British-Jewish writers are increasingly addressing challenging questions about what it means to be both British and Jewish in the twenty-first century. Writing Jewish provides a lively and accessible introduction to the key issues in contemporary British-Jewish fiction, memoirs and journalism, and explores how Jewishness exists alongside a range of other different identities in Britain today.
By interrogating myths and stereotypes and looking at themes of remembering and forgetting, belonging and alienation, location and dislocation, Ruth Gilbert examines how these writers identify the particularity of their difference – while acknowledging that this difference is neither fixed nor final, but always open to re-interpretation.
Ruth Gilbert is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Winchester, UK and Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute Research Centre at the University of Southampton, UK. She has published a number of articles on Jewish literature and is the author of Early Modern Hermaphrodites: Sex and Other Stories.
| Acknowledgements |
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viii | |
| Preface: `No Place Like Home' |
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x | |
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1 British-Jewish Writing Today |
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1 | (18) |
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2 `Two Thousand Years of Memory': Memory and British-Jewish Identity |
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19 | (19) |
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3 `An Impossible Task': Remembering the Holocaust |
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38 | (21) |
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4 `Rootsie-tootsie': (Re)locating Jews in Contemporary Britain |
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59 | (21) |
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5 Belonging and Division: British-Jewish Reflections on Israel |
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80 | (21) |
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6 Bar mitzvahs and Balls: British-Jewish Masculinities |
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101 | (21) |
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7 `A Vortex of Contradictory Forces': British-Jewish Women |
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122 | (22) |
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8 Jewish, Half-Jewish, Jew-ish: Contemporary Identities |
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144 | (19) |
| Afterword: Reality Gaps |
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163 | (4) |
| Bibliography |
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167 | (8) |
| Index |
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175 | |
Ruth Gilbert is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Winchester, UK and Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute Research Centre at the University of Southampton, UK. She has published a number of articles on Jewish literature and is the author of Early Modern Hermaphrodites: Sex and Other Stories and co-editor of At The Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period.
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