ENG 253 - Modern Jewish Writers

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR (students beginning prior to Fall 2024): Meets general academic requirement HU.
A study of the narrative, drama, poetry, memoirs and essays produced over the past two centuries by writers who identified with or were identified by their Jewish backgrounds, both secular and religious, and beginning in the nineteenth century, produced work written in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and other European languages. Foci will include literary enactments of conflicts between heritage and “assimilation”; literary engagement with such ideological developments as Zionism and Socialism; cultural practices associated with Diaspora and cosmopolitanism; the emergence of a distinctive urban Jewish sensibility in the mid-twentieth century; ethnic voicing and ideological conflict; immigrant and immigrant-offspring writers’ contribution to the paradigms subsequently employed in the development of other ethnic literatures. Writers studied are likely to include Franz Kafka, Heinrich Heine, Emma Lazarus, Sholem Aleichem, Philip Roth, Henry Roth, Joseph Roth, Grace Paley, Ayelet Tsabari, Paul Celan, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Abraham Yehoshua, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Primo Levi, Muriel Rukeyser, S.Y. Agnon, Aharon Appelfeld, Bernard Malamud, Allen Ginsberg, Mordecal Richler, Stefan Zweig, Clifford Odets, Mike Gold, Abraham Cahan, Chaim Grade, etc. Satisfies departmental Social Justice and Poetry or Prose requirements.