Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History articles

Recent articles from Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History

Resisting the Father's Narrative: A Study of Lea Aini's Vered Ha-Levanon
January 1, 2012... INTRODUCTION Lea Aini's autobiographical novel Vered ha-Levanon (Rose of Lebanon), (1) is a groundbreaking study of a range of national, social, and personal topics. Aini deconstructs categories that constitute the foundation of cultural and social identity in Israel. Most important of these...

On Some Motifs in Moyshe-Leyb Halpern: A Benjaminian Meditation on Yiddish Modernism
January 1, 2012... Iz gefloygn di goldene pave Iber ale yamen. (The golden peacock flew over all the seas.) --Yiddish folk song Walter Benjamin was well versed in a great many things, but, as far as the historical record informs us, he never read a single page of modernist Yiddish poetry. This...

Yosef Hayyim Brenner's Mikan Umikan: The Telling of Trauma
January 1, 2012... "FROM HERE AND THERE": REFLECTIONS ON TEXTUAL INTEGRATION Yosef Hayyim Brenner's Mikan umikan is one of his three major works set in early twentieth-century Palestine. (1) Brenner wrote it while living in Ein-Ganim, a small agricultural settlement established by a group of ideological...

Sisyphus in Tel Aviv: AIDS in Yotam Reuveny's Night Diary
January 1, 2012... INTRODUCTION In the 1980s, when homosexuality was still illegal in Israel, the Israeli mass media dealt extensively with the HIV/AIDS pandemic. (1) As in many other countries, the "dangerous plague" was identified with homosexuals and was often described as a "death sentence" and as...

An Ethical Zionist: Jesus in A.A. Kabak's Bemish'ol Hatsar
January 1, 2012... In the mid-1930s, the Hebrew writer A. A. Kabak suffered a debilitating stroke and, while recuperating, experienced a religious epiphany. Several years later, Kabak described the moment of this epiphany, which occurred as he lay in bed looking out the window at the cypress trees beyond: A...