Certain aspects of Vodoun, Benin’s primary indigenous religious tradition, have been perceived by some of that nation’s Christian believers as a menacing occult reality. Many Christians report states of acute psychological distress due to fears of the forces of Vodoun. This study analyzes the strategies employed by applied psychotherapeutic science professionals to diagnose and treat such cases, with an eye toward presenting a framework for the possible amelioration of clinical outcomes in comparable instances elsewhere.

"Jews and Muslims in South Asia: reflections on difference, religion, and race." Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

The aims of this study are to document a relevant array of perspectives on the use of genetic testing for the purposes of approving immigration to state of Israel, and to consider the potential implications of such testing for the larger Jewish world. Further, this work analyzes the views of a number of prominent national figures-in the rabbinical, governmental, educational, and private sectors in Israel-on this subject. Finally, it provides a critical assessment of the varying contentious scenarios that may manifest themselves with regard to the claims of contested Jewish communities from the Global South whose genetic "evidence" is not as readily accessible as is that of Jews hailing from established centers of Jewish life.

This article presents selections from ongoing qualitative research dealing with the influence of the Internet on the diffusion and promulgation of different iterations of Judaism (not all of them normative) among individuals and communities, mostly from the Beti-Fang demographic, in Cameroon and Gabon. It assesses the influence of specific Internet-derived content on the personal and communal lives of the participants by way of integrative and qualitative discourse analysis methods. Throughout this study the aim is to enumerate the ways in which globalized media technology has been instrumental in propagating a specifically Jewish mode of ethno-religious identity.

Ranen Omer-Sherman’s writing on Israeli society has always had something unique about it: it is erudite, but not lofty; critical, but not detached; it highlights important themes without perpetuating clichés. Indeed, the careful and sometimes overtly painful manner in which Omer-Sherman engages his subjects of inquiry often recalls the interaction that occurs in relationship counseling: pathos is balanced by honesty, and even love. His latest book, Imagining the Kibbutz, follows this same pattern of therapeutic engagement, tracing how the kibbutz, “like any other human institution,” has “evolved in some ways and devolved in others” (7). Omer-Sherman, an Israeli-American and former kibbutznik whose insider-outsider experiences inform the narrative trajectory of the book, acknowledges that he felt compelled to compose it “part out of a sense of dismay and even a degree of anger at how rapidly the kibbutz’s extraordinary achievements are fading into mythic irrelevance” (ibid.).The book is structured chronologically, but it contains asynchronous meta-level analyses that accompany and substantially enrich each section. For instance, chapter 1 examines the works of writers such as David Maletz, Shlomo Reichenstein, Moshe Shamir, and S. Yizhar—early kibbutz authors whom Omer-Sherman refers to as “writers who inaugurated some of the first antiheroes in the literature of the Yishuv and the early years of the Israeli state” (15)—alongside later selections of thought-provoking contemporary memoir and literary or sociohistorial criticism that serve to add nuance and context to those early writers’ depictions of the kibbutz. It also incorporates analyses of writers rarely discussed in the same vein, such as the seminal Arthur Koestler, who apparently only lived for ten days in a kibbutz (Heftziba), but for whom the kibbutz encapsulated all that was meaningful in the early Zionist ethos. Omer-Sherman presents a nuanced profile of Koestler’s novel Thieves in the Night (which has long been eclipsed by that author’s magnum opus, Darkness at Noon), comparing and contrasting the book’s “morally troubling” support for terrorism as a means of expelling the British from Mandate Palestine with other, similar works on the same theme, such as Leon Uris’s ever more popular Exodus. Correctly affirming that the “Zionist socialist revolution” is unfailingly intertwined with kibbutz history, Omer-Sherman highlights in chapter 1 how “reading the literature of the kibbutz can bring us profound insights into the ways in which ideology responded to historical contingency” (24) in this pre-state phase of the kibbutz’s existence.In chapter 2, Omer-Sherman returns to the deliciously subversive authors and themes that he has treated at length elsewhere (notably, in his Israel and Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006]), such as those who minimize or even lampoon “the heroic stature of the Sabra” (69), turn revered biblical archetypes on their heads, or highlight ideological hypocrisies with “disturbing moral force” (70). Omer-Sherman provides fresh insights into canonical works by “Generation of the State” authors such as Amos Oz, Avraham Balaban, Nathan Shaham, and others in light of recent interviews, ongoing scholarship, and changing geopolitical realities. The contribution of chapter 2 is to showcase, especially through the prism of the work of Oz, how “the kibbutz serves as a stage for [the] critique not merely of the utopian imagination but of the entire Zionist nationalist endeavor as well” (70).Chapters 3 and 4 shed new light on the work of writers who maintain “ethnic outsider” status in the Zionist enterprise (such as that of Atallah Mansour, a Christian Arab-Israeli, and Iraqi-born Eli Amir, one of the first Sephardic Israeli writers of acclaim) or those whose preferred genres (such as those employed by Batya Gur and Savyon Liebrecht, mystery and feminist-focused, respectively) have frequently been excluded from academic discussions of literary portrayals of the kibbutz. In these chapters, Omer-Sherman convincingly galvanizes readers to broaden their notions of what he calls “Israeli literature’s enduring and troubled preoccupation with the fate of the individual protagonist” (15) through the presentation of varying perspectives on the “individual versus the collective” paradox, which, in these cases, are nuanced by national, ethnic, or gender-based differences. Thus, both of these chapters are a kind of rallying call for greater inclusion.Chapter 5, which this reviewer found to be the most exciting by far, treats the subjects of nostalgia and revisionism in films made about the kibbutz movement. It provides comprehensive overviews on the major fictional and/or semiautobiographical kibbutz films made by well-known directors such as Yitzhak Yeshurun, Akiva Tevet, and Dror Shaul, all of which reflect on the bygone days of kibbutz idealism, testing the “limits of collective thinking” (207) while highlighting the problems with the hyper-individualism and escapism of younger generations. It also considers more recent and controversial cinematic forms of expression regarding the kibbutz, such as those found in documentary film (Ran Tal) and video art (Oded Hirsch). These expressions, which feature interview and archival footage alongside representations of “silent individuals and groups” whose actions “often lead to dubious or anticlimactic outcomes” (249), are particularly striking. In this chapter, Omer-Sherman revisits many of the topics analyzed in earlier sections, such as disillusionment, agitation, and melancholy, but manages to situate them among more wide-ranging discussions of postmodernity in Israeli society. This final chapter, if written in a more conventional mode, could have easily been a simple rehashing of the author’s previously articulated intellectual concerns. Instead, it functions as a persuasive coda for the project, showcasing why the rise and demise of the kibbutz continue to resonate so profoundly in forms of cultural production of and about the state of Israel. In Omer-Sherman’s terms, such cultural production should be considered “not merely a nostalgic consolation [about] what was once achieved, but also a [source of] genuine pragmatism and a wellspring of inspiration and hope for the future [of] what human community might be” (274).In sum, this is a volume whose sharp insights and wide-ranging analyses (some of them appearing here for the first time in English) contribute greatly to our understanding of the histories of and shifting perceptions surrounding one of modernity’s most fascinating ideological movements. Informative for the specialist reader as well as accessible for students and a general lay audience, Imagining the Kibbutz promises to shape the ways in which historiographers, ethnographers, literary and cultural critics, and even authors and artists themselves discuss portrayals of the kibbutz phenomenon in the decades to come.NATHAN P. DEVIR is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Utah, where he also directs the Middle East Center and Religious Studies Program.

This article examines the theological, cultural, and socio-historical underpinnings of the custom of polygamy as it is practiced among so-called “Judaizing” movements in rural Cameroon. As a case study of one of the rarely discussed ideological points of contention between such Sub-Saharan African communities and the Global Northern Jewish communities that sponsor, support, or encourage them, this essay analyzes how neo-Jewish perspectives surrounding the practice of polygamy can help to illustrate the myriad ways in which normative, modern-day Jewish practices are sometimes inherently contradictory to accepted notions of propriety held by members of emerging Jewish communities from the Global South.

This article analyses changing perceptions regarding idolatry and secular art in two major Jewish-American novels: Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev (1972) and The Gift of Asher Lev (1990). The analysis focuses on the ways in which Potok subverts, recasts, and reinterprets several key tropes from the intertextual reservoir of Judaic culture, along the lines of emphatically American concerns, in order to transform traditionally discursive rejections of visual art into affirmative themes for creative endeavours and spiritual renewal in Jewish-American life. In particular, this study demonstrates how the major didactic component in Potok's re-envisioning of Judaism's long-standing association of the visual arts with idolatry stems from the author's advocacy of the tenets of the American branch of Conservative Judaism, according to which the best aspects of modern secular culture are to be integrated with a non-literalist view toward conventional religious principles.

This article examines the political discourse of a highly successful francophone novel, Chochana Boukhobza’s Un été à Jérusalem (A summer in Jerusalem) (1986), as a case study for exploring the underrepresented genre of secular, feminist Jewish Tunisian-Israeli literature written in French. In particular, this study focuses on the ways in which the novel debunks many of the themes, tropes, and archetypes held sacrosanct in the Judaic tradition (specifically, traditional representations of matriarchs and the feminine manifestation of the Divine Presence) and then reenvisions them along the lines of distinctively Maghrebian feminist concerns. Finally, this article demonstrates how Boukhobza’s text dissects the dogma inherent in both of the self-legitimizing discourses of Zionism and Judaic religious piety by way of a particular kind of female epistemology, in which the destructive qualities of both discourses might be explicated through the lens of patriarchal oppression.

This article demonstrates the ways in which the allegorical hermeneutic of A. B. Yehoshua's novel A Late Divorce (1982) is inextricably linked to the intertextual reservoir of Judaic culture, particularly by way of its dependence upon the stories, themes, motifs, and characters from the Judaic textual tradition. Additionally, it shows how Yehoshua's novel subverts those narrative patterns along the lines of emphatically Israeli concerns, simultaneously providing a totemically charged connection with the Judaic textual tradition and evidence of a radical departure from it. Drawing on the theoretical perspectives of archetypal psychology, this study also provides a reexamination of the much-discussed persona of Naomi, the text's central female character, with respect to her role as the "mediatrix of the unknown" and her use of predominantly culturally inherited points of reference to link the thematic portions of the novel.

The highly popular and critically acclaimed novel My Name Is Asher Lev (1972) has long been hailed as one of Chaim Potok's finest pieces of writing. Regularly assigned as compulsory high school reading and frequently discussed within the context of Jewish-Christian relations due to its Christological subject matter, the story of a young Jewish painter struggling to reconcile art with tradition has also attracted much scholarly attention. Studies in American Jewish Literature, in particular, has been one of the leading fora for scholarship on My Name Is Asher Lev, not to mention on the larger context of Potok's work as a whole. In fact, the earliest critical essays on Potok were printed in SAJL several years before the first monograph on Chaim Potok, written by Edward Abramson, was published in 1986.Ellen Uffen's early article, “My Name Is Asher Lev: Chaim Potok's Portrait of the Young Hasid as Artist,” appeared in SAJL in 1982. The journal's 1985 issue, entitled “The World of Chaim Potok,” featured S. Lillian Kremer's “Daedalus in Brooklyn: Influences of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on My Name Is Asher Lev,” as well as Sanford Pinsker's “The Crucifixion of Chaim Potok/The Excommunication of Asher Lev: Art and the Hasidic World.” In 1992, Henry Ahrens's essay, “Tales from an Archetypal Ocean: Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev,” appeared in SAJL. Nineteen ninety-eight witnessed the publication in SAJL of Joanna Barkess's article, “Painting the Sitra Achra: Culture Confrontation in Chaim Potok's Asher Lev Novels.” Most recently, Daniel Walden, the founding editor of SAJL, published an article in the 2010 issue of that journal, entitled “Potok's Asher Lev: Orthodoxy and Art: The Core-to-Core Paradox.”1 Needless to say, forty years after its initial printing, the interest in My Name Is Asher Lev shows no signs of abating.2That said, few readers familiar with the story of My Name Is Asher Lev are aware of the book that continues the saga of the young Jewish painter from New York. That same book was also the last novel on a Jewish theme that Potok wrote: The Gift of Asher Lev, which won the National Jewish Book Award upon its publication in 1990.3 I find this lack of attention curious, since, in my opinion, the second book is far superior in style and content to the first. Indeed, as someone who has closely studied the trajectory of Potok's novelistic career, I believe that The Gift of Asher Lev represents the apex of what Potok was capable of, both in its culmination of themes that had occupied the author throughout his fictional enterprise, as well as in the fluidity of its prose. How fitting to now have the opportunity to explore some of the major highlights of this novel in the same journal that initiated the first serious critical work on Potok.This close reading of The Gift of Asher Lev—the first, to my knowledge—focuses on Potok's subversion in that novel of several traditional motifs, characters, and themes from the intertextual reservoir of Judaic culture. In particular, it examines the ways in which Potok references and re-envisions sacrosanct archetypes from the story of the ‘akedah, or the “Binding of Isaac,” from Genesis 22, which recounts how God instructed Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, as a burnt offering, only to save the boy at the last moment.4 This reading emphasizes the ways in which Potok gives the aforementioned Judaic metanarrative a “scandalous” symbolic value, à la Barthes (23), by playing with the commonly held associations regarding the moral coherence of the story. I also highlight how the profoundly ambivalent nature of father-son relationships in Potok's novel mirror not only the archetypal Abraham-Isaac relation but also the paradoxes of allegiance and observance intrinsic to Jewish-American life.The reader will recall the basic plot elements from the first Asher Lev novel: Asher Lev, the artistic prodigy born to Hasidic immigrant parents in New York City, is unable to pursue his passion while in the confines of his family's ultra-Orthodox existence. The Rebbe (rabbi) of the Ladover community (its name a thinly veiled allusion to the Lubavitcher movement) to which his parents belong recognizes that the boy's impulses cannot be stifled forever, and so assigns him a mentor in the form of Jacob Kahn, a non-observant Jew who pushes the young Asher closer and closer to apostasy. Both the Rebbe, who is not aware of the extent to which Asher's mentor has lost touch with his Judaism, and Jacob Kahn, who posits that religion and art are diametrically opposed, attempt to affect the eventual outcome of Asher's use of his artistic gift, each by pushing him in a different direction. None of them actually succeeds completely, for Asher will remain, until the end of the second novel, tormented by the conflicting forces in his life; and herein lies the irony of his name, which in Hebrew means, “happy of heart.” There is, therefore, something of the great American theme of compromise in Asher's pain; but there is also a betrayal, in the eyes of his community, of several basic tenets of religious Judaic praxis, the most significant of which has to do with his subversion of the rationale behind the principle of the prohibition of idolatry, as outlined in the Second Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exod. 20.2; Deut. 5.7). What Asher's community sees as a violation of this prohibition, via his artistic activity, is especially painful at the close of the first novel, when he exhibits two “Brooklyn Crucifixion” paintings that incorporate Christological depictions of himself and his parents. Thus, Potok's particular rebellion against the Second Commandment in the Asher Lev novels concerns not only the inversions of traditional characters or motifs but also the subversion of a biblical thematic that has formed a central part of Judaic religious discourse since the inception of Mosaic law. In the paragraphs that follow, I foreground these inversions and subversions as they appear in the second novel through an examination of their associative contexts with major characters from the first novel.Aside from the Rebbe, the character who has the most influence on the young Asher of the first novel is the fictional painter and sculptor Jacob Kahn. According to Potok, the character of Jacob was modeled in part on the cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973) (“The First Eighteen Years” 105). Like Lipchitz, said to be part of Picasso's early circle, Jacob has come to America as a refugee from Europe during World War II. He agrees to take Asher as an apprentice at the request of the Rebbe of Asher's community, who prefers that Asher develop his craft under the tutelage of a Jew—albeit one who no longer observes the commandments—and who regards his devotion to art as his only spiritual observance.Although Jacob still has great affinity for certain Jewish traditions, we learn from the text that the Holocaust erased any belief that he held in God. In that sense, the aura around Jacob is implicitly connected to his biblical namesake, for he, too is one who has wrestled with the idea of the divine, as did the Jacob of the Bible, before being renamed Yisrael (Israel) (Gen. 32.25–31), meaning “he who struggles with God.” Since Jews throughout the ages have been referred to as bnei yisrael (“the sons of Israel”; or, more figuratively, the “House of Israel”), Potok's decision to give the non-observant, atheist/bohemian character the name of Jacob suggests that the struggles embodied by this man are liable to engender a new kind of “House of Israel.” This new paradigm will be one in which the questioning of traditional mores and the willingness to learn from other traditions will provide a counter to the insular, Eastern European Jewish existence of old, typified by the adherence to mulish rabbinical propriety. From that perspective, it is quite fitting that Asher comes to be instructed by Jacob when the former is thirteen years old—the age at which Jewish males traditionally undertake the coming-of-age ceremony of the bar mitzvah (in Aramaic, bar mitzvah, “son of the commandment,” might also be figuratively translated as “the one to whom the commandments apply”). Therefore, by paralleling Asher's religious instruction at the yeshiva with an edifying entrance into the secular world of Western culture and art, Jacob Kahn provides a counter to rabbinical propriety with his aesthetic didacticism, through which Asher Lev will live out his formative experiences.Asher's time alongside Jacob represents the first occasion in his life that he is able to discuss his gift with anyone, let alone to have his artistic drive confirmed as meaningful. By fulfilling this function for the young boy, Jacob also inadvertently takes on the role of a father figure for Asher, whose relationship with his obdurate birth father is stormy, at best. The father-son connection between these two artists is further alluded to by the apprentice's name, for Asher in the Bible was one of the sons of Jacob (Gen. 30.12).From the moment in the novel that Asher makes the acquaintance of Jacob Kahn, the reader becomes aware of just how saturated with modernity the latter character is. The first set of images that relay this depiction are primarily physical in nature: for instance, as opposed to the hunched-over, sickly, or persecuted types of men whom Asher knows from his Ladover community (Asher's father, for instance, has a permanent limp a result of a childhood bout of polio), Jacob is presented as a towering figure who imposes by his girth as much as by his revolutionary intellect. Upon shaking his hand, Asher immediately notes the difference mentioned above, and makes a statement that also indicates Jacob's impending influence upon the boy: “He had a powerful grip. I felt my hand swallowed by his” (My Name Is Asher Lev 193). Later, during their first practical lesson together (a semi-erotic encounter in which the act of painting functions ritualistically as a replacement for the highly fetishized movement around the scroll of the Torah in the synagogue), Asher juxtaposes the imagery surrounding his newfound mentor with descriptions of Jacob's “new Jew” physicality—corporeal imagery clearly reminiscent of Max Nordau's advocacy of a much-needed “muscular Judaism.”5 Asher notes that Jacob is “broad-shouldered, white-haired … [and] with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, I could see the muscles of his arms; they were powerful arms, and they looked sculpted from stone” (206).Asher's move toward apostasy, in the eyes of his parents and the Hasidic community, is not the simple product of the boy's artistic drive; nor is it the inevitable conclusion of the confrontation with his conservative parents and community. In fact, the foundational experiences for Asher, with regard to both his aesthetic and intellectual information, initially come into being solely from the influence of Jacob Kahn. Jacob's preliminary rhetorical question to Asher, posed during their first meeting, testifies to this fact: “You are entering the world of the goyim [Gentiles], Asher Lev. Do you know that?” (195). The subsequent testing of Asher's Hasidic mores increases in tandem with the lad's talents, up until the point where the young artist, having surpassed his now-covetous master, moves boldly and publicly into the world of the forbidden. The text, however, leads us to believe that Asher's apotheosis as a painter would not have been possible, had it not been for the tutelage of Jacob Kahn.Talk of individuals who break off from their own nations to move toward universality also brings into play the suffering indicative of what happens when one's ego is not coherent within itself. In that vein, the philosophy espoused by Kahn is also mirrored in the life of Christ, another universalist Jew, who, in his rebellion, moved toward, and represents, the integrated and individuated ego par excellence in the Western mindset. This is one of the reasons, symbolically speaking, that Jacob Kahn encourages Asher Lev to study the art form of the crucifixion: for he knows that Asher Lev will also be sacrificed for his “gift” to the world. Let us recall Jacob's exact words to the prodigy: “I am not telling you to paint crucifixions. I am telling you that you must understand what a crucifixion is in art if you want to be a great artist. The crucifixion must be available to you as a form” (228). While it is true that Jacob's decision to force Asher to paint nudes (and thereby to disregard the explicit instructions of the Rebbe) coincides with his instruction regarding the crucifixion motif in Western (Christian) art, the symbolic value of this action is that Asher Lev, while contemplating the crucifixion, also becomes aware of a part of himself. And, let us not forget that Jacob Kahn's initials are the Yiddish forms of the initials of Christ (Krist) (Jacobs 178): J.K. In a way, then, Jacob's encouraging Asher to draw crucifixions (when every such sketch mirrors, in a sense, the crucifixion of his mentor, who is also his surrogate parent) prepares him, ultimately, to depict the suffering of his parents in the classic aesthetic mold of the Western tradition.More importantly, the point implicit in all of Asher's activity with Jacob Kahn is not only to show that Jews can, and should, participate in purely aesthetic undertakings (which may also be spiritual, if one regards art as part of the mystery of the sublime). It is also to show how blind adherence to prescribed meaning (such as in the Second Commandment's prohibition of idolatry) inevitably decontextualizes content from its original sources. The fact that Jews had to wait until the turn of the twentieth century to actively and publicly participate in the world of visual arts is, according to Asher, a testament to this unfortunate fact. Moreover, it is possible only because of the integration of Judaic culture into the larger umbrella civilization, which, during the course of the transition into modernity, is also in the process of debunking its own stale myths. Thus, Asher is led by the instruction of Jacob Kahn toward a perspective that will change, for him, and for many of his admirers, a notion that is old as Judaism itself. This perspective, however, does not cancel out Asher's Judaism; instead, it reforms it with a particularly American brand of cross-cultural adaptation, set in motion by the wisdom of the figure of Jacob Kahn.As noted above, this distinctly American adaptation of Asher Lev's Judaism, which mirrors the development of the Jewish Conservative movement, carries with it many symbolic ties to the Christian tradition. These ties are evidenced not only in the subject manner of the painting, but also via the moment and place of its composition. Asher creates the crucifixion paintings around the time of Passover (327), the last Jewish festival purportedly celebrated by Jesus before his crucifixion (the first day of which is said to have coincided with the Last Supper).6 Moreover, the location in which Asher paints the crucifixions foreshadows Potok's subversion of the myth of the Binding of Isaac in the second novel, which will be explored below. Specifically, the construction of Asher's crucifixion art foreshadows the theme of sacrifice as the main symbolic action in the sequel, The Gift of Asher Lev, inasmuch as Christian typology regards Isaac as the figurative precursor to Jesus. In the second novel, Paris functions as the locale where Asher Lev and his French-Jewish wife conceive their son, Avrumel, who will be offered up for sacrifice as a modern-day avatar of the biblical Isaac. The more mature Asher is also transformed into a recasting of Abraham, although the figures who have continued to be a force in his life still play an important role in their transmission of wisdom and codes of conduct. As is the case with most of Potok's literary works, the end result is one of American-inspired balance and integration.The reader will recall that at the end of the first Asher Lev novel, the protagonist, now a young man, follows in the footsteps of Abraham by leaving his father's house for a foreign land. Asher's archetypal quest thus mirrors that of his people's progenitor, Abraham, as recounted in Genesis 12.1, when God says to Abraham: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will show thee.” We would do well to note the parallel here with certain passages from Robert Henri's book The Art Spirit, which is quoted at length in My Name Is Asher Lev: “Every great artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a ‘universal’ without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere” (203). Indeed, like the rebel American painter Robert Henri, leader of the Ashcan School of the American realist movement, Asher does become a great artist. The “true culture” alluded to above will become the credo by which Potok suggests the Jews of the twentieth century must live their lives. Asher's eventual, distinctly American form of this culture, Conservative Jewish religious thought, was no doubt informed by Potok's long-standing association with the Conservative movement. (Potok held tenures at several organizations officially sponsored by this movement, such as the Jewish Theological Seminary, from which he was also ordained, and the Jewish Publication Society of America, for which he served as managing editor, and later, as a frequent contributor/translator.)In this case, it is not from Haran to Canaan that Asher must journey; rather, it is from Brooklyn to Paris, which is, symbolically speaking, an equally daunting type of journey, and one that follows two of the three directives issued by God to Abraham (then named Abram): (1) the permanent exit from one's native country; and (2) cutting oneself off from one's immediate family and community. Here, the figure who issues the directive is the Rebbe, who tells Asher to go to the Ladover yeshiva in Paris because “You have crossed a boundary. I cannot help you. You are alone now” (367). However, the Rebbe does not intimate in any way that Asher must leave his “kindred” (i.e., the Jewish people). In the decisive last scene, where the Rebbe takes on the father-like role, he echoes a comment by Asher's real father, who had earlier remarked, after having seen Asher's nude paintings, “Do not forget your people, Asher. That is all I ask of you. That is all that is left me to ask of you” (234). Here, the Rebbe's last sentence to Asher, “I give you my blessings” (367), indicates that what is needed is simply a temporary change in surroundings. As it turns out, this change will last until the death of Asher's beloved uncle Yitzchok—the scene that opens the second Asher Lev novel—an event that forces Asher to return to Brooklyn, and to his past. In any case, the rabbi's function here mirrors the influence of Jacob Kahn on the younger Asher, in the sense that the sculptor also encouraged his protégé to “cross over” to another kind of existence.Jacob, who is portrayed only marginally in the second book as a jealous and somewhat loathsome character, has only really served as a giver of wisdom for Asher during the first part of his spiritual journey. Unlike the Rebbe, he encourages Asher to actually take his leave from his “kindred” (the Jewish people), since he believes that true art cannot exist alongside any other doctrine. For this reason, he instructs Asher to figuratively “smash his father's idols” (as recounted in the Talmudic tale from Genesis Rabbah 38.13) by subverting the religious preconceptions of his parents regarding idolatry. In the second novel, Asher manages to both subvert and (ultimately) remain bound to his parents' conceptions regarding the necessity for, and understanding of, sacrifice. This is accomplished through a triangular relationship that reflects the God-Abraham-Isaac connection in Genesis 22, and which also brings up variant readings of the myth along the way, further evoking Potok's desire for balanced and nuanced interpretations of Judaic religious heritage. As this interpretation is forged through the wisdom of the elders, the religious figure stands out once again as the driving force in the amalgamated Judaic propriety that Potok's protagonist exemplifies.To that end, the figure of the Rebbe in the second Asher Lev book is portrayed in several ways as the modern-day avatar of the God of the Hebrew scriptures. For instance, the interaction between Asher Lev and the Rebbe closely resembles the interaction between Moses and the Giver of the Law, as recounted in Exodus 33.20–23, when Moses cannot see the face of God: “And He said: ‘Thou canst not see My face, for man shall not see Me and live … And I will take away My hand, and thou shalt see My back; but My face shall not be seen’” (Exod. 33.20, 23). Potok describes the physical appearance of the Rebbe in a similar fashion, when Asher sees the Rebbe behind his desk, and remarks that “No face could be that white. It had to be a trick of the chandelier” (The Gift of Asher Lev 174). At other times, the Rebbe “seemed more a presence than a man” (191) and “seemed garbed in light” (284). Also, Asher notes that the Rebbe consistently has “a tallis [prayer shawl] covering his head so that his face could not be seen. He would come in with his head covered and go out with his head covered; only an edge of his beard would be visible” (74). While in this passage the appearance of the Rebbe is symbolically associated with the image of God on Mt. Sinai, the rest of the references to the Rebbe as a God-figure are in concordance with his relationship as God the father, and particularly, in his role as a father figure to Asher Lev, who is put into the role of Abraham. As the Rebbe says to the painter, “I have looked upon you as a son” (244). At the novel's conclusion (discussed below), when Asher Lev follows the action of his biblical counterpart and symbolically offers up his son for sacrifice, the sound of the Rebbe blowing the shofar (“ram's horn”) at the start of the Jewish New Year indicates that the Rebbe has a nonhuman otherness about him that connects him explicitly with the divine, since “it seemed that no human was sounding that ram's horn but some messenger from the Master of the Universe, someone bringing a clear musical note from the heavens” (353).7In addition to the numerous biblical allusions in the novel, the subversion of the myth of the Binding of Isaac coincides with one of the book's major subplots: the question of who will succeed the Rebbe in Asher's parents' Ladover community.8 Since the Rebbe has no children, it is expected that his right-hand man, Asher's father, Aryeh, will succeed him. But Aryeh's advanced age precludes him from being considered a possible successor. By the same token, the scandalous nature of Asher Lev's artistic credo makes him too controversial to ever take over his father's position of leadership, even if the divided community were to endorse such an outlandish proposal. However, the rabbi hints at several intervals throughout the book (60, 120, 353) that the number three will be significant to the question of his passing; he also takes a keen interest in Asher Lev's son, Avrumel, which in Hebrew means, “God is the exalted father.” Both of these instances point to the eventual sacrifice of Avrumel (Isaac) by Asher (Abraham), via the decree, albeit implicit, of the Rebbe (God), who has asked that Asher “sacrifice” his son by allowing him to be groomed to eventually succeed the Rebbe.The number three refers, first, to the generations of Levs in possible succession to the spiritual leader of the Ladovers. It also serves as an intertextual link to the legend of the Binding of Isaac, since it took Abraham and Isaac three days to reach the land of Moriah (Gen. 22.4). The choice of the name for Asher's son is also evidence that the Hasidic propriety in which Asher was raised, and the overarching belief in Judaic theodicy upon which that propriety is predicated, had not totally fallen by the wayside after Asher's choice to follow a different path in life. Rather, his decision has been countered by another influence. This influence will provide a much needed balance on the seesaw of integrated Jewish-American life, rather than functioning as a dead weight that will lead to isolation and a lack of objective reasoning.The more evident clues to the recasting of the story of Abraham and Isaac, however, appear from the moment when Asher Lev is asked to speak in his daughter's class about his art. Already nervous that his children are studying in the place in which he felt suffocated (Asher and his wife have decided to stay on in America temporarily, while the issues surrounding his uncle's will are resolved), Asher decides to explain to the children why he chose the crucifixion as the motif for his infamous paintings. During the question and answer session, a girl in the class remarks the following: “My father says you could have used something else, something more Jewish, like the binding of Isaac” (138), to which Asher responds, “The binding of Isaac? Is that really a theme of suffering?” (138). Asher then draws on the board the figures of Abraham and Isaac, and suddenly realizes that he has drawn his own face in place of Abraham's, and Avrumel's in place of Isaac's. His daughter, Rocheleh, later asks her father, “Why did you put yourself and Avrumel into the drawing of the binding of Isaac?” to which Asher replies, “I don't know. It was a surprise to me.” He then notes that he can draw things without knowing exactly why, because “then the drawing tells me what I'm trying to say” (141).We learn later in the novel, from a comment by a Ladover driver who is a fan of Asher's work, that Asher had done a painting called Sacrifice of Isaac (note that here, Lev uses the conventional Christian appellation, instead of the Judaic “Binding of Isaac”) (301). Asher casually mentions that he had wanted to call the piece “Inheritance” (301), a nod by Potok to Israeli poet Haim Gouri's famous elegy about the Binding of Isaac, “Yerushah” (1960), which can be translated either as “heritage” or “inheritance” in Hebrew. Gouri's poem is another classic example of the ways in which modern Jewish writers re-envision sacredly held myths. In it, Isaac's offspring “noladim/umaakhelet belibam” (565; “are born/and the slaughtering knife is in their hearts”). Asher's fictional painting follows the same tragic interpretation, in which Isaac is depicted as actually having been slaughtered. Asher recounts how, many years earlier, during his father's first visit to Lev's apartment in Europe, Aryeh saw the painting and exclaimed, “What have you done? He did not kill him.” Asher replies, “There is a midrash [homiletic exegetical text] that states he did.” The father's reaction is one of incredulity: “But it is only a midrash. This is what you will show the world? Abraham slaughtering Isaac?” (333). Concerning the question of why he painted it that way, Asher simply explains, with the same ambiguity that characterizes his drawings on the chalkboard of Asher/Abraham and Avrumel/Isaac, that sometimes he doesn't know what he is drawing. However, his comment, “It's how I feel about it” (333) betrays his belief that the sacrifice is an action wrought with ambiguity, as opposed to one to be celebrated. This perspective contradicts traditional Judaic notions of theodicy that revere Abraham for his willingness to carry out God's instruction to the letter; it also problematizes notions of allegiances to hierarchical orders.Asher's decision to align his painting symbolically with several contrarian interpretations of the myth of the Binding of Isaac is worthy of further investigation for several reasons. First, Asher's decision to entitle the painting Sacrifice of Isaac (as opposed to “Binding of Isaac”) intimates that an act of killing did in fact take place. His comment according to which he has somehow based his depiction of events on a midrash of this alternate version of the Abraham and Isaac story (an act that simultaneously upsets the conventional attitude concerning the legend and yet offers a variant justification from traditional Judaic praxis) provides a logical reason for the use of this title.9 However, in choosing a traditional Christian title for his composition, Asher is also forming an associative tie with the typology of Christological salvation motifs, which, as we have seen, thematically connect much of the action in both of the novels. Namely, the understanding of the willingness of a father to sacrifice his son is deemed as necessary for understanding the Christian logic of the later sacrifice by God of his only son (“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son” [John 3.16]). On the one hand, Asher's use of the Christological motif may be seen as a continuation of his early desire to use the theme of sacrifice as a vessel to convey suffering, as seen in the cruciform device imagery in the “Brooklyn Crucifixion” paintings. On the other, it serves to foreshadow a far more important action: Asher's willingness to give up his only son on behalf of the Ladover community.The latter action is filled with indistinctness and yet signals that Asher Lev has absorbed the wisdom of two separate codes. The first is the spiritual and nomocratic heritage of Judaism; and the second is the code of Western art and culture, which has Christianity and the Greeks as its basis. By fusing the two, Asher creates what his wife Devorah calls, while looking at the Isaac drawings, “a new syntax … a new i

Chochana Boukhobza's 1986 novel Un ete a Jerusalem subverts and recasts several recurring tropes, figures and discourses from the intertextual reservoir of Judaic culture. This article proposes that the novel's feminist deconstruction of foundational Judaic myths and metanarratives informs the protagonist's corporeal revolt against the patriarchal confines of the Tunisian-Jewish subculture from which she hails. It also analyzes the text's intimations that the causes of the violence occurring in both the familial and the societal frameworks in which the female characters find themselves may be linked to the trajectories of two dominant Judaic discourses: religious piety and (Zionist) Israeli nationalism. Finally, the paper looks at how different recastings of revered Jewish female figures are involved in destabilizing the manifestations of patriarchy in the novel.

The Logic of Biblical Subversion in Chaim Potok’s “The Trope Teacher” Nathan P. Devir Introduction The essay underlines the ways in which Chaim Potok subverts the biblical myth of the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) in one of his lesser-known literary works, “The Trope Teacher,” a short story from his last published collection, Old Men at Midnight (2001). In this article, I suggest that Potok’s particular subversion of the myth, which follows a distinctly American and conservative Jewish ethical and philosophical outlook, stresses three main themes: the preponderance of moral action; the rejection of blind reliance on traditional Judaic theodicy; and the realization that Judaism must come to be integrated into the modern world if it is to survive. Following a brief overview of the novella’s plot summary, I analyze Potok’s treatment of the biblical myth in tandem with an exposé of the character Ilana Davita Chandal, who is a central figure in all three of the short stories in Old Men at Midnight, and who originally appeared in Potok’s novel Davita’s Harp (1985). “The Trope Teacher” is an allegorical tale structured around the fate of Isaac Zapiski, an observant Ashkenazi Jew who makes his living in the United States by teaching “trope”—the punctuation marks for musical motifs and tones used in the chanting of Biblical Hebrew. Although gravely wounded during World War I and expelled from his university in Vienna on account of his being Jewish, Zapiski still feels himself to be very much a part of “civilized” Europe. At the beginning of the story, he decides to leave behind the America in which he does not belong, in order to return to Vienna on the eve of the Second World War. Benjamin Walter, the narrator of the story (as well as Zapiski’s student and the tale’s main protagonist), describes him thus: “A small, bumbling, stooped man who wore his hat low over his eyes . . . looking to all intents and purposes like a turtle in the act of withdrawing into its shell. He had a habit of shaking his head in a sort of nervous twitch . . . as if trying to disentangle himself from some web in which he had been caught” [End Page 16] (208). Zapiski frequently falls asleep, a state symbolic of his inaction. Even when awake, “He seemed then a helpless rag doll of a man. Wrinkled dark pants and jacket; stained white shirt, disheveled white beard; pale pockmarked features; the bad [prosthetic] leg lying on top of the good one as if it needed more than the floor for support” (218–19). Zapiski returns to Europe and is never heard from again. Benjamin, however, is haunted by the memory of the man, and imagines him as a stand-in for all of the Jews murdered during the Holocaust, the knowledge of which is only beginning to make itself known to American Jews. Motivated by an urge to defeat what he sees as the modern-day incarnation of Amalek (Exod. 17), the archetypal enemy of the Jews, Benjamin joins the US army and helps to liberate some of the Nazi concentration camps in Eastern Europe. While there, he imagines Isaac Zapiski everywhere, and expects to come upon him at any moment. Instead, what Benjamin encounters is described as the “spirit” of the old man, which functions as a kind of talisman for the young soldier, inasmuch as the phantom of Zapiski tells Benjamin where to duck and dig in order not to be injured. After the war, Benjamin becomes a historian and uses his real-life experiences in the war as the impetus behind his major academic work, entitled Why So Late. The reader will note that already one subversion of the Binding of Isaac myth has been outlined in this initial description of “Isaac” Zapiski, insofar as the novella’s titular character is the one depicted as having been sacrificed. However, this particular subversion—subversive because, in this case, Isaac actually dies, unlike in the biblical account—does not work in tandem with the main subversion of the plotline in Potok’s novella; therefore, I mention its symbolic components here only because they prefigure the later...

This paper analyzes the poetic ego in what is perhaps the most misunderstood work of Greek thinker and statesman Nikos Kazantzakis: The Last Temptation of Christ (1960). In the aforementioned novel, Kazantzakis subverts the New Testament accounts of Jesus of Nazareth in order to form a counter-narrative upon which to base his attack on the Western cultural tradition. This study argues that in performing such a subversion, Kazantzakis manipulates the ideological text by rewriting the historical essence of social struggle. Taking that perspective into account, the analysis then invites the reader to consider the credo of social action as espoused by the author's transubstantiated Jesus through the prism of the neo-realistic supposition according to which ideology allows the individual to become an integral feature of the social world.

Evelyne Accad's novel L'excisee [The Excised] (1982) has long been hailed as an indispensable component of the Francophone literary canon. However, the reception of this book in the English- speaking world has been tepid at best, despite the growing popularity of Accad's literary corpus in (mostly) the United States and in Britain. In this paper, I argue that the principle reason for the Anglophone world's aforementioned lack of attention to the novel is inextricably linked to a series of major oversights in its English translation. More specifically, I demonstrate the manner in which the mistranslations of the prosimetric structure in the narrative of L'excisee(including its biblical and qur. anic citations) have minimized the text's intertextual significance to such a degree that the book's overarching theme-the necessity of female agency as a counter to oppressive social practices-has no symbolic structure upon which to rest. To that end, this article elucidates the semantic, semiotic and stylistic functions of the prosimetric and intertextual configuration of L'excisee, in the hopes of offering a more just and culturally pertinent translation of the text's revolutionary message to the English-speaking reader.