Description: This volume assesses the role of Jews, as both agents and figures, in the development of critical and literary theory in the twentieth century and beyond. Its topics range from Biblical criticism to the relationship between Derrida and Levinas, from Mizrachi Jews in Israel to the Zionisms of Buber and Scholem.
Brief description: Hannan Hever is the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Judaic Studies and a professor of comparative literature at Yale University. He earned his PhD at the Hebrew University in 1984. In English he published Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon, Nation Building and Minority Discourse (New York University Press, 2002) Nativism, Zionism, and Beyond: Three Essays on Nativist Hebrew Poetry (Syracuse University, 2014); and Suddenly the Sight of War: Violence and Nationalism in the Hebrew Poetry of the 1940s (Stanford University Press, 2017).
Review Quotes: "A glittering collection of essays that asks how the critical gist of the Frankfurt School tradition as well as the work of other Jewish intellectuals such as Scholem, Derrida, Buber, and Auerbach is inflected by 'the Jew.' Beyond pointing to the biographies of many who have taken up critical theory, the volume shows how images and assumptions about the Jew and Jewishness, Ashkenazi vs. Sephardic Jewry, Israeli vs. diasporic Jewry, hover in the background of a range of texts and thinkers. A powerful collection that opens new vistas in our approach to social, cultural, and literary critical theories."---Seyla Benhabib, Yale University