Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature

Isabelle Hesse is Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, Australia.

The book’s strength lies in Hesse’s selection of a wide variety of fascinating literary texts, and in her ambitious engagement with theorists of trauma and post-colonial studies. While the discourse of trauma has had traction within Jewish academic discourse since the Holocaust, Hesse goes to great pains in order to situate the Jews within a post-colonial context … Hesse successfully addresses stylistic and thematic renderings of the image of the Jew since 1945, as empowered, oppressive, and human, as opposed to simply a symbol of marginality and victimization.

• 1. Introduction: From the Enlightenment to the Gaza Freedom Flotilla: Ideas of Jewishness in the Modern and Contemporary Period2. The Complexities of Victimhood: The Holocaust and Israel in German-Jewish Literature3. Rewriting the Foundational Myths of Israel: Shulamith Hareven’s Thirst: The Desert Trilogy and David Grossman’s See Under: Love4. Minority, Exile, and Belonging in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay and Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood5. Black Jews, White Arabs: Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Mizrahi Literature6. ‘Within the Bounds of the Permissible’: Palestinians in a Jewish National Space7. Imagining the Other: Jewish Settlers, Soldiers, and Civilians in Palestinian Literature8. Conclusion: ‘We are not all Jews’: Resisting Jewish Victimhood in Metropolitan LiteratureBibliographyIndex