Bücher von Efraim Sicher

Advances in genetics are renewing controversies over inherited characteristics, and the discourse around science and technological innovations has taken on racial overtones, such as attributing inherited physiological traits to certain ethnic groups or using DNA testing to determine biological links with ethnic ancestry. This book contributes to the discussion by opening up previously locked concepts of the relation between the terms color, race, and "e;Jews"e;, and by engaging with globalism, multiculturalism, hybridity, and diaspora. The contributors-leading scholars in anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and cultural studies-discuss how it is not merely a question of whether Jews are acknowledged to be interracial, but how to address academic and social discourses that continue to place Jews and others in a race/color category.

An innovative study of the gendering of ethnic difference in Western society, Sicher's multidisciplinary, comparative analysis shows how racialized images have persisted and helped to form prejudiced views of the Other.

This study shows how four famous Jews writing in Russian in the early Soviet period attempted to resolve the conflict between their cultural identity and their place in Revolutionary Russia. Babel, Mandelstam, Pasternak and Ehrenburg struggled to form creative selves out of the contradictions of origins, outlook, and social or ideological pressures.

Isaak Babel' (1894-1940) is arguably one of the greatest modern short story writers of the early twentieth century. Yet his life and work are shrouded in the mystery of who Babel' was-an Odessa Jew who wrote in Russian, who came from one of the most vibrant centers of east European Jewish culture, and who all his life loved Yiddish and the stories of Sholom Aleichem This is the first book in English to study the intertextuality of Babel''s work. It looks at Babel''s cultural identity as a case study in the contradictions and tensions of literary influence, personal loyalties, and ideological constraint. The complex and often ambivalent relations between the two cultures inevitably raise controversial issues that touch on the reception of Babel' and other Jewish intellectuals in Russian literature, as well as the "e;Jewishness"e; of their work.