The other Jewish question : identifying the Jew and making sense of modernity / Jay Geller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Geller, Jay, 1953-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jews--Identity.

Jews.

Civilization, Modern.

Antisemitism--History.

Antisemitism.

History.

Physical Description:

xiv, 510 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2011.

Summary:

This book examines how modernizing German speaking, cultures, undergoing, their own processes of identification, responded to the narcissistic threat posed by the continued persistence of Judentum (Judaism, Jewry, Jewishness) by representing "the Jew's" body-or, rather, parts of that body and the techniques performed upon them. Such fetish-producing practices reveal the question of German-identified modernity to be inseparable from the Jewish Question.

But Jewish-identified individuals, immersed in the phantasmagoria of such figurations in the gutter and garret salon, medical treatise and dirty joke, tabloid caricature and literary depiction, church facade and bric-a-brac souvenir-had their own question, another Jewish Question. They also had other answers, for these physiognomic fragments not only identified "the Jew" but also became for some Jewish-identified individuals the building blocks for working through their particular situations and relaying their diverse responses.

The Other Jewish Question maps the dissemination of and interrelationships among these corporeal signifiers in Germanophone cultures between the Enlighten- ment and the Shoah. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: toward a physiognomic epidemiology of the fetishized Jew

Feminization and the problem of Jewish persistence

Tailing the suspect, or the braiding of gender and ethnic difference

From mohels to Mein Kampf: syphilis and the construction of Jewish identification

Circumcision and a Jewish woman's identification: Rahel Levin Varnhagen's failed assimilation

Going to "alimentary" school: brotstudium, Ludwig feuerbach, and the dietetics of antisemitism

From rags to risches: on Marx's other Jewish question

A future without Jews: Max Nordau's pre-Zionist answer to the other Jewish question

President Schreber and the memoirs of a wandering Jew(ess)

Walter Benjamin reproducing the scent of the messianic.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780823233618

0823233618

9780823233625

0823233626

OCLC:

692292477