Jewish Frontiers

SANDER L. GILMAN is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is one of the foremost critics of literature and Jewish culture.

'Provocative and imaginative, Gilman's essays offer a unique glimpse into the mechanism of cultural identity.' - Anna Dogole, The Jewish Eye 'An extraordinarily learned, endlessly fascinating book that deals with a hot contemporary subject.' - Elaine Showalter, Princeton University, USA '[A] fascinating work...Gilman has an eye for detail, yet remains aware of the wider perspective. He also raises important questions...In [this] rich, elegant and beautiful [book] he shows that the history of aesthetic surgery is too important to be left to the surgeons.' - Jonathan Cole, Times Literary Supplement '[Gilman] tells a strange, macabre, and often richly comic story of shifting desires. His book shows a dazzling European erudition...There is now less furtiveness attached to aethetic surgery. But the question remains - and Gilman asks it cleverly, humanely, and persistently - whether new appearances just gloss over old problems and often create new ones.' - New York Review of Books 'The effervescent Sarder L. Gilman's latest volume, is a characteristically lively series of essays which examines the concept of Jewish identity from fresh and stimulating perspectives...and casts a cultural microscope over Jewish history on a wide frontier.' - The Jewish Chronicle

• Introduction: The Frontier as a Model for Jewish History REPRESENTING THE SHOAH The First Comic Film about the Shoah: Jurek Becker and Cultural Opposition within the GDR Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny?: On the Boundary Between Acceptable and Unacceptable Representation of the Holocaust DISEASES AND BOUNDARIES A Dream of Jewishness on the Frontier: Kafka's Tumor and 'The Country Doctor' Private Knowledge: Jewish Illnesses and the Process of Identity Formation A French Frontier: Proust's Nose JEWISH BODIES AND HISTORY TODAY 'We're not Jews': Imagining Jewish History and Jewish Bodies in Contemporary Multicultural Literature