Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning

Acknowledgements

acknowledgments My first and primary gratitude is to Althea Stroum, who, along with her late husband, Samuel Stroum, created the Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. Mrs. Stroum graciously attended all of the lectures I delivered at the University of Washington in May 2002, and I was honored and delighted to spend some additional private time with her. Naomi B. Sokoloff of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Washington invited me to deliver the Stroum lectures several years ago; I am grateful to her, to the current chair of the program, Kathie Friedman, and to the other faculty of the program —Jere Bachrach, Hillel Gamoran, Martin Jaffee, Joel Migdal, Scott Noegel, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, and Kalman Weiser—for their hospitality to me during my stay in Seattle; and to Loryn Paxton for her exemplary organization of my visit and lectures. My study of Jewish autobiography was aided by the students in a graduate seminar I taught on this subject at Columbia several years ago, and by the members of the University Seminar on Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia who heard an early draft of one of the lectures and provided helpful comments. I am indebted to Alice Nakhimovsky, who read the chapter on Lilienblum and Mandelstam and contributed important suggestions and corrections; to Gil Anidjar for his insights into the work and life of Sarah Kofman; to Michael Silber for help in Israeli archives; and most especially to my friends and colleagues Elisheva Carlebach and Olga Litvak, who took time from their own extraordinarily busy schedules to go over my entire manuscript with great care, and saved me from many infelicities and errors. xiii I wish to thank Naomi Pascal at the University of Washington Press for her graciousness as editor of this book and the Stroum Lectures Series as a whole, and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University for a faculty publications grant. I would like to thank my friend Bruce Goldberger for proofreading this manuscript just for fun; my student Dan Schwartz for producing an excellent index; and Kerrie Maynes for her superb editing and support. Finally, my greatest debt is once more to my family—my wife, Marjorie Kaplan, and our children, Ethan, Aaron, and Emma—who have tolerated my obsession with the problem of autobiographical writing for the last several years, and who make my own life-story so rich and fulfilling. xiv acknowledgments Autobiographical Jews ...