Ruth von Bernuth - Böcker

Exploring the people and contexts that imbue Jewish material culture with its meaning.In museums, synagogues, antique stores, and personal collections, Jewish objects are gathered, studied, and passed down as material representations of a culture and faith. What defines these items as "Jewish," and how does an item acquire or lose this characteristic throughout its life? Drawing from material culture studies, folklore studies, and curatorial perspectives, this collection aims to answer these questions and reveal the life histories of Jewish things. Essays consider assemblages ranging from Holocaust ephemera to religious relics and pieces of art. Each time these materials cross geographic, cultural, or social borders, their Jewishness is redefined through new dialogues about maker and user, buyer and seller, insider and outsider. Each contributor's insight builds bridges between curators, private collectors, scholars, and archivists whose diverse perspectives inform a growing conversation in folklore, religion, and Jewish studies that places material culture at the heart of Jewish cultural and historical narratives. Tracing the paths of Jewish things across time, place, and culture, this collection reveals complex stories of individual and collective struggles to survive.

How the Wise Men Got to Chelm is the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationship to its literary precursors. When God created the world, so it is said, he sent out an angel with a bag of foolish souls with instructions to distribute them equally all over the world—one fool per town. But the angel's bag broke and all the souls spilled out onto the same spot. They built a settlement where they landed: the town is known as Chelm. The collected tales of these fools, or "wise men," of Chelm constitute the best-known folktale tradition of the Jews of eastern Europe. This tradition includes a sprawling repertoire of stories about the alleged intellectual limitations of the members of this old and important Jewish community. Chelm did not make its debut in the role of the foolish shtetl par excellence until late in the nineteenth century. Since then, however, the town has led a double life—as a real city in eastern Poland and as an imaginary place onto which questions of Jewish identity, community, and history have been projected. By placing literary Chelm and its "foolish" antecedents in a broader historical context, it shows how they have functioned for over three hundred years as models of society, somewhere between utopia and dystopia. These imaginary foolish towns have enabled writers both to entertain and highlight a variety of societal problems, a function that literary Chelm continues to fulfill in Jewish literature to this day.

Special volume treating exemplars of the vast number of texts arising from historic and imaginary encounters between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, from the early modern period to the present.Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop, which was inaugurated at Duke University in 2009 and is now held at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish studies. Nexus publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies, introducing new directions, analyzing the development and definition of the field, and considering its place vis-à-vis both German Studies and Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. Nexus 5 features essays written in honor of the memory of Jonathan M. Hess, a leading scholar in German Jewish Studies who, through both his person and publications, opened up the field for many others to explore new areas of research and inquiry. It offers exemplary instances of historic and imaginary encounters based on interactions of Jews and "other Germans" from the early modern period to the present day. It also discusses adaptations and translations of Yiddish and German texts, presenting insights into connections between literary texts and their Jewish and non-Jewish readers alike. By exploring multimodal cultural works ranging from performance to poems and illustrated fairy tales, and literature in German, Yiddish, and other languages, Nexus 5 works to expand the field of German Jewish studies in the spirit of Jonathan Hess himself.