Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studies
Publications

Berman Center Series, "New Perspectives on Jewish Studies"

• Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust
• Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon: Nation Building and Minority Discourse
• Mapping Jewish Identities
• Interpreting Judaism in a Postmodern Age
• The Other in Jewish Thought and History
• Jewish Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective
• New Perspectives on Israeli History:The Early Years of the State

The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present

Berman Center Newsletters

New Perspectives on Jewish Studies

Since 1990, the Berman Center has published eight volumes, seven of which appear in the Center's series New Perspectives on Jewish Studies, published by New York University Press. The eighth volume, The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpeting the Present, was published by Sheffield Academic Press in 1996. The series provides a theoretically informed, interdisciplinary discussion of a basic dimension of the field of Jewish studies.

The most recent volume in the series, Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust, was published in the summer of 2003. Edited by Shelley Hornstein, Laura Levitt, and Larry Silberstein, the volume brings together a distinguished group of contributors, including artists, photographers, cultural critics, and historians, to analyze the ways in which the Holocaust has been represented in and through art, photographs, museums, and monuments. Exploring frequently neglected aspects of contemporary art after the Holocaust, it demonstrates how visual culture informs Jewish memory and makes clear that art matters in contemporary Jewish studies. Accepting that knowledge is culturally constructed, Impossible Images makes explicit the ways in which context matters. It shows how the places where an artist works shape what is produced, in what ways the space in which a work of art is exhibited and how it is named influence what is seen or not seen, and how calling attention to certain details in a visual work such as a gesture, a color, or an icon can change the meaning assigned to work as a whole. Table of Contents - Introduction - NYU Catalog

Impossible Images: "Freshly innovative and insightful. For anyone following the unexpectedly audacious artistic responses to the Holocaust by a generation born only into its memory, this volume provides a deep look into works by a diverse group of artists and composers as they struggle profoundly with issues of 'belated memory,' representability, decorum, high and low art. All lead us to question again the role art plays in our memory of this time, how through this art we remember events like the Holocaust we never knew directly." --James E. Young, author of At Memory's Edge and The Texture of Memory

The sixth volume in the series, Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon: Nation Building and Minority Discourse, by Hebrew University professor Hannan Hever, offers a sweeping view of the entirety of modern Hebrew literature, shedding light on the moments of rupture and reversal that have undermined the efforts to construct a hegemonic Zionist narrative. It provides a model for understanding the relations between minority and majority voices in postcolonial situations, showing these processes working and changing over time, from the earliest days of the creation of a Zionist sensibility for literature to Israeli state culture and the discourses or Arab otherness. By illuminating both the process of the canon formation as well as the voices excluded from the canon, Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon offers a powerful alternative reading of twentieth-century Hebrew fiction.

Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon:"This book not only offers a brilliant, insightful, and unsettling contemplation on the role of literary canonization and minority discourse in the construction of national imagination, but, above all, an appositional voice whose critical stance is bound to inform all the work of a new generation of Hebrew scholars."--Anton Shammas, University of Michigan

What actually is being examined when we attempt to assess "Jewish identity" or any identity? Most tend to assume that identity is a pre-existing, relatively fixed frame of reference reflecting shared cultural and historical experiences. Drawing on recent work in such fields as cultural studies, poststructuralist theory, postmodern philosophy, and feminist theory, Mapping Jewish Identities, edited by Larry Silberstein, challenges this premise.

Contesting conventional approaches to Jewish identity, contributors argue that Jewish identity should be conceptualized as a continuous process of "becoming" in the context of changing cultural and social conditions rather than as a stable defining body of traits. These thoughtful and provocative essays invite a rethinking of the concepts of Jewish culture and identity.

Mapping Jewish Identities: "The pleasures and rewards of this volume are ample. Mapping Jewish Identities opens up--and reinvigorates--questions of Jewish identity and difference. En route to revealing the multiple possibilities of modern Jewish identity, it also succeeds in charting vital new routes for Jewish Cultural Studies today."--Ann Pellegrini