At the end of my last blog post, I suggested the possibility of Jewish Camp. But is that possible? Aren’t the two mutually exclusive? This is what Susan Sontag suggests when she argues that Jews and Homosexuals are the creators of two modern sensibilities that are at odds with each other: a moral and an […]
German film theorists and thinkers had widely divergent reactions to comedy and film. Theodor Adorno had a problem with all comic films since he saw laughter as sadistic and reactionary. To be sure, he saw it as a negation of thinking. Walter Benjamin, in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical […]
Very few scholars have addressed the appropriation of the schlemiel by Zionist thinkers and critics. Daniel Boyarin has suggested the contrast between the less masculine, Medieval model for the Jew (which, to be sure, is a humble simpleton who bears many of the more feminine qualities that are associated with the schlemiel) and the more […]
Dan Miron is one of the greatest living critics of Yiddish and Jewish-American literature today. His books on these bodies of literature have won him critical claim. What interests me most is how Miron would approach a schlemiel like Motl (the main character of Sholem Aleichem’s Motl the Cantor’s Son: Writings of an Orphan Boy. […]
Although I am in the midst of a few different reading projects, I recently decided to take a look at James Joyces’ Ulysses. I haven’t read the book for a while and it’s been on my mind. To be sure, his representation of Leopold Bloom is of great interest to me as it is the […]
One of the things I have never discussed on this blog is the topic of the “living schlemiel.” To be sure, the most well-known books on the schlemiel – Ruth Wisse’s The Schlemiel as Modern Hero and Sanford Pinsker’s The Schlemiel as Metaphor – do not address this topic. Their concern is the schlemiel in […]
Abish is, for me – and several others like John Updike, Harold Bloom, et al, – one of the greatest fiction writers in America in the 20th century…that (not) many people knew about. He is a writer for writers, for those of us who love language. In a truly Derridian sense, Abish was a master […]
In 1946, in the wake of the Holocaust, Jean-Paul Sartre published Reflexions sur la Quesion Juive. The collection of essays was renamed, translated as Anti-Semite and Jew (my edition is from 1965, Schocken Books). Sartre’s book was reprinted over twelve times, and in many languages. The book presents a reading of anti-Semitism and the anti-Semitic […]
I arrived in Budapest last Thursday and on Friday I started my Graduate Seminar on “The Schlemiel in European Literature and Culture” at the Ashkenazium Program (which includes several notable Jewish Studies, Philosophy, and Literature scholars on its faculty such as Elliot Wolfson, Paul Franks, Shaul Magid, Peter Trawny, Susan Handelman, etc.) To give an […]
What is “the witz”? Freud and his friend (and subject) Theodor Reik wrote books on wit(z). For Freud, one can learn about how the unconscious and dreams work (Freud cited many Jewish jokes in his book on this subject) through humor; while Theodor Reik saw the witz as the key to understanding not just masochism, […]
Schlemiel Theory 