methodology for rectifying this lacuna, by identifying the central component of Ḥabad identity and society, as well as the primary facet of the function and definition of a Ḥabad master, namely the ma’amar or discourse. The Ḥabad discourse is distinctive in its content, as well as in the ceremony with which it is delivered. Its draws on ideas from the Kabbalah, interpreted through the constructs of Ḥabad thought. It is conceived of as the “wellsprings of the Baal Shem Tov,” the putative founder of the Hasidic movement, meaning that it is supposed to promulgate and explicate the teachings and concepts conveyed by the Besht. From the second generation of Ḥabad and on, following its founding by R. Schneur Zalman, the discourse has also been presented as developing the ideas of the preceding rebbes. These concepts are explicitly present in the set of discourses discussed in this dissertation, called Bosi legani. Each of these discourses contains teachings from all the Ḥabad masters, who are cited by name. Additionally, the notion of disseminating the wellsprings of the Besht is a recurring theme throughout this series. The ceremony of its initial oration includes a number of practices such as the singing of a preparatory melody and of listening to it while standing that represent an awareness of hearing the words of the Living G-d as they emerge from the mouth of the rebbe. I propose a concept called “midrashic intertextuality” as a method to approach the discourse, understand how it works, and assess the metamessages it conveys. This approach recognizes that intertextuality signifies that the interaction between texts can take a variety of forms and “tones.” When one appreciates the relationship of Midrash to the Biblical texts it interprets, they may extend that same concept to describe the relationship between the various texts within the Ḥabad corpus, as well as that between the various rebbes who authored the texts. Thus a new dimension of the inner lives of the rebbes, as well as of their adherents, comes into view, and enriches our insight into their society and life choices.

The nonhuman animals and creatures featured in what may be called the Danielic corpora are some of the most memorable and influential in early Jewish literature. The collection presents episodes of a king’s theriomorphic transformation, violent confrontations with lions and serpents, the judgment of mythic-hybrid monsters, and domestic animals in conflict, each of which this study examines. With attention to the unique expressions of animality and foreignness of each episode—how animality reflects foreignness and foreignness reflects animality—this investigation demonstrates the diverse ways in which early Jewish communities negotiated identity and worked out their conceptions of self and other. The diversity of these expressions is a reflection of the heterogeneity found in the Danielic corpora, which remains a complex and palimpsetic set of traditions that preserves linguistic, generic, and compositional distinctions which cannot be reduced to the categories often applied to them. In the same way, this investigation maintains that the animals, creatures, and monsters who often portray foreign others in the Danielic texts cannot be simplified into one understanding of foreign kings, empires, and gods as bestial aggressors and monsters of chaos. Moreover, this study argues that the instability and malleability of the human-nonhuman binary is evinced in how Jewish literary imagination of the early centuries BCE employed and interacted with nonhuman interlocutors, and provided a mirror in which Jewish groups could view and review themselves, foreign others, and divine sovereignties.

In the winter of 1919-1920, the artist Max Weber (1881-1961) created twenty-four or twenty-five small woodcut prints out of a box he had received containing a gift of comb honey. The small images that resulted appropriated visual forms from Western and Central African art and incorporated them into the representation of Jewishness. This thesis argues that the woodcuts and Weber’s dissemination of them in the context of Yiddish modernism embody an aesthetic of diasporic primitivism that explores Jewishness as one form of difference among others and thereby distinguishes itself from primitivist practices that sought to manage difference. Weber’s woodcuts moreover actively participated in a matrix of Yiddish modernism advocated by the movement known as Di Yunge and concerned with literary and aesthetic negotiations of how Jewishness relates to other cultures.

This dissertation argues that Stalin’s rumored plan to deport the Jews of the Soviet Union to locations in the Soviet Far East in 1953 can be examined as a plot-generating device, irrespective of the question of its historical reality. Seen in this light, the deportation plan fits the narrative model initiated by the Purim story as recounted in the Book of Esther. The Purim story offered a model for comprehending (and even generating) the plan, as well as for placing it into a Jewish narrative tradition and a characteristically Jewish conception of time as a series of recurrences or analogies between past and present. The dissertation examines fictional treatments of the plan in relation to Stalin’s last days and argues that early works drew upon this model for representing the deportation plan, while later works additionally developed a fictional Jewish resistance effort to Stalin and his regime as a form of symbolic revenge for his Jewish victims in keeping with the inherent ideological requirements of Purim. These works incorporate elements of the Purim story, at times indirectly or even unwittingly, and thereby draw analogies between that story and the deportation plan because they are working in a particular narrative tradition whose “genre memory” conditions a comparison between the events in the Book of Esther with the events of 1953. In order to explain this connection, the dissertation draws on several schools and major figures of Russian literary theory: the historical poetics of Alexander Veselovsky, Vladimir Propp’s morphological study of the folktale, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of genre memory. These theoretical tools help explain how the Purim story made it possible for Jewish and non-Jewish writers to make sense of the rumors connecting Stalin’s death to his postwar antisemitic campaigns. By comparing fictional treatments of the plan in the USSR and the West during and after the Soviet era, the dissertation examines how varying sociopolitical and cultural conditions engendered different representations of the plan that can nevertheless be subsumed within the “Purim-Stalin” genre as a kind of literary and cinematic special Purim.

Ethnic Studies epistemologies have been central to the historicization and theorization of the US-Mexico border as an ordering regime that carries out structures of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and white supremacy. While scholars of Jewish history have explored the connections between colonial borders, transnational economic structures, and Jewish merchants, little is known about the role of Jewish entrepreneurs in the process of modern US-Mexico border formation. This dissertation explores how state, corporate, and military imperatives of US imperialism between the American Southwest and Northern Mexico created the conditions for Jewish inclusion into a white settler class and a model of Jewish continuity beyond Europe since the mid-nineteenth century. To explore the imprint of US settler colonialism on Jewish settlement, inclusion, and continuity, Chapter one reviews how Jews have been historicized as exceptional subjects in the contexts of colonial Mexico and the modern American West. Subsequently, Chapter two utilizes archival sources to reinscribe the Jewish border entrepreneur into the history of capitalist and military expansion across the new US imperial frontier. Working across the economies of extraction, policing, and revolution, Jewish border entrepreneurs reflect how commercial middlemen were neither separate nor above the racial and colonial contexts in which they existed, but were rather active and benefiting participants.Next, Chapter three investigates a regional movement for Jewish agricultural colonization and immigrant re-settlement that originated in late-nineteenth-century California and imagined a semi-sovereign Jewish nation-state in Baja California, Mexico. The plan to establish a “Palestine on the Pacific” persisted through 1939 and suggests that ideologies of Jewish nation-building were informed by structures of US settler colonialism, including liberal articulations of peoplehood, citizenship, and territorial belonging. Finally, Chapter four employs place-based, autoethnography in a Jewish cemetery in the Sonoran Desert to understand Jewish interpolation into US settler society as an ongoing process that can be explored through the Jewish American non-profit industrial complex. To conclude, I discuss how writing Jews into a modern, critical history of the US-Mexico border region contributes to Jewish and Chicana/o Studies by expanding methodological approaches to the analysis of settler colonial and neoliberal economies, and racial ordering in North America.

AbstractMapping Jewish Poland: Leisure Travel and Identity in the Interwar PeriodByUrszula H. Madej-KrupitskiDoctor of Philosophy in Historyand the Designated Emphasis in Jewish StudiesUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor John Efron, ChairThis study explores the development of leisure cultures and practices among the highly-diversified population of Polish Jews during the interwar period. Travel networks, guidebooks, and the leisure industry all helped propel a transformation of Polish-Jewish society that transcended the multitude of religious, socio-economic, political, and linguistic divides among them. Approaching this subject from the methodological perspective of Alltagsgeschichte, the history of everyday life, drawing on popular materials in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian and German, such as travel brochures, magazines and advertisements, as well as an array of underutilized archival documents, my work analyzes the travel choices of Jewish, and for comparative purposes, non-Jewish, citizens, during the Second Polish Republic. Through examining the recreational preferences of both Jews and others in the Polish context, and how those preferences enabled identity formation, this research examines the grand processes of Jewish acculturation, belonging, and assimilation in interwar Poland.Modern scholars usually portray Polish Jews of the period in a decidedly lachrymose manner. Historians such as Celia Heller and Emanuel Melzer suggest respectively that Jews were living on the “edge of destruction” with “no way out.” However, this study firmly demonstrates that between the two world wars, Polish Jews lived rich lives, negotiated complicated relationships with broader Polish society, and dreamed of diverse futures in their homeland. Despite experiencing difficult and changing times marked by severe economic challenges, nationalism, and increasing antisemitism, Polish Jews thrived within the boundaries of the Second Polish Republic. By exploring their engagement in domestic tourist activities, this dissertation reveals the genuine emotional connection they felt for Polish forests, rivers, mountains and towns. In doing so, it challenges historical accounts that depict the Polish Jewish experience of the period solely as a series of desperate attempts to leave the country. Beyond the quotidian travel choices of Jews, this study examines the Yidisher Gezelshaft far Landkenetnish or Żydowskie Towarzystwo Krajoznawcze (Jewish Society for Knowledge of the Land), founded in 1926. Headed by Jewish intellectuals, physicians, and historians, it sought to promote a sense among Jews that they were both an integral part of the Polish nation and that Poland was very much their homeland. Through its tours, publications, public lectures, and other forms of public programming, the Landkentenish movement aimed to change the consciousness of Jews and transform them from being ‘Jews in Poland’ to Polish Jews. Largely but not exclusively expressing itself in Yiddish, Landkentenish had a sort of Jewish interiority that made its commitment to acculturation complex and unique. Its activities were not designed to “impress” or ingratiate itself to the majority, but to foster a deep commitment to a new and truly integrated Polish-Jewish identity. In short, this dissertation underscores not only why and how Polish Jews became tourists, but also the ways in which leisure travel aided them in establishing and expressing their Jewishness and Polishness.

My dissertation, Translational Encounters: Modernism, Jewishness and Translation in Literatures of the Mass Migration Period, studies strategies of literary representation developed by early-twentieth-century Jewish immigrant authors in response to pressures of assimilation and language effacement. I triangulate authors who have traditionally been read within different, monolingual literary historiographies: Lamed Shapiro (Yiddish), Anzia Yezierska and Henry Roth (American English), and L. A. Arieli (Hebrew). This new historiographical map traces how multilingual authors who wrote in various languages designed in their works strategies of translation to utilize the modernist project’s destabilization of the national language. I argue that in order to make a repressed minor language into a vital agent within a national culture that demanded its effacement, these authors designed an openended narrative oscillation between “original” and “translation.” They designed a new, linguistic paradigm to envision an American self that is always in the making.My dissertation examines one of the most intricate genres undertaken by Jewish immigrant authors, which I term “the translational novel.” These are works which read as a translation, insofar as the linguistic situation in the fictional world is mediated for the reader by another language. As a result, much of the thematic “drama” in these texts is shifted from the represented world to the very act of its linguistic mediation. A few recent studies investigated this technique in different contexts, e.g. Adriana X. Jacobs’ Strange Cocktail (2018) and Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s Born Translated (2015). What seem to have been missing, however, are first, an adequate account of contemporaneous literatures in several languages, and second, a study of this device’s particular response to the modernist crisis of representation. Translational Encounters addresses this lacuna by uncovering the aesthetic potentiality of such translational encounters in narrative form. I consider Jewish immigrant authors’ design of a translational mode of narration (for example, Lamed Shapiro narrates in Yiddish events that take place in English), contending that these authors draw on the place of translation outside the “nameable,” that is the social grammars of meaning and their construction of legible national and linguistic subjects. For these authors, I argue, translational narration is a distinctly modernist technique for responding to a crisis of expression and social fragmentation, a means to participate in modernism’s destabilization of language without giving up linguistic particularity. The first chapter reaches beyond modernism to explore the vital role of translation in the American Yiddish theater’s audacious reworkings of Shakespeare, under the parodic dictum, as the legend has it, “translated and improved.” It also studies the afterlife of this late-nineteenth-century practice, by examining works by Anzia Yezierska and Grace Paley. Specifically, I look at various works which Judaize, Yiddishize and queer Shakespearean characters in order to subvert the notion of a national literary inheritance. These works, I suggest, employ translation as a means to envision non-reproductive modes of familial and literary kinship. Finally, the chapter also includes an analysis of “Shakespeare The Second” (Shekspir der tsveyter 1920) by the prolific Yiddish shund playwright Hershel Kalmanowitz, a play which I discovered in a full manuscript form in the American Jewish Archives, and which has not been studied before. Turning to explicit engagements with modernist style, the next chapters examine works in three languages. In my second chapter, I explore a literary debate between two American Yiddish authors – Lamed Shapiro (1878-1948) and Yankev Glatshteyn (1896–1971) – regarding James Joyce’s technique of stream of consciousness. I show that American Yiddish authors resolved their contested ideas about Jewishness by projecting them onto their ideas on Joycean abstraction of time, interiority and language. I argue that Shapiro utilizes the encounter between the Yiddish language and the American locale to complicate the modernist “universalist” turn inward. His translational representation of a Yiddish-inflected consciousness is attuned to both linguistic particularity and multilingual potentiality. Whereas my first two chapters study attempts to place Yiddish vis a vis a presumed universal literature, my third chapter turns to Anzia Yezierska’s design of an aesthetic language that is distinctly American. Specifically, I study All I Could Never Be (1932), a novel which is a fictionalized account of Yezierska’s work as a translator with the Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey in his 1918 ethnographic study of Polish immigrants. As I show, Yezierska designs a novel that reads as both an original and a translation, tracing in the oscillation between the two a means to effect Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy of a fluid American self. In shaping an incessant motion between source and target languages, the novel undoes a unidirectional idea of origin, stressing how each new translation changes the original. While Yezierska unsettles English to advance cultural pluralism, the Hebrew author L. A. Arieli posits that psychic tensions of acculturation can be elucidated only through a non-vernacular minor language. My fourth chapter considers Arieli’s Hebrew novel Diary of a Lonely Man, or How I Became an Anti-Semite (1928), focusing on the crucial role of language in thematizing psychic tensions of ethnic passing. Arieli depicts a second-generation Eastern-European Jewish immigrant who can “pass” as a descendent of Irish (rather than Jewish) immigrants through acculturated speech. Yet although the events take place in English, Arieli narrates them in Hebrew, in order to thematize the pathological effect of ethnic prejudice. Arieli parodically mimics a dated, rabbinic Hebrew register, in order to reveal his protagonist’s view of the Jewish body as a Hebrew liturgical text – a “shameful” obsolete residue whose cultural Otherness raises endless exegetic investigations by the Anglo-dominated surroundings. In my concluding chapter, I look at Henry Roth’s belated attempt to revisit the decayed Yiddish world of his childhood in his English writing. I show that Roth forms a distinct post-Joycean temporal and linguistic aesthetics that does not retreat from “history” but rather seeks to convey the historical decay of the Yiddish world of his childhood without accepting it under the determinism of a historical “fate.” Specifically, he incorporates numerous manuscripts and diaries into the finished work. This manuscript temporality, I argue, harbors a liberating hesitative time of authorial revision, before past events crystalize on the page into a “fated” death of Yiddish. Similarly, Roth employs Yiddish words as speculative agents that could disrupt the features and boundaries of monolingual American literature in the present.In studying the intersection of translation, aesthetic form, and ideas on migration and citizenship, my project not only recovers a poetics whose political implications resonate in our own time. It also offers a new, transnational historiography of modernist, American, and modern Jewish literatures alike. By triangulating Hebrew, Yiddish, and American literary works that have not yet been put in substantial conversation, I invite us to rethink what (multilingual) Jewish (as well as American) literature is and the ways in which its historiography should be conceived.

My dissertation explores the use of meat as a metaphor in modern Yiddish fiction written in Eastern Europe and the United States. From maskilic literature of the early twentieth century to post-Holocaust Jewish-American literature, the metaphorics of meat appear incessantly. The literature in this study articulates the social changes in Jewish identity in the early twentieth century through the meat metaphor. I analyze writers who understood Jewishness and anti-Jewish violence through the metaphorics of the human-animal relationship and meat consumption. I argue that representations of meat in Yiddish literature from 1902 to1968s must be examined within a matrix of modernization and secularization in Jewish identity formation. Using a comparative and connective framework, I focus on three American Yiddish writers: Morris Winchevsky, Berish Weinstein, and Issac Bashevis Singer, who created Jewish ethics that tie together Jewish tradition and political radicalism. In the first chapter, I discuss a newly found play by Morris Winchevsky that was inspired by the real events of the 1902 kosher meat boycott in New York City. Winchevsky’s play is a hidden key to understanding the symbolic power of kosher meat in the modern era and how Jewish American immigrants confronted revolutionary circumstances for which few precedents existed. The second chapter explores a cycle of nine poems by Berish Weinstein titled ​Shehita​ (Slaughter). Weinstein’s images of slaughter define several relationships: Jewish and Gentile, kosher and non-kosher, and the modern and pre-modern. I read Weinstein as a humanitarian poet who defends humans and animals alike through the meat metaphor and insisted on One Flesh For All. Reading these poems in the historical context of Europe in 1936 helps us to understand how ethically pressing his poetics were. The last chapter is an attempt to understand Isaac Bashevis Singer’s continuous preoccupation with vegetarianism. This is best exemplified in works that depict two recurring themes in his fiction: the role of the ritual slaughterer in a religious community and the Holocaust survivor refusing to eat meat for moral reasons. Singer’s stories utilize their power as a direct attack on humanistic thought and its inherent difficulty in considering the non-human. Singer identified vegetarianism as a moral commandment, which he called his “only dogma.”

From the 1830s through the end of the 1850s, with a brief respite in 1848, the press of Vienna was censored by the Habsburg state. Despite censorial restrictions, Viennese journalists expanded the press industry during these years such that by the end of the 1850s the Habsburg capital was home to a major, flourishing commercial press. In the midst of these developments, the majority of Viennese journalists labored to define journalism as a wholly masculine profession—one in which women might participate as readers but would rarely work as contributors. Thanks to this effort, most people came to believe that the “ideal” journalist ought to be male and ought to behave according to specific norms that were viewed as masculine.Simultaneous to the rise of the masculine press, a growing group of young Jewish men arrived in Vienna from other Habsburg provinces in search of new professional and social opportunities. For social and economic reasons, many of these Jewish men became involved in the local press. Despite ongoing discrimination by the state, many of these Jewish men quickly became well-known journalists and newspaper editors. By the 1840s the association between “Jew” and “journalism” had been adopted at a colloquial and professional level: people connected the profession of journalism with Jewish men.With the association between Jewish men and journalism in mid-nineteenth-century Vienna in mind, this dissertation explores two intertwined questions. First, what forms of masculinity came to be associated with the image of the journalist between 1837 and 1859, and how did the norms change? Second, what role did Jewish men, as leading Viennese journalists and newspaper editors, play in shaping forms of masculinity in journalism during this period? In asking these questions, I am able to explore the possibility that Jewish men of the mid-nineteenth century were not only participants but in fact forerunners who defined and shaped the attitudes and behaviors associated with journalists in Vienna. Broadly, this allows me to investigate how minorities or discriminated populations could become leading representatives of specific modes of behavior among a majority population in the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire.The argument presented in this study is twofold. First, Jewish male journalists in Vienna sought to gain entry in Viennese professional and social circles by adopting masculine practices that were considered desirable for members of the Viennese professional middle class of the mid-nineteenth-century. During this period, when anti-Jewish sentiment among the professional middle class was relatively low, those Jewish men who successfully negotiated and deployed these practices were often able to find acceptance and respect in non-Jewish professional circles. Second, as Jewish journalists became leaders in the press industry, they used journalism as a venue to publicly broadcast their masculine behaviors. In so doing, they increasingly came to define the forms of masculinity that dominated the image of the journalist. Jewish journalists were, therefore, crucial participants in the effort to define journalism as a male pursuit and the effort to determine how manliness, or masculinity, was articulated through the press in mid-nineteenth-century Vienna. In the 1830s through the 1850s, many Jews were viewed by their professional, non-Jewish peers as positive examples of appropriate masculinity in journalism. This was the case even as Jews increasingly had to counter anti-Jewish, hostile claims about their masculinity after the 1848 uprisings. This study explores four modes of masculinity—the “literary man,” the “popular man,” the “political man,” and the “business-man”—that dominated perceptions of the figure of the journalist between 1837 and 1859 and the involvement of Jewish men in developing these modes.

In the twenty-first century, knowledge of Gustav Mahler’s work as a conductor is largely limited to his work in the German romantic repertory, with particular affinities for the symphonies of Beethoven and the operas of Wagner, alongside his advocacy of his own music. But a closer look reveals that Mahler’s musical curiosity—both in the opera house and the concert hall—extended quite far beyond nineteenth-century German music. In this dissertation, I will spotlight the Bach Suite Mahler edited and assembled as a piece of music in its own right, and will discuss it as a symbol for Mahler’s complicated relationship with music of the past and with his own identity as expressed in his famous quotation “Ich bin dreifach heimatlos: als B�hme unter den �sterreichern, als �sterreicher unter den Deutschen und als Jude in der ganzen Welt.” (I am three times homeless: as a Bohemian among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans and as a Jew in the entire world.)The focus of this dissertation will be fourfold: a survey of available literature about the Suite; a discussion of the implications of musical appropriation and the cultural circumstances surrounding Mahler’s decision to assemble his own Suite rather than perform one of the existing Bach Orchestral Suites; some thoughts about the implications of performing such a Romantically-inflected edition of the music of Bach in an age of historically-informed performance; and some practical considerations for rehearsing and performing the suite as keyboardist and conductor, as I did with UCLA Philharmonia in the spring of 2019. (Video of the performance accompanies this dissertation in ProQuest and the University of California’s repository, eScholarship. It may also be accessed directly via the following link: https://vimeo.com/337853300/519b69cf76.)

The Moroccan-descended Jewish community of Iquitos, Perú has engaged in large-scale migration to Israel since the early 2000s. Despite strong self-identification as Jews, Israel’s immigration regime requires “conversion” practices that privilege Ashkenazi-normative Jewish identifications and customs and help integrate Iquiteño migrants into Israel’s racial hierarchy. In two sets of in-depth interviews in 2016 and 2019, Iquiteño Jews explained their reasons for migrating, changes to their modes of identification, and their understanding of their future place in Israel. Their explanations reveal the tension between sociological theories of diaspora and transnationalism. After applying interview data to these theories, this thesis finds that the Iquiteño case is one example of how interested actors, including states, use the rhetoric of diaspora to stimulate transnational activity, such as philanthropy and migration, among otherwise-localized communities, thereby introducing and reinforcing external racial hierarchies among the far-flung nodes of diasporic networks. Broadly, the rhetoric of diaspora serves interested actors’ transnational political aims, which often homogenize diasporas even as they activate them.

My dissertation explores the way fear of Jewish identity haunts the Italian literary imagination and allows a new understanding of the Risorgimento as a negotiation between centuries-old religious struggles. My first chapter begins with the establishment of the Venetian ghetto in 1516 described in diaries by Marino Sanuto alongside Pietro Aretino’s drama La Cortigiana and correspondence between Sarra Copia Sulam and Catholic bishop Baldassare Bonifacio. Reading these texts together reveals two competing perspectives – one which envisions Jewish identity as ‘subaltern’ through coded language that emphasized the need for confinement and conversion and the other which advocates for tolerance and integration. The second chapter examines the diary of Anna del Monte within the larger epidemic of forced baptisms and the exchange between G.B.G. D’Arco and Benedetto Frizzi on the role of Jews in their Catholic communities. My analysis suggests that the tensions in their writings reveal a strong connection between the rhetoric of fear and confinement and its actuality. In this way, Jewish identity continues to haunt the literary imagination and the same tensions in 16th-17th century Venice are made visible in social thought in the 18th century. My third chapter reads the portrayal of Jewish identity in Risorgimento writings as a culmination of this haunting. This chapter provides a radically new interpretation of canonical texts which reveals two competing nationalisms – one based on an assumed ethnoreligious heritage and the other a pluralist perspective based on a shared sense of political affiliation. Incorporating works by Cesare Balbo, Antonio Fogazzaro, and Vittorio Alfieri facilitates my reading of Ugo Foscolo’s epistolary novel, Le ultime lettere, as an iteration of the Wandering Jew narrative. Focusing each chapter on a different snapshot of Italian history shows how, across time, Jewish identity occupied a precarious position with an uncertain future which contextualizes the consequences of assimilation into the pluralist national cause or exclusion from the emerging ethnoreligious nationalist movement of the 19th century. Thus, my research enables the field of Italian literature to move beyond the traditional ‘secular versus Catholic’ competitive view and instead understands Risorgimento writings as way to envisage solutions to prior religious tensions.

A presentation of village life has long stood in the foreground for projects of nationalism in the German-speaking world. From the noble, agrarian barbarians of Tacitus’ Germania to the Blut und Boden rhetoric of Nazi propaganda, the aesthetic of an ethnically homogenous and culturally conservative rural idyll has been evoked by generations of nationalist thinkers. This practice remains paradigmatic for claims of homeland [Heimat] and belonging today. My research examines literary representations of village life through the lens of so-called “village stories” in their various manifestations from the mid-nineteenth century through the post-Reunification period, with specific, comparative case studies from the mid-19th- and late-20th/early-21st centuries. Concentrating primarily on short literary forms, I place these village stories in conversation with pastoral tropes in nationalist discourses, paying particular attention to the role of the ‘stranger’ or ‘outsider.’Following an initial theoretical and methodological chapter in which I conceptualize migration and the literary village as the layering of representational place through engagement with critiques of space and spatiality derived from the disciplines of sociology and human geography, my research comprises two contextualized case studies. The first examines the literary and critical work of Berthold Auerbach, a prolific popular writer of the mid-19th century whose bestselling Black Forest Village Stories [Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten] chronicle the rapid demographic and technological transformations of the time through an imagined series of migrations between the fictionalized town of the author’s birth and a Swabian frontier town on the Ohio River. Engaging with Auerbach’s ample critical writings including his work on both dialect and Jewish-German literature, as well as his correspondences with contemporary writers including Gottfried Keller, I read these migration narratives as thinly veiled attempts to negotiate the role of a diverse population in the formation of nascent discourse on the nature of Germanness.The second case study is built around the corpus of work by contemporary translingual author José F. A. Oliver, and the development of what he calls his “Andalusian Black Forest village” [Mein andalusisches Schwarzwalddorf]. Beginning with the tropes and techniques developed more than a century before by Auerbach to negotiate layerings of belonging through engagement with concrete social space—techniques derided by some Auerbach critics as “false reconciliation” (Horch 2013)—I investigate Oliver’s idiosyncratic use of German, Andalusian-Spanish, and Alemannic dialect to suggest the evolution of a poetics of layered place. Using translation theory to supplement my critique of social spaces, I read both the narrative and aesthetic qualities of Oliver’s work, particularly his essays and early poetry, as refining a language of concurrent belonging: eschewing models of in-betweenness in favor of layering multiple affinities through the development of a representational place capable of encapsulating the diversity of the contemporary village experience. In both case studies, I highlight the use (or non-use) of dialect and foreign language in juxtaposition to both authors’ attempts to preserve and document localized traditions—the omnipresence of Swabian folk song in Auerbach’s migration narratives or the privileging of Southern German Carnival [Fastnacht] in Oliver’s negotiation of village community. This research represents one push back against the cultural imaginary of rural homogeneity—demonstrating a longstanding pluralist tradition in the literary presentation of village life and expanding the scope of the debate on contemporary German multiculturalism. In doing so, I present the village as a microcosm for larger questions of arrival and belonging in the German-speaking world, arguing for its reevaluation as a place of shared experience: inherently complex and multivalent. My research posits the village story as a representational place of interconnectivity, and the literary village as a porous borderland. In contrast to the prevailing nationalist imaginaries, through examining both the process and practice of migration or displacement in its intersection with representations of ‘everyday’ village life, I posit the literary village as a place of profound intersectionality.

Choreographing Livability: Dance Epistemes in the Kibbutz and in the Israel Defense Forces traces the historical articulation of dance as a source of knowledge-formation in Israeli culture through two emblematic sites of performance, between the 1940s and the 2000s. It also proposes a theoretical intervention through the elaboration of the framework of livability, through which I explore the life-stakes and the political investment entailed in dancing within the specific context of Israel, in relation to its larger ideological tensions and political shifts. My investigation across sites of performance and time-periods ultimately reassesses existing narratives that have framed “Israeli dance” primarily as a joyful, nation-building, recreational, entertaining, and energetic endeavor. In order to do so, I set out the mechanisms through which different dance experiences, even those apparently disengaged from political preoccupations, have contributed to the enhancement of governmental policies and ideological goals, in particular when such political maneuvers reiterated ethnonational divides or mechanisms of settler colonial hegemony. More specifically, through my scrutiny, supported by archival research, ethnography, and choreographic analysis, I unpack how dancers and choreographers in Israel have often articulated dance as a multicultural, universalistic, and humanizing practice. By doing so, I maintain, dance in Israel has generally worked as a strategy for the mitigation and concealment of larger governmental and ideological apparatuses of marginalization, commodification, or oppression. The Introduction offers an interpretation of Zionism and Israel from a biopolitical perspective, an overview of my livability framework, and a reading of my project in terms of killjoy scholarship. Chapter 1 delineates how dance in kibbutz culture has been able to support shifts in the national strategy, evolving from engine for the international affirmation of Zionism, to agent for a rearticulation of the Socialist Labor Zionist agenda, to neoliberal enterprise. Chapter 2 charts the evolution of dance in the Israel Defense Forces from bureaucratic tool for the administration of military life, to spectacular device for the recalibration of the Israeli soldier’s masculinity, to globalized digital practice that reinforces military authority from the lower levels of the military hierarchy. The Epilogue, in addition, includes four choreographic analyses that, engaging with the kibbutz, the IDF, and the issue of choreographing in Israel, show how dance can invest in a critique of systems of oppression, and expand the possibility of living more livable lives.

This dissertation investigates how Lithuanian Jews positioned themselves vis-�-vis Lithuanians and the Lithuanian state in the era of democratic nation building and, after a military coup d’�tat in 1926, under an authoritarian regime. Across these dramatically different interwar political contexts, Lithuanian Jews honed different strategies to advance the idea that they belonged to Lithuania, leaning on historical, political, cultural and even linguistic evidence. At the same time, they negotiated a contradictory public discourse about them that held that Jews were integral to, and yet conditional participants in, the Lithuanian national project. I argue that, at its core, Lithuanian Jewish belonging consisted of two parts: the Russian Jewish liberal tradition and a deep-seated sense of localness, if not indigeneity. These traditions sometimes worked in tandem but were often in tension.I trace the arc of Lithuanian Jewish political self-fashioning by looking closely at sources including the Yiddish and Lithuanian daily press, memoirs, literary production and public celebrations. I begin by looking at a group of Jewish cultural activists who, from the 1910s to 1920s, made significant inroads with Lithuanian intellectuals to advance the cause of Jewish indigeneity in a multiethnic Lithuania. In the early years of statehood, democratism, rights and the system of cultural autonomy for minorities were important vehicles for Jewish integration, and yet they were contested concepts within the Jewish community, which was fractured between Jewish parties including, most significantly for this dissertation, Zionists and Folkists. To that end, I analyze debates between party spokespeople, especially Jacob Robinson and Yudl Mark, including an exchange over the meaning of the Yiddish term "doikayt," or "hereness." I follow how Jewish supporters of democratic rights reformulated their ideas and positions under Antanas Smetona’s authoritarian government, which required Jews to present as unified and loyal, despite rising anti-Semitism among the Lithuanian middle class. By the 1930s, some Lithuanian Jews came to support Smetona’s project and the Jewish place in it, while others continued to demand the rights they were promised in the wake of World War I. Finally, I look at the phenomenon of the Jewish study of Roma and the Romani language, which I argue was a way for Jews to demonstrate their relative rootedness.

The biblical Solomon narrative that appears in the Book of Kings offers a complex portrait of Solomon as both the wise Temple builder as well as an idolatrous sinner. Solomon’s story poses the problem of how the wisest of all men to whom God spoke could have come to worship other gods. Over history, Jewish literature has had to contend with Solomon’s mixed legacy. It has done so by either ignoring the difficult aspects of his narrative, by apologizing for Solomon’s conduct, or by criticizing him for his errors. Even within Tanakh, we see multiple and disparate responses to the Solomonic problem presented in Kings. Chronicles offers a cleansed portrait of Solomon, focusing on his role as Temple builder. Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, both attributed to Solomon, play a large role in the evolution of Solomon’s character in Jewish thought. Arguably they were written as critiques of Solomon, of his arrogant reliance on wisdom and his failure to maintain faith in God. Yet this purpose seems to have been lost by the time of the rabbis of late antiquity. Instead, the rabbis designate these works, which they presume to have been written by Solomon, as divinely inspired. This in turn ultimately establishes a basis on which to redeem Solomon, the rabbis construing his works as expressions of penitence. Solomon’s prophetic status is amplified by the targumic treatment of those works. The popularity of the Targum to the Song of Songs and its use by Rashi in his commentary to the Song, granting its ideas even greater circulation, promoted a highly laudatory reading of Solomon in the Middle Ages. In addition, admiring portrayals of Solomon in Christianity and Islam may have influenced Jewish perceptions. These factors made castigation of Solomon increasingly difficult for the Jewish medieval exegetes. Thus, an apologetic image of Solomon gains ascendance in the Middle Ages which has colored Jewish perceptions of Solomon ever since. As such, we see Jewish exegesis responding to its own theological needs as well as responding to external exegetical influences.

The dissertation offers new insights into the daily life, political status, and worldviews of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel between 1948 and 1967. During this period, the state endowed this community with nominal citizenship while at the same time subjecting it to martial law and a wide array of discriminatory policies. At the center of my work is a careful reconstruction of the interactions between the Palestinian Arab citizens and Israeli state organs in four realms: movement restrictions, labor union activities, health care, and political expression. The dissertation focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian encounter at the military checkpoint, in the examination room of the government-run clinic, in the everyday tasks of the Palestinian Histadrut member, and in the worldview of the pro-Nasser caf� patron. Along with newly declassified and previously inaccessible Israeli archival material, the dissertation also makes use of oral history interviews, private memoirs, and the printed press. In particular, this study disrupts the current scholarly and public discussions on the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel, which pit one claim against another: either the State of Israel has consistently oppressed and persecuted the Palestinians under its control, or it has overall functioned as a model democracy. In contrast, this research concludes that until 1967, Israeli officials of different ranks largely targeted Palestinians for absorption into the Israeli body politic through a protracted project of “subordinate integration.” The Palestinians for their part recognized the state by engaging in civic struggles premised on their citizenship and in the hopes of being treated as equals. The net effect was that the Palestinian Arab citizens became “Arab-Israelis.” Analytically, the dissertation situates the Israeli-Palestinian case in the context of colonial and settler-colonial histories. The dissertation demonstrates how the historical pattern of Palestinian Arab subordinate integration into Israeli society differs from the experiences of other Arab societies subject to a European colonial power. The Jewish-Palestinian relationship in Israel during the years 1948-1967 is more comparable to settler-colonial patterns, such as the ones in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In other words, I contend that the integration of Palestinians into Israeli society is a manifestation of a settler-colonial assimilationist agenda.

This dissertation demonstrates how the work of three contemporary Mizrahi authors (Haviva Pedaya, Albert Swissa, and Dvir Tzur) challenges the postsecular framing of Mizrahi Jewish practice as masortiyut (“traditionism”), which refers to the flexible form of Jewish observance associated with Arab-Jews in Israel/Palestine. Postsecular critics have mobilized this position to challenge the terms of Jewish national sovereignty. This study claims that, while these writers refuse “masortiyut” as a coherent subject position, they extend certain of its challenges by reconsidering the interaction of the secular and the theological with regard to the nationalist narrative of return entailed in Shivat Tzion (“the return to Zion”). By means of an allusive engagement with mystical texts, these authors reconceive of exile as a reparative condition rather than as a defective state. They replace a notion of static “return” with a “Wandering East” which potentially reorients the Jewish presence in the Middle East away from a relationship of strict identity with the geopolitical territory of Israel.

This dissertation constructs a cultural biography of the Ark of the Covenant, exploring through it the close, but often complicated, relationships that have existed between objects and collective memory in Biblical and ancient Jewish societies. The project considers the different ways in which Biblical writers and interpreters have remembered the Ark as a “real thing,” forming it, mobilizing it, and making meaning with it—largely in its absence after its likely loss in the 6th century BCE. From Exodus to Chronicles and in works of biblical interpretation through the Mishnah, this project explores how these writers reimagine the Ark to craft visions for their people’s future through their people’s past. The project is structured around five interrelated case studies from the Ark’s mnemohistory, considering different dimensions of cultural memory’s entanglement in material culture. Each case study draws upon and enriches text-, source-, and redaction-critical approaches, investigating the growth and reshaping of biblical writings as creative memory work. Chapter 1 discusses the dynamics of texts, cultural memory and material culture in biblical literature with particular focus on Jer 3, where a textual expansion to an early prophetic oracle calls on Israel to forget the Ark. Chapters 2 and 3 consider the contrasting narratives of the Ark’s construction in Deuteronomy (10:1–5, 8–9; 31:25–27) and Priestly writings (Exod 16:34–36; 25; 37; Lev 16; Num 7:89; 17:21–28). The two different contexts that these documents provide for the Ark empower it as a real thing to metonymically represent two different versions of the past, enabling its use as a symbol by Priestly writings and Deuteronomy in the realization of their contrasting visions of Israel’s present and future. Chapter 4 focuses on the literary growth and revision of biblical writings as memory work, analyzing three editions of the Ark’s installation in the Temple: 1 Kgs 8, 3 Kgdms 8, and 2 Chr 5. Chapters 5 and 6 explore considerations of the Ark’s loss in the Ark Narrative (AN; 1 Sam 4:1b–7:1) and ancient Jewish and Rabbinic writings. Chapter 5 focuses on AN, which tells the story of the Ark’s (temporary) loss in battle to the Philistines. While the Ark’s triumphant return to Israel in AN implies that the Ark was not truly lost, the text makes the Ark’s loss thinkable. Chapter 6 explores reactions to the Ark’s loss in ancient Jewish and early Rabbinic writings. The Hebrew Bible is curiously silent on the Ark’s fate. Midrashic ancient Jewish and Rabbinic interpretation fill this lacuna by positing the Ark’s survival and imminent return in the End Times. This apocalyptic deferral of the Temple’s ultimate restoration capitalizes upon the Ark’s presumed reality and absence. As memories of the Ark shift towards the apocalyptic future, “old things” like the Ark continue to occupy central roles in the self-fashioning of biblical societies. This dissertation explores the ways and forms that the lost Ark lives on in biblical societies: its lives, its afterlives, and the broad relationships between cultural memories and material culture that underlie all aspects of religious life.

This dissertation focuses on the figure of Jewish exile since the rise of Zionism. My research proposes a unique configuration of German, Turkish, Israeli, and Palestinian contexts, one that sheds new light on the challenge of representing minority subjectivity during moments of collective displacement. I argue that displacement is not only an experience, but also a structure of representation. My study begins by examining the representation of Jewish belonging at the turn of the century, when the German-Ottoman imperial alliance provided a potential framework for the immigration of European Jews to Palestine. The aesthetic possibilities that ultimately crystallize in Israeli and Palestinian literature, I assert, are inseparable from the imaginary of Jewish displacement in fin de si�cle Germany and Turkey. Germany, Turkey, and Israel each occupy a space of intense critical focus in Comparative Literature. Beginning with Edward Said, scholars have called the discipline’s attention to a cohort of German-speaking Jewish academics who fled to Istanbul during the Nazi years. From this canonical moment in the emergence of Comparative Literature, Erich Auerbach’s composition of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, and his work on Weltliteratur (or “world literature”), have emerged as prominent models for the discipline’s self-conception. The achievements of German-Jewish intellectuals in Turkey would later reinforce notions of “exilic” critique as a practice of heroic opposition to nationalist chauvinism. These assessments could be enriched, however, by situating the very possibility of Auerbach in Istanbul within the political programs and cultural imaginaries that immediately preceded, and in fact enabled, the German-Jewish scholars’ remarkable refuge in Istanbul. My project begins the story of German-Jewish literature and aesthetics a generation earlier. I propose a comparative framework that juxtaposes the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl’s five visits to fin de si�cle Constantinople with the German-Jewish scholars, such as Erich Auerbach, who found refuge from the Nazis in Turkey a generation later. I assert that the very production of Mimesis is a vital part of the story of the representation of European Jewish exile – perhaps inseparable from the story of Zionism in the early 20th century. Through close readings of Herzl’s wide- ranging corpus of literature, I conclude that this exilic position – one who identifies with and yet (must) live beyond the settled location of the native – was an irreducible feature of Herzl’s Zionism. Mimesis, as the re-presentation (making present, again, elsewhere) of European reality and subjectivity, becomes an essential analytical tool for understanding the relationship between Jewish belonging and exile.My dissertation then turns to literary works written in the aftermath of the 1948 partition of Palestine and creation of Israel. I discuss the portrayal of Palestinian exile by two of the most canonical Hebrew authors from the period, the poet Nathan Alterman and the novelist S. Yizhar. My readings explore changes in the representation of exile at the moment when its simultaneous creation and negation comes to define two national communities. The dissertation’s final chapter presents an original, comparative analysis of poetry written by Dahlia Ravikovich and Mahmoud Darwish. Through recourse to what I term the visionary prophetic modes of Hebrew and Arabic literature, these authors re-open the literary significations of exile to pre-modern traditions of Jewish and Islamic exegesis, liturgy, and history. I assert that their poetics – attuned to the semiotic displacements between vision and text – unravel the political discourses of national belonging generated by the failed partition of Israel and Palestine. These alternative modalities of representation re-envision the nature of belonging in a post-colonial world. I contend that the study of Israeli and Palestinian literature cannot be extricated from broader inquiries into the representation of migration and flight across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

"Aryanization" is the Nazi term for the cheap purchase of Jewish firms during the Third Reich with the ultimate goal of eliminating Jews from the German economy. Eleven of the largest such companies in Germany are examined in this dissertation and a noticeable pattern becomes evident. In an atmosphere of anti-Semitism, conservative non-Nazi businessmen approached Germany's three largest banks to request that they withdraw existing loans from the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Although this study focuses on the large Hermann Tietz and Leonhard Tietz retailers, it presents a new paradigm of Aryanization through analyses of the patterns of acquisition of massive publishing houses, as well as an enormous private bank, brewery, and gun manufacturer. The financial institutions participated because they earned fees, appointed bank executives to the formerly Jewish firms' Supervisory Boards and became the house bank conducting all future transactions. Courts were unwilling to intervene in the coerced acquisitions, because they shared the same conservative mindset as the businessmen and financial institutions. By focusing on the Jewish enterprises, it appears that the largest enterprises were frequently purchased in 1933-1935, whereas the tiny "Mom-and-Pop-shops" usually went out-of-business in 1938. This insight has not been noticed by the traditional model, since it does not differentiate between large and small companies. The cheap purchase of Jewish-owned companies occurred throughout the 1933 through 1938 timeframe. Saul Friedländer keenly observed a radical break in its implementation during these six pre-war years, with the pre-1936 period being a time of "relative moderation." He discerned a "new phase on the internal German scene" in 1936 in its manner of actualization, which had profound consequences. The 1936 break in the style of execution occurred due to Germany's economic growth and return to full employment as well as Göring's appointment to the Four Year Plan to prepare the nation for war. With regard to the Jewish citizens, the resulting "internal radicalization" in 1936 necessitated that in the opinion of the Reich "their assets [be] impounded for the benefit of German rearmament." Furthermore, Schacht's dismissal in 1938 also contributed to the Government replacing private opportunists as the key player in Aryanization. There were two periods of Aryanization. The 1933-1935 period, discussed in this dissertation, was characterized by an ad-hoc private initiative perpetrated by non-Nazi businessmen. In contrast, the 1936-1938 period was an organized state activity leading to the exclusion of Jewish businessmen from the German economy.Many historians have successfully elucidated the later 1936 through 1938 period of Aryanization directed from Berlin for the benefit of the state or private parties. By observing that the largest of Jewish-owned companies were taken during the earlier 1933 through 1935 period, this dissertation would like to make a contribution to scholarship. The responsibility for the 1933-1935 Aryanizations is placed firmly on the private sector, rather than on either the Nazi political party or on the central government in Berlin as has been characterized for the 1936-1938 timeframe. Another comprehensive break in the Aryanization process was the later focus on tens of thousands of mid-sized and small businesses as contrasted with the earlier conglomerates. The later timeframe additionally also concentrated on houses, apartments, acreage and even synagogues. This coincides with Friedländer's far-reaching break between the two periods of Aryanization. Although the following quotation concerns the difference between the prices paid for large versus small firms, perhaps Friedländer could accept my interpretative inclusions, which coincide with my perspective: "As noted in chapter 1 , recent research indicates that the considerable scope of [later] Aryanization at the medium- and small-business level was not indicative of the [earlier] situation at the higher level of the economy." The interpretive adaptation of Friedländer illustrates that although this dissertation is indebted to him for an Aryanization paradigm, with a thoroughgoing differentiation before and after 1936, there are some significant contributions in this research. Another such example concerns the role of Conservatives in the process of expropriating Jewish companies. Friedländer viewed Conservatives, such as Schacht, as a protection for the continuation of Jewish ownership or at least that fair market value would be offered. However, research uncovered in this dissertation indicated that in the earlier 1933-1935 period, Conservative businessmen without any capital were extended loans by Conservative bankers to coerce a sale in which Conservative judges were unwilling to ensure that justice was achieved. For the most part, one does not find documentation in the archives concerning the earlier 1933-1935 intervention by Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, or Rudolf Hess in the seizure of large Jewish-owned department stores, publishing houses, banks, and breweries. Instead, the key participants in the acquisition of such non-Gentile firms are non-NSDAP Party members, such as Joachim Tiburtius, Georg Karg, Max Winkler, Walther Frisch and Herbert Hoffmann. In Chapter III Section B4, this Dissertation has discovered and extrapolated on the venomous feature articles and lampoons beginning in December 1927 by Propaganda Minister Goebbels. However, my research process actually began by means of a different approach. In 2010, Business Historian Jeff Fear recommended that I begin my Aryanization research by reading microfilm on Hermann Göring's Four Year Plan. Two significant differences immediately emerged between my 1933-1935 bottom-up approach in the investigation of seizing Jewish firms and a later top-down procedure. First, I discovered that in building his financial colossus, Göring had not depended upon acquiring firms from the consumer sector as the private Aryanizers did. Göring's NSDAP-inspired technique involved acquiring control over firms in the Autobahn construction, car manufacturing and synthetic fuel and fiber replacement industries. Second, following Friedländer's observation, Göring's Four Year Plan commenced in 1936, which was after the timeframe from 1933 to 1935 in which the major Jewish companies had been "purchased." Private "purchases" of Jewish-owned businesses for personal benefit occurred years before Göring's acquisition of war-related industries for the state's benefit. The Dissertation does not seek to answer the question of whether comparatively smaller private sector Aryanizations influenced the later NSDAP's public infrastructure acquisitions. In addition, neither Friedländer nor I attempt to address the quantitative issues of what percentage of rearmament funding originated with Hjalmar Schacht's Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft promissory notes (also known as Mefo bills) as opposed to the requisition of Jewish assets. The hesitancy to be more quantitatively precise in both Aryanization and the funding of German rearmament is indirectly acknowledged by Friedländer's admission: "It is difficult to assess what was paid... to the tens of thousands of Jewish owners..." This dissertation merely seeks to contribute to the understanding of early Aryanization. Neither the Aryanization by the state or by private individuals in the later 1936-1938 period are addressed. Numerous other economic issues remain for future research, including other private to public transitions such as the private pre-1933 building of the Autobahn to the later Organisation Todt construction of the roads. One of the three largest financial organizations was the Dresdner Bank. Its executive Karl Rasche was made a scapegoat by his firm in the subsequent war-crimes trials at Nuremberg. In contrast, little is known about other Dresdner Bank executives, not to mention the numerous local bank managers who organized lists of local businessmen seeking a quick profit. Similarly, little is known about German businessmen, who were not Nazi Party members, but who nevertheless took advantage of the political circumstances to enrich themselves. Germans viewed post-war de-Nazification proceedings as "victor justice," and thus these post-war processes are replete with whitewashed assessments of how German businessmen acquired Jewish firms. Since the original Jewish proprietors were usually unaware of the confidential negotiations between the three banks and the new Gentile owners, the restitution trials are often unhelpful to the historian. Nevertheless the common perspective of a "perpetrator" as one carrying a weapon, is expanded to include "ordinary" non-Nazi businessmen who enriched themselves at Jewish expense.

The presented essays are divided into three groups. The first article concerns the book produced by Jews in Central and Eastern Europe against the background of the world production of Hebrew books. The second, the printing of the New Testament in Yiddish (Hebrew fonts) in the first half of the 16th century in Krakow. This also includes two articles on the Talmud. The first article illustrates the intellectual effort of Polish Jews who faced the challenge of printing Talmudic tractates with valuable documentary annexes. The second presents the difficulties that the Jewish printers had to face when persecuted by the Polish censorship authorities. The last group opens with an article describing one of the most valuable European collections of Judaica - old prints from the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, from the former Prussian State Library in Berlin. The second presents a part of the Saraval’s collection - priceless Hebrew incunabula that were transferred from Prague to Wrocław. The third concerns the 14th century Wolff Haggadah with a "Polish" episode in the background. Together, all the articles form a selective introduction to the little-known world of the Hebrew book.