Anglophone Jewish literature is not traditionally numbered among the new literatures in English. Rather, Jewish literary production in English has conventionally been classified as ‘hyphenated’ and has therefore not yet been subjected as such to the scrutiny of scholars of literary or cultural history. The collection of essays addresses this lack and initiates the scholarly exploration of transnational and transcultural Anglophone Jewish literature as one of the New English Literatures. Without attempting to impose what would seem to be a misguided conceptual unity on the many-facetted field of Anglophone Jewish literature, the book is based on a plurality of theoretical frameworks. Alert to the productive friction between these discourses, which it aims to elicit, it confronts Jewish literary studies with postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and other contemporary theoretical frameworks. Featuring contributions from among the best-known scholars in the fields of British and American Jewish literature, including Bryan Cheyette and Emily Miller Budick, this collection transcends borders of both nations and academic disciplines and takes into account cultural and historical affinities and differences of the Anglophone diaspora which have contributed to the formation and development of the English-language segment of Jewish literature.

Located on the seam of Diaspora and Israeli Literature, Anglophone Israeli Literature comprises a loose community of 100-500 authors and has co-existed with the Hebrew writing tradition in Israel since the 1970s. Consisting mainly of immigrants from Anglophone countries, Anglophone Israeli Literature is characterized by a search for personal and poetic identity in a highly transcultural environment, challenging settled identities and opting instead for flexibility, flux and inclusion. The present volume considers Anglophone Israeli Literature as a phenomenon in its critical, social and historical aspects on the one hand and explores the specific mechanisms of constructing and representing poetic identity on the other hand. Focusing on the works by and interviews with some of the core representatives of Anglophone Israeli Literature – Shirley Kaufman, Rachel Tzvia Back, Karen Alkalay-Gut, Lami, Richard Sherwin, Jerome Mandel, Riva Rubin and Rochelle Mass – the book analyzes three pivotal elements of identity: language, geography and place, and political and emotional self-positioning towards the Other.

English has become the major language of contemporary Jewish literature. This book shows the transnational character of that literature and how traditional viewpoints need to be reassessed.

Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay. Call It English tells a story of preoccupation with pronunciation, diction, translation, the figurality of Hebrew letters, and the linguistic dimension of home and exile in a culture constituted of sacred, secular, familial, and ancestral languages. Through readings of works by Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, Delmore Schwartz, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and other writers, it demonstrates how inventive literary strategies are sites of loss and gain, evasion and invention. The first part of the book examines immigrant writing that enacts the drama of acquiring and relinquishing language in an America marked by language debates, local color writing, and nativism. The second part addresses multilingual writing by native-born authors in response to Jewish America's postwar social transformation and to the Holocaust. A profound and eloquently written exploration of bilingual aesthetics and cross-cultural translation, Call It English resounds also with pertinence to other minority and ethnic literatures in the United States.

Provides critical overviews of the main writers and key themes of Anglophone Jewish fictionThis collection of essays represents a new departure for, and a potentially (re)defining moment in, literary Jewish Studies. It is the first volume to bring together essays covering a wide range of American, British, South African, Canadian and Australian Jewish fiction. Moreover, it complicates all these terms, emphasising the porousness between different national traditions and moving beyond traditional definitions of Jewishness. For the sake of structural clarity, the volume is divided into three parts American Jewish Fiction British Jewish Fiction and International and Transnational Anglophone Jewish Fiction but many of the essays cross over these boundaries and speak to each other implicitly, as well as, on occasion, explicitly. Extending and redefining the canon of modern Jewish fiction, the volume juxtaposes major authors with more marginal figures, revising and recuperating individual reputations, rediscovering forgotten and discovering new work, and in the process remapping the whole terrain. This volume opens windows onto vistas that previously had been obscured and opens doors for the next generation of studies that could not proceed without a wide-ranging, visionary empiricism grounding their work. The Edinburgh Companion is a paradigm-changing event, and nothing in Jewish literary studies that follows can fail to pay close attention to it. Key Features:Highlights the rich diversity of the field and identifies its key themes, including immigration, the Diaspora, the Holocaust, Judaism, assimilation, antisemitism and ZionismAnalyses the main trends in Anglophone Jewish fiction and situates them in historical contextDiscusses the place of Anglophone Jewish fiction in relation to critical debates concerning transatlanticism and transnationalism; ethnicity and identity politics; postcolonial studies, feminist studies and Jewish Studies. With a preface by Mark Shechner, the volume contains 28 essays by contributors including Vicki Aarons (Trinity University, Texas), Debra Shostak (Wooster College, Ohio), Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia), Efraim Sicher (Ben-Gurion University, Phyllis Lassner (Northwestern University), Sue Vice (University of Sheffield), Lori Harrison-Kahan (Boston College), Ruth Gilbert (University of Winchester), Beate Neumeier (University of Cologne) andSandra Singer (University of Guelph).David Brauner is Professor of Contemporary Literature at The University of Reading.Axel Sta er is Reader in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

What defines the "Jewish" writer, and how different is the American Jewish writer from an Israeli writer? This book presents edited selections from a modern writers' conference and is a telling record of Jewish literature from the Enlightenment to the present, the Hebrew renaissance in Israel, and contemporary writing in the Diaspora.

Anglophone Israeli Literature comprises a loose community of more than 500 authors and it has co-existed with the Hebrew writing tradition in Israel since the 1970s. Consisting mainly of immigrants from Anglophone countries, Anglophone Israeli Literature is characterized by a search for personal and poetic identity in a highly transcultural environment, challenging settled identities and opting instead for flexibility, flux and inclusion. The present volume considers Anglophone Israeli Literature a a phenomenon in its critical, social and historical aspects on the one hand and explores the specific mechanisms of constructing and representing poetic identity on the other hand. The book analyzes three pivotal elements of identity: language, geography and place, and political and emotional self-positioning towards the Other.