... toward an alternate literary history, a counterdiscourse to the dialectical conservation of a Jewish identity anchored in the past. The chapter proposes a “Zionist” scholarly desire for self-evidence as a way of marking the pernicious historicist tendency to think about Jewishness in statist terms...

...This chapter presents a critical analysis of the New York intellectuals within the context of Jewish identity, and particularly the legibility and affectivity of Jewish identity, in order to disengage the political problematic of literary criticism from biologistic nationalism. It examines how...

...This chapter focuses on the nationalist identitarianism underwriting the current academic isolation of the historicist mainstream of Jewish American literary practice. It first considers the Jewish problem as the problem of “Jewishness” before turning to a discussion of the Jewish identity...

... of interest in talking about Jewish identity on the part of other fields such as American studies and comparative ethnicity studies as one of the axes of Jewish American literary study's professional alienation. It has also discussed sweeping claims about what Jewish American literary study can and should do...

...Historians’ definitions of ancient Jewish identity, whether as a race, a people, a nation, an ethnic group, or a religious community, have been influenced by modern ideologies, which do not always take the realities of antiquity fully into account. Despite ample evidence of Jewish diversity...

.... Bringing perennially controversial questions of Jewish identity, continuity, and survival to the forefront of the discussion, the book addresses topics of great resonance in a diverse America....

... that the exiles did not become “Sephardic Jews” overnight. Only in the second and third generation did these disparate groups coalesce and adopt a “Sephardic Jewish” identity. The book presents a new and fascinating portrait of Jewish society in transition from the medieval to the early modern period, a portrait...

...This chapter discusses the Book of Esther which recounts how Esther hid her Jewish identity to become the wife of the Persian king Ahasuerus. She disguises herself by performing as a non-Jewish Persian woman, to win the king's favor and ultimately to save her people from an edict of destruction...

... generally, along with multiple and often discontinuous histories and agents accounting for the field's ghettoization. The book employs a literary critical concept of Jewishness to reveal the history, meaning, and power of Jewish identity and articulates a concept of particularity for the study of identity...

... and argues that the book highlights a responsible way to retain Jewish identity as a critical term. Through the mediation of the critical trope of “trauma,” Foer's book allows literary criticism to confront the agency of its own historicist desire to read texts for narratives of what it already wants...

...This concluding chapter reflects on the motivations of Jewish women engaged in early feminist activism, considering the importance of fluid, but ever-present, Jewish identity to every kind of social movement in which they became involved. Over a period of several decades and several generations...

... of first-hand observation in modern day Israel, the book provides an on-the-ground look at this hotly debated and widely emulated use of tourism to forge transnational ties. We ride the bus, attend speeches with the Prime Minister, hang out in the hotel bar, and get a fresh feel for young American Jewish...