The Universal Jew

by Dekel, Mikhal

• ISBN13: 9780810127173
• ISBN10: 0810127172
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-01-06
• Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr

Summary

More than half a century before the foundation of the State of Israel and prior to the inauguration of the Zionist political movement, a new conception of Jewish nationhood and the Jewish national subject emerged in the imaginative work of European writers. In The Universal Jew, Mikhal Dekel revisits writings from the formative ôZionist moment,ö exposing the ways in which this imaginative work helped to create the conditions and shape the terms by which minority Jewish communities began to imagine the possibility of a Jewish nation. Combining close readings with historical insights, original source material, and literary and political theory, Dekel situates the birth of Jewish national subjectivity in the context of contemporary preoccupations and anxieties regarding European modernity, aesthetics, gender, and sexuality. Unique both in content and in scope, The Universal Jew is a bold and vital work with implications for theories of nationalism and a wide range of disciplines, from literary to cultural studies, even as it challenges long-standing assumptions in Jewish studies. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Man-Jew-Woman	p. 3
Jewish Men, Universal Women: Novel, Nation, and Creation in Daniel Deronda
Jews, Modernity, and the End of the European Bildungsroman	p. 39
On Woman and Nation in the Late Nineteenth Century	p. 63
ôWho Taught This Foreign Woman About the Ways and Lives of the Jews?ö: George Eliot and the Hebrew Renaissance	p. 79
Fin-de-siècle Imagination of a Liberal Public Sphere in Palestine
Herri's Old New Land	p. 95
The Tragedy of Zionism
Nationhood and the Birth of Jewish Tragedy at the Fin dc Siècle: A Quick Overview	p. 133
Kishinev and the Making of a Jewish Tragedy	p. 139
ôNietzsche: I Want to Become Oneö	p. 169
Masculinity, Tragedy, and the Nation-State	p. 205
An Autobiographical Postlude: Woman, Tragedy, and the Making of the Universal Jew	p. 225
Notes	p. 237
Selected Bibliography	p. 247
Index	p. 263
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