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Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 387 Reviews of peripheral consequence for, or quite irrelevant to, the Written Torah as the Judaism of the dual Torah, oral and written, receives and reads it. But the Judaism that privileges the Pentateuch does so in the context of the Torah, oral and written, and reads the Pentateuch as not the secular history of a small nation but as the foundations of the system and structure of God's dominion: Halakhah and Aggadah fused into the design for the social order of the kingdom of priests and the holy people destined for eternal life beyond the grave. That is not the religion for which Hertz formed his apologetics and polemics, and it is not the religion that he served as the first alumnus of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. But it is the religion of Judaism, as our sages of blessed memory defined it for eternity. To that religion, the Hertz Chumash supplies a minor footnote, one unlikely to persist. Jacob Neusner University ofSouth Florida & Bard College St. Petersburg, FL 33701 jneusner@luna.cas.usj.edu THE BOOM IN CONTEMPORARY ISRAELI FICTION. Alan Mintz, ed. pp. 192. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1997. Paper, $19.95. This book is pathbreaking for English-language criticism in two important ways: it is the first book devoted entirely to it presentation of the contemporary Israeli scene and its significance; and it is the first anthology to analyze Israeli literature through a broad range of contemporary critical methodologies. Although each entry focuses on a different subject and group of writers, there does exist a common thread: the view of fiction as a space permitting the uninhibited exploration of the connections between historical, national, and individual identity. The authors, leading scholars in the field, impress through their critical sophistication and their attentiveness to diverse historical contexts. As such, the book deserves an audience among three types of scholars, in concentric circles. For teachers of Hebrew literature and language, the book treats dozens of novels and relates them to larger literary and social currents. Scholars working in an area of Jewish studies would profit from discussions of how issues relating to gender, ethnicity, and the Holocaust are imaginatively explored by Israeli novelists. And professors of modem literature would find stimula- Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 388 Reviews tion in the vitality of the writing and the criticism in a field whose size relegates it to the margin of academic notice. In the first entry (reprinted from ProD/textS). Robert Alter observes in the work of some novelists-among them David Grossman. Meir Shalev. and Yoel Hoffman-a swerve from the historical mainstream of modem Hebrew fiction. Whereas writers from Mendele on established a tradition of mimetic realism, these contemporary writers work in the style of "magical realism" made famous first in Latin America starting in the 1960s. Magical realism's appeal for this generation, Alter speculates, derives as much from the inevitable "pendulum swing" of literary history as from international influences. Although the style can degenerate into preciousness and eccentricity, it can also "throw the realistically represented world into sharper focus." Alter argues that the element of fantasy opens up the portrayal of ambiguities in areas too painful or contentious to investigate by other means, such as the relation between victims and victimizers in the concentration camps or the shortfalls of Zionist ideology. The next two contributions bring international debates over gender to bear on Israeli fiction. Ann Golomb Hoffman analyzes the way that two of the most important modem male novelists, Yaakov Shabtai and A. B. Yehoshua, draw attention to the processes by which gender differences are created in Israeli society and serve to reinforce ethnic, religious, and national differences. She maintains that the Israeli cult of masculinity derives from the Zionist response to the antisemitic stigmatization of the "feminine Jew" in late-nineteenth century European racial science. In her Freudian reading, Shabtai and Yehoshua subvert the Oedipal structure of masculine identity, and thus call into question the hierarchies of male/female, Zion/Golab, Ashkenazi/Sephardi upon which Israeli identity is predicated. Yael Feldman explores the elaboration of feminist consciousness within Hebrew novels written by women. As she points out, Israeli...

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