Related Guides
About this Guide
This Research Guide will help you find Hebrew language and literature resources available thru the BU Libraries. Here you will find information on:
- Language resources - dictionaries and grammar books
- Background information - guides, encyclopedias, biographies
- Open Access resources including websites and digital collections
- Related programs at Boston University
Featured Resources
Amos Oz: The Legacy of a Writer in Israel and Beyond by
The veteran contributors to this volume take as their central drama, and their essential task for analysis, the enduring literary and political legacy of Israel Prize laureate Amos Oz (1939-2019). Born a decade prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, in what was then Palestine under British rule, Oz's life spanned the country's entire history, and both his fiction and nonfiction restlessly probe and illuminate its fraught conflicts, contradictions, and ambivalences. Throughout his career, Oz grappled frankly with the often-painful realities of Israeli life while also celebrating the ebullience of the Israeli spirit, and his sophisticated understanding of the sociopolitical turmoil of his society was always accompanied by intensely lyrical language and deep penetrations into the vulnerabilities of the human psyche. The volume's twenty contributors bring an exciting diversity of concerns and perspectives to Oz's most celebrated novels (including his powerfully resonant final novel, Judas) as well as to overlooked facets of his oeuvre, illuminating the breathtaking scope of his literary legacy. Together, they offer gripping analyses of his urgent and profoundly universal works about political and romantic dreamers whose heartfelt struggles with both their own human frailties and those of the state ultimately resonate far beyond Israel itself.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2023
Jewish Comics and Graphic Narratives: A Critical Guide by
"The most-up-date critical guide mapping the history, impact, key critical issues and seminal texts of the genre, Jewish Comics and Graphic Narratives interrogates what makes a work a ‘Jewish graphic novel’, and explores the form’s diverse facets to orient readers to the richness and complexity of Jewish graphic narratives."
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History by
A history of modern Jewish literature that explores our enduring attachment to the book as an object With the rise of digital media, the "death of the book" has been widely discussed. But the physical object of the book persists. Here, through the lens of materiality and objects, Barbara E. Mann tells a history of modern Jewish literature, from novels and poetry to graphic novels and artists' books. Bringing contemporary work on secularism and design in conversation with literary history, she offers a new and distinctive frame for understanding how literary genres emerge.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
The Pages: a novel by
An entirely original novel in which a book--Joseph Roth's masterpiece Rebellion--narrates its own astonishing life story, from 1930s Germany to the present day, at the heart of a gripping mystery. "A powerful, powerful piece of work." --Colum McCann, best-selling author of Apeirogon One old copy of the novel Rebellion sits in Lena Knecht's tote bag, about to accompany her on a journey from New York to Berlin in search of a clue to the hand-drawn map on its last page. It is the brilliantly captivating voice of this novel--a first edition nearly burned by Nazis in May 1933--that is our narrator. Fast-paced and tightly plotted, The Pages brings together a multitude of dazzling characters, real and invented, in a sweeping story of survival, chance, and the joys and struggles of love. At its center are Roth, an Austrian Jewish author on the run, and his wife, Friederike, who falls victim to mental illness as Europe descends into war. With vivid evocations of Germany under Nazism and today, The Pages dramatically illuminates the connections between past and present as it looks at censorship, oppression, and violence. Here is a propulsive, inspiring tale of literature over a hundred years: a novel for book lovers everywhere that will bring a fresh audience to this acclaimed writer.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
Maus Now: selected writings by
Richly illustrated with images from Art Spiegelman's Maus ("the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust" --The Wall Street Journal), Maus Now includes work from twenty-one leading critics, authors, and academics--including Philip Pullman, Robert Storr, Ruth Franklin, and Adam Gopnik--on the radical achievement and innovation of Maus, more than forty years since the original publication of "the first masterpiece in comic book history" (The New Yorker). Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman is one of our most influential contemporary artists; it's hard to overstate his effect on postwar American culture. Maus shaped the fields of literature, history, and art, and has enlivened our collective sense of possibilities for expression. A timeless work in more ways than one, Maus has also often been at the center of debates, as its recent ban by the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board from the district's English language-arts curriculum demonstrates. Maus Now: Selected Writing collects responses to Spiegelman's monumental work that confirm its unique and terrain-shifting status. The writers approach Maus from a wide range of viewpoints and traditions, inspired by the material's complexity across four decades, from 1985 to 2018. The book is organized into three loosely chronological sections-- "Contexts," "Problems of Representation," and "Legacy"--and offers for the first time translations of important French, Hebrew, and German essays on Maus. Maus is revelatory and generative in profound and long-lasting ways. With this collection, American literary scholar Hillary Chute, an expert on comics and graphic narratives, assembles the world's best writing on this classic work of graphic testimony.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought: Twentieth-Century Central Europe and Migration to America by
Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought deals with the concept of exile on many levels--from the literal to the metaphorical. It combines analyses of predominantly Jewish authors of Central Europe of the twentieth century who are not usually connected, including Kafka, Kraus, Levi, Lustig, Wiesel, and Frankl. It follows the typical routes that exiled writers took, from East to West and later often as far as America. The concept and forms of exile are analyzed from many different points of view and great importance is devoted especially to the forms of inner exile. In Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought, Bronislava Volková, an exile herself and thus intimately familiar with the topic through her own experience, develops a unique typology of exile that will enrich the field of intellectual and literary history of twentieth-century Europe and America.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2021
