Jewish Studies: A Theoretical Introduction

3. In a New Key

3 In a New Key Cast of Characters André Aciman, contemporary memoirist, essayist, literary critic who emigrated in his youth with most of the Egyptian Jewish community. Martin Buber, Jewish philosopher, disseminator of Hassidic lore, and an early, idiosyncratic Zionist; born in Galicia, resettled in Germany, and made aliyah, where he was among the first generation of faculty members of the Hebrew University. Franz Rosenzweig, German-born Jewish philosopher, known to a restricted circle in his lifetime, eventually recognized as a key voice in Jewish thought of the twentieth century; translator of Jehuda Halevy and, in collaboration with Buber, of the Hebrew Scriptures; he has been onstage, if often unseen, from the opening lines of the Introduction. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, contemporary Jewish historian and theorist of Jewish memory, who had a leading role in chapter 2. Edmond Jabès, Egyptian Jewish French-language novelist and poet. Benjamin Zucker, Jewish gem merchant and contemporary novelist, devoted to Franz Kafka, Bob Dylan, and James Joyce. Elliot Wolfson, contemporary Jewish scholar of the Kabbalah; his conceptualization of the timeswerve figured in chapter 2 and returns as a key to chapter 3. S. Y. Agnon, Galician-born Jewish storyteller and novelist, a founding figure of Israeli fiction. Jehuda Halevi, Jewish poet and philosopher of medieval Iberia, who died en route to Zion. Jonathan Safran Foer, contemporary American Jewish novelist; husband of Nicole Krauss. Robert Frost, twentieth-century American poet, whose verse appeared in Mr. Engel’s sixth-grade lesson in the old Ardsley Middle School. Emmanuel Lévinas, Jewish philosopher and also teacher of Talmud outside the study house; born in Lithuania, studied in France, then Germany, finally returning to France; stands in relation to Jewish thought in a new key as Rosenzweig does to the current state of the question. Kadya Molodowsky, Jewish poet writing in Yiddish, born in Belarus, immigrated to the United States before the outbreak of the Second World War, and thereafter lived in both the newly founded State of Israel and the United States. 93 R. B. [Ronald Brooks] Kitaj, American-born Jewish painter, and author of two diasporist manifestos, long active in England, but returned to the United States in the wake of a controversy concerning his penchant for appending midrashic commentaries to his own paintings. Walter Benjamin, a Jew who fled Nazi Germany and then tried to flee farther from France, failed, and committed suicide at the Spanish border; philosopher, literary critic, cultural theorist; lifelong friend and correspondent of Gershom Scholem; a constant companion in my Jewish Studies classes. Cynthia Ozick, contemporary American Jewish fiction writer and sometime essayist. Michael Fishbane, contemporary American Jewish scholar of Bible and Midrash. Harold Bloom, contemporary American Jewish scholar of literature and literary theory, and my teacher. Gershom Scholem, Israeli Jewish scholar of Jewish mysticism, born in Germany; probably the most widely respected figure in Jewish Studies in the later twentieth century; lifelong friend and editor of Benjamin. Erich Reiss, him, I don’t know, as Robert De Niro tells Billy Crystal in Analyze This. Theodor Adorno, Jewish philosopher born in Germany, exiled in the United States during the Nazi years, returned to East Germany after the war. Gillian Rose, British Jewish philosopher, who made a deathbed conversion to Christianity. Joseph Green, Polish-born Jew who made his career as a director of Yiddish-language films in the United States. Severo Sarduy, in the summer of 1983, at a café in Paris just around the corner from the offices of the French publishing house Editions du Seuil, where he worked, and on the strength of an introduction by my teacher, Roberto González Echevarría, Sarduy told me a story: Gabriel García Márquez had been passing through Cuba not long before and stopped at the home of Sarduy’s parents to express to them his great esteem for their son’s novels and to ask, for that reason, if there were not something that he, García Márquez, might do for them, given the privileges of his position in the world of literature and in Cuba, owing to his unwavering support of the Revolution. He asked if he could buy them a new refrigerator, for instance. “But what would Jewish parents say?” Sarduy asked rhetorically. “We want to see our son. We’ll come back to Cuba. We promise. We just want to see our son. Can you arrange visas?” And so García Márquez did. “They’re arriving tomorrow,” Sarduy added, thereby explaining his need...