Stephen Katz – författare

Between 1890 and 1924, more than two million Jewish immigrants landed on America's shores. The story of their integration into American society, as they traversed the difficult path between assimilation and retention of a unique cultural identity, is recorded in many works by American Hebrew writers. Red, Black, and Jew illuminates a unique and often overlooked aspect of these literary achievements, charting the ways in which the Native American and African American creative cultures served as a model for works produced within the minority Jewish community. Exploring the paradox of Hebrew literature in the United States, in which separateness, and engagement and acculturation, are equally strong impulses, Stephen Katz presents voluminous examples of a process that could ultimately be considered Americanization. Key components of this process, Katz argues, were poems and works of prose fiction written in a way that evoked Native American forms or African American folk songs and hymns. Such Hebrew writings presented America as a unified society that could assimilate all foreign cultures. At no other time in the history of Jews in diaspora have Hebrew writers considered the fate of other minorities to such a degree. Katz also explores the impact of the creation of the state of Israel on this process, a transformation that led to ambivalence in American Hebrew literature as writers were given a choice between two worlds. Reexamining long-neglected writers across a wide spectrum, Red, Black, and Jew celebrates an important chapter in the history of Hebrew belles lettres.

In Disciplining Old Age Stephen Katz gives us a sophisticated and theoretically rigorous approach to what gerentology does. He deftly and subtly combines the theories of Foucault, Bourdieu, and the Althusser in his analysis of what he calls the "gerontological web."Katz explores how political and social sciences have differentiated the elderly as a special kind of population characterized in negative terms, and he examines the literature of the discipline and shows how gerontology as built itself as a discipline through its journals, associations, funding agencies, and "schools of thought."

Applying interdisciplinary perspectives about everyday life to vital issues in the lives of older people, this book maps together the often taken-for-granted aspects of what it means to age in an ageist society.Part of the Ageing in a Global Context series, the two parts address the materialities and the embodiments of everyday life respectively. Topics covered include household possessions, public and private spaces, older drivers, media representations, dementia care, health-tracking, dress and sexuality. This focus on micro-sociological conditions allows us to rethink key questions which have shaped debates in the social aspects of ageing.International contributions, including from the UK, USA, Sweden and Canada, provide a critical guide to inform thinking and planning our ageing futures.