Description:
Examines the embedding of Jewish history and culture in depictions of English racial and national identity in nineteenth-century novels.
Brief description: Heidi Kaufman is Assistant Professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of Delaware.
Review Quotes:
"Heidi Kaufman has written a useful and consistently interesting book. She examines many of the complex ways that 'Jewish discourse' is imbricated in nineteenth-century British fiction and culture. In doing so, she critiques Edward Said's Orientalism for its overly binaristic approach to Western depictions of the East. . . . In her conclusion, Kaufman notes that antisemitism was at least correct in accusing Jews and Judaism of influencing British culture and politics. The novelists she examines give 'Jewish discourse, ' as she calls it, a major role in their understandings of Christianity and of contemporary English identities. She ably demonstrates that 'Jewish discourse' both mediates and problematizes the many religious and racial categories through which Victorian writers and intellectuals made sense of themselves and their world."
--Patrick Brantlinger Shofar