Books by Our Literature Faculty

The book compares and contrasts rabbinic interpretation of Jewish texts with contemporary literary theory, focusing on the differences between Jewish and Christian exegesis.

A collection of essays by contemporary Jewish women Torah scholars on Bible, Talmud, Midrash and Chassidism. Along with bringing their own expertise and novel insights, the scholars reflect on all those who personally inspired them, for example, Rav Joseph Dov Solevechik, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, and Nechama Lebovitz.

This book reflects on the reactions of Torah leaders to the pressing issues facing Jewish education today. It is both adroit and informative and touches both educators and parents alike.

William Kolbrener claims that Milton resists paradigms of modernity drawn from the Enlightenment. His writing instead mediates between apparently contradictory positions.

A collection of essays that examine Astell's political, theological, philosophical, educational, and poetic writings, analyzing her role not only in developing early modern feminism but as a major figure of the period.

A collection of essays that discuss American literature in relation to ethnicity, religion, politics, race, gender, ideology, history, and ethics, placing it in the context ofboth Jewish and American writing.

Each issue of Maggid: A Journal of Jewish Literature, presents new Jewish writing from around the world, in all genres, by established authors as well as exciting new voices who are forging the future of Jewish letters.
Volume I: Jewish American Writing: 350 New Years Later (1505)
Volume II Jewish Lives: Memoirs and More (1506)
Volume III Jewish Bodies: The Flesh Made Words (1507)

A new edition of Hawthorn's classic American novels. It combines the text of the first editions with a historical and critical introduction, a detailed chronology of the author's life, a bibliography of critical works, and a note on the texts.

A multifacted introduction to Nobel Prize-winner Saul Bellow's most widely-read work of fiction, Seize the Day, a prime example of the Jewish novel of the 1950s. The essays in this volume examine the thematic, stylistic, and critical elements of Bellow's masterpiece and offer different approaches to how the novel may be thought of as "ethnic."

Reading the Underthought: Jewish Hermeneutics and the Christian Poetry of Hopkins and Eliot By Kinereth Meyer and Rachel Salmon Deshen
Reading the Underthought explores the question of how readers from one tradition can approach the poetry of another. Based on the assumption that readers from diverse cultural backgrounds may have something positive and generative to bring to an alien text, this book examines the contribution that a reader schooled in Jewish hermeneutic practices may offer to the interpretation and appreciation of mainstream Christian religious poetry.

a winner of the Award for the Best Journal in the Hummanities and Social Sciences from the Association of American Publishers.

The central argument of this treatise is that for each generation there exist inherited ideas and contemporary concerns to which each creative artist and writer responds. This volume relates English writers and artists of the period to developments in architecture, painting and sculpture.

Even when there is no direct contact, artists and writers develop many comparable techniques for coping with problems specific to their time. In Modernist Patterns, Murray Roston explores the relationships between modernist artists and writers and their responses to the immediate challenges of their time, to the implications of Freudian psychology, molecular theory, relativist theory, and the general weakening of religious faith.

The scientific achievements of the modern world failed to impress the leading writers of this century, leaving them instead profoundly disturbed by a sense of lost values and of the insignificance of the individual in a universe seemingly indifferent to human concerns.

literary interpretation is discussed in terms of current cognitive theories of understanding.

Iconotropism: Turning Toward Pictures, edited by Ellen Spolsky, the polemical introduction and the essays in this collection are meant to recognize our human embodied need for pictures, exemplifying the ways in which that need is met.

A study of early modern skepticism in art and literature from a culture, historical, and cognitive point of view.

a cognitive study of the Reformation struggle between word and image arguing that Shakespeare contributed to the restoration of cultural sanity by adapting the Italian grotesque style to English needs.

Creative Writing

A luminous new novel by the author of Small Worlds, the series that relates the ambitious loves and unbounded dreams of the Polish Jewish villagers of Krimsk, now thriving in America. In the summer of 1920 in St. Louis, Missouri, Matti Sternweiss, once the ungainly wonder child of Krimsk, now catcher for the St. Louis Browns, schemes to fix Saturday's game against the Detroit Tigers.

The stories in this collection are deeply felt explorations in to the Jewish mind and world--stories in the tradition of Isacc Bashevis Singer. At the same time, illuminated by compassion and humor, they transcend cultural boundaries and provide fascinating studies in the universal human experience.

an expanded collection of Wallach's work, including her more difficult experimental meditations on language. Though Wallach died of breast cancer at the age of 41 in 1985, her groundbreaking poetry continues to inspire writers and influence the Israeli literary landscape. Her work in English translation has become an important part of language and women's studies programs in the United States. (Robert Creeley)

Robert Creeley commented on Unopened Letters, by Linda Zisquit, saying, "The ease and directness of these poems make an unexpected testament of singularly complex feeling. Linda Zisquit's work is uniquely present, yet timeless. Its clarity has no equal."

The first collection of poems by this brilliant and controversial Hebrew poet to appear in English. In the volume are her most well-known and accessibly poems. Zisquit received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant for the collection in 1997. (Robert Creeley)"