Classics Transformed in Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian Receptions

by Kenaan, Vered Lev; Rosenmeyer, Patricia A.

• ISBN13: 9780198878964
• ISBN10: 0198878966
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2025-06-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Classics Transformed in Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian Receptions invites the reader to view classical antiquity through the writings of poets, translators, and scholars emerging from modern Jewish diasporas, Mandatory Palestine, and the State of Israel who engaged with Greek and Roman literary precedents. Whereas these voices have up to now been mostly studied independently of one another as separate fields of research, this volume brings some of these distinct voices, who nevertheless share a connection to Greco-Roman antiquity, into conversation with one another. Taking its cue from the crisis of humanism following the Holocaust, the chapters take as their themes the destruction of home, displacement, and different forms of wandering and homecomings, drawing connections to acts of translation and transmission of the classics to form a picture of cultural and textual states of alterity. The volume shows that Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian responses to the classics are entangled and even complementary despite their different trajectories. The chapters included here focus particularly on critical moments in Jewish and Palestinian existence when the reception of classical humanism is closely linked to issues of survival. On offer here is a historically grounded investigation into the ways Jews, Israelis, and Palestinians have used classical antiquity and classical philology to validate their identity in a rapidly changing society.

Author Biography

Vered Lev Kenaan, University of Haifa,Patricia A. Rosenmeyer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Vered Lev Kenaan is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. Her work focuses on the connections between classical studies, comparative literature, reception studies, and psychoanalysis. Among her numerous publications, she is the author of The Ancient Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and the Ancient Text (OUP, 2019), and Pandora's Senses: The Feminine Character of the Ancient Text (Wisconsin University Press 2008).

Patricia A. Rosenmeyer is Paddison Distinguished Professor of Classics and Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She taught previously at Michigan, Yale, and Wisconsin. Her books include The Poetics of Imitation: Anacreon and the Anacreontic Tradition (Cambridge, 1992), Ancient Epistolary Fictions (Cambridge, 2001), Ancient Greek Literary Letters (Routledge, 2006), Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature ( Brill, 2013;), and The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus (OUP, 2018).

Table of Contents

Classical Transformations, Vered Lev Kenaan and Patricia A. RosenmeyerPart I. Classical Scholarship in Times of Crisis1. After Lights Out: Studying Classics in a Second World War Internment Camp, Patricia A. Rosenmeyer2. Shlomo Dykman's Aeneid: A Journey from Holocaust to Revival, Vered Lev Kenaan3. Resisting Reception: The Treachery of the Self, Simon GoldhillPart II. Philosophical Wanderings4. The Genesis of Rachel Bespaloff 's De l'Iliade, James I. Porter5. The Odyssey, Otherwise, Galili Shahar6. Cholent and the 'False Divinity' of Greece: Hannah Arendt's Hellenism, Miriam LeonardPart III. Translation and Survival7. Yiddish Translations of Classical Texts: Plato in the Mamalushn and the Metropolis, Donna Shalev8. Ay de mi Alhama: Impossible Chronologies of Love, Loss, and Learning in Freud and Moshe Ha-Elion, Richard H. Armstrong9. Translation in Exile: Ma?mud al-Ghul's Aeneid, Vered Lev Kenaan and Ahlam NubaniPart IV. Classics and the Secularization of Modern Hebrew10. The Classical Turn in Hebrew Literature in the Early Twentieth Century: The Role of the Literary Editor, Yotam Cohen11. The Reception of Classical Literature in Hebrew: A Very Brief Survey, Aminadav Dykman12. Knowledge, Power, and Control in Modern Jewish Folktales of Alexander the Great, Tsafi Sebba-ElranPart V. Mediterranean Classics: Receptions by Israeli and Palestinian Poets13. From Enemy to Ruins: Roman Empire and Decadence in the Poetry of Dan Pagis and Haim Gouri, Giacomo Loi14. Homeric Memory in Israeli and Palestinian Poetry: Meir Wieseltier and Mahmoud Darwish, Kawthar Aslah and Haim Dorchin15. 'Because of What Is Frozen': Back to the Classics in the Poetry of Israel Pincas and Walid Khazendar, Daniel Behar