1st Edition
Jewish Identities in Contemporary Europe
Providing an assessment of Jewish identity, this volume presents critical engagements with a number of Jewish writers and filmmakers from a variety of European countries, including Austria, France, Germany, Poland, and the UK. The novels and films discussed explore the meaning of being Jewish in Europe today, and investigate the extent to which this experience is shaped by factors that lie outside the national context, notably by the relationship to Israel. As the recent attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and the targeting of a Jewish supermarket in Paris, demonstrate, these questions are more pressing than ever, and will challenge Jews, as well as Jewish writers and intellectuals, as they explore the answers.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Jewish Culture and History.
Foreword Andrea Reiter and Lucille Cairns
Introduction Lucille Cairns and Andrea Reiter
1. Negotiating Jewish identity in an asemitic age Diana Pinto
2. Standing apart/being a part: Cixous’s fictional Jewish identities Maxime Decout
3. Frenchness, Jewishness, and ‘integration’ in Karin Albou’s La Petite Jérusalem Nathalie Ségeral
4. ‘Becoming English’: assimilation and its discontents in contemporary British-Jewish literature Sue Vice
5. Antisemitism and Israel in British Jewish fiction: perspectives on Clive Sinclair’s Blood Libels (1985) and Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question (2010) Axel Stähler
6. Lost in Third Space? Narrating German-Jewish identity in Maxim Biller’s autobiography Der gebrauchte Jude (2009) Bettina A. Codrai
7. The persistence of nostalgia? When Poles miss their Jews and Israelis yearn for Europe Diana I. Popescu
8. Is there an ‘Israeli Diaspora’? Jewish Israelis negotiating national identity between Zionist ideology and diasporic reality Yuval Moshkovitz
9. Growing up Jewish in Austria: a personal testimony Ruth Beckermann
Biography
Andrea Reiter is Professor of German at the University of Southampton, UK. She is the author of Contemporary Jewish Writing: Austria after Waldheim (2013). Her research focuses on contemporary German and Austrian Jewish writers and intellectuals.
Lucille Cairns is Professor of French at Durham University, UK. Her work focuses on French women’s writing and filmmaking, male and female homosexuality in French literature and film, and Franco-Jewish literature. She is the author of Sapphism on Screen: Lesbian Desire in French and Francophone Cinema (2006), Post-War Jewish Women's Writing in French (2011), and Francophone Jewish Writers: Imagining Israel (2015).
