Project MUSE®: Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/181
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 9 (1990) through current issueLatest Articles: Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies1534-51650882-8539Latest articles in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®“In These Matters, I Lack Any Kind of Understanding”: A Queer Reading of Lea Goldberg’s Avedot
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989507
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In 2018, Michal Sapir’s unique prose work, Ha-rikud ha-moderni (The modern dance), was published, consisting of five different “chapters” (or sections), each focusing on one influential writer.1 The last section, titled “A Gray Light (‘Dedicated to Elvina’: a Shelved Novel),” centers on the Hebrew poet and author Lea Goldberg (1911–70), one of the most prominent figures in Hebrew literature. In fact, Sapir’s text revisits—and rewrites—Goldberg’s shelved 1930s novel Avedot (in English, “Losses”; the alternate title of the novel is “Dedicated to Antonia”).2 Originally written during the mid-late 1930s but first published only in 2010, Goldberg’s Avedot is set in Berlin in 1932–33, where its protagonist, Hebrew poet
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/181/image/coversmall“In These Matters, I Lack Any Kind of Understanding”: A Queer Reading of Lea Goldberg’s Avedot2026-05-01text/htmlen-US“In These Matters, I Lack Any Kind of Understanding”: A Queer Reading of Lea Goldberg’s Avedot2026-05-012026TWOProject MUSE®1001072026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-05-01Thomas Mann’s Jewish Homosexual Modernity: Wälsungenblut as a Poetological Novella
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989508
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Thomas mann’s novella wälsungenblut (the blood of the volsungs) starts with the sound of a “Tamtam” (GKFA 2.1, 429; or “gong,” 154, in the English translation),1 and aims toward its climax at its very end. In the interim, we are told the story of two twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, from the wealthy Aarenhold family, living in fin-desiècle Berlin. Sieglinde will be married within a week to a “civil servant” (156) named von Beckerath. The twins go to the opera together one last time to see Richard Wagner’s The Valkyrie. Returning home, they reenact, it seems, what they have seen in the opera:2 like the Volsung twins of the same names, they have sex with each other. Wälsungenblut has an adventurous publication history
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/181/image/coversmallThomas Mann’s Jewish Homosexual Modernity: Wälsungenblut as a Poetological Novella2026-05-01text/htmlen-USThomas Mann’s Jewish Homosexual Modernity: Wälsungenblut as a Poetological Novella2026-05-012026TWOProject MUSE®1215612026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-05-01Rage Against Europe: Uri Zvi Greenberg and the Emotional Work of Jewish Masculinity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989509
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Let us start from the end, and read backward. The Yiddish journal Albatros (1922 Warsaw–1923 Berlin) was unique and unrivaled in many ways. This uniqueness and its specific implications will be examined in this article, but to start from the last page of the last issue would be fitting, since—and this is the oddity—this final moment in print is a dedication. How strange is it to end the life of a journal with a dedication? This is what happened to Albatros, perhaps befitting such an intricate and exceptional publication. On the last page of the journal, its coda, are the only non-Yiddish words of the whole lifespan of Albatros. There lays a short, three-lined dedication that is a welcome call, all but redundant
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/181/image/coversmallRage Against Europe: Uri Zvi Greenberg and the Emotional Work of Jewish Masculinity2026-05-01text/htmlen-USRage Against Europe: Uri Zvi Greenberg and the Emotional Work of Jewish Masculinity2026-05-012026TWOProject MUSE®859622026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-05-01Queer Ahasver? The “Wandering Jew” in Early German Queer Magazine Culture (1896–1933)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989510
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“If you do not love me, you will end up like ahasver, the ‘wandering Jew’”—this, in short, is the quintessence of a short fictional text titled “Briefe an einen Freund” (Letters to a friend), published in the queer magazine Das Freundschaftsblatt (The journal of friendship) in 1926. What at first glance might seem like an odd, yet inconspicuous remark is rooted in a textual logic that sacralizes love between men. As such, it sheds light on how conceptions of relationships and kinship were negotiated in the literature of the first queer emancipation movement in Germany. References to the figure of Ahasver can be found several times in the movement’s journal culture, in fictional as well as nonfictional texts. Based
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/181/image/coversmallQueer Ahasver? The “Wandering Jew” in Early German Queer Magazine Culture (1896–1933)2026-05-01text/htmlen-USQueer Ahasver? The “Wandering Jew” in Early German Queer Magazine Culture (1896–1933)2026-05-012026TWOProject MUSE®1026212026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-05-01Queer Macaronic: Hebrew-German “Married Life” in David Vogel’s Prose
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989511
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On the cusp of his journey to vienna in 1912, david vogel, a young eastern European Jewish writer, found himself caught between languages. In his journal, he reflected in Hebrew on his relationship with both Hebrew and German, the two languages he had been studying that would shape his literary future, grappling with the ways they at once complement and collide:The days pass without me noticing [. . .] I teach lessons, and in my free time I study the Bible via the Ashkenazi [German] translation [. . .] at this moment, I am making progress in acquiring the Ashkenazi tongue; my vocabulary grows by the hour—and I am happy about it. I need to make myself fit to go to Vienna—in every sense; I need to shrink so I can
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/181/image/coversmallQueer Macaronic: Hebrew-German “Married Life” in David Vogel’s Prose2026-05-01text/htmlen-USQueer Macaronic: Hebrew-German “Married Life” in David Vogel’s Prose2026-05-012026TWOProject MUSE®1011962026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-05-01Homo Temporalis: German Jewish Thinkers on Time by Nitzan Lebovic (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989512
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The burden of lebovic’s stimulating and substantive book is to show that there exists a tradition of German Jewish philosophers who did not construe action in the world as existing through the lens of spatial categories. Instead, the “stateless” German Jews that Lebovic examines, “who opposed the territorial and demographic [read: spatial] language of Zionist settlers and [who] advocated instead for a confederative and pluralist solution” (4) all made use of temporal categories. In seeking to infuse new life into the category of the present (or the “now”), they broke decisively with political concepts that (on Lebovic’s account) gave rise to the horrors of the twentieth century:Instead of spatial categories such as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/181/image/coversmallHomo Temporalis: German Jewish Thinkers on Time by Nitzan Lebovic (review)2026-05-01text/htmlen-USHomo Temporalis: German Jewish Thinkers on Time by Nitzan Lebovic (review)2026-05-012026TWOProject MUSE®87032026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-05-01Jewish Studies and the Gospel of St. John by Zev Garber and Kenneth L. Hanson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989513
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In jewish studies and the gospel of st. john, zev garber and kenneth hanson have gathered a diverse group of scholars to present penetrating analyses of the Gospel of St. John and its impact on an evolving Christian view of Jews and Judaism. Garber describes the monograph as “an innovative Catholic-Protestant-Jew attempt to reconstruct old-new corrections for the Christian remembrance and observance of scriptural, liturgical, and ecclesial lessons related to the Fourth Gospel” (7). In addition to Garber and Hanson, the contributors are Herbert W. Basser, Eugene J. Fisher, Nathan Harpaz, Steven Leonard Jacobs, Yitzchak Kerem, Chris Seeman, and the late Norman Simms.In his essay “I Am: Torah, Testament, Testimony,”
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/181/image/coversmallJewish Studies and the Gospel of St. John by Zev Garber and Kenneth L. Hanson (review)2026-05-01text/htmlen-USJewish Studies and the Gospel of St. John by Zev Garber and Kenneth L. Hanson (review)2026-05-012026TWOProject MUSE®101312026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-05-01Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction by Karolina Krasuska (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989514
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In soviet-born, karolina krasuska maps the now established archive of contemporary writers who emigrated from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) to the United States and Canada in the 1970s, arriving on the literary scene about twenty years ago. The appearance of authors like Gary Shteyngart, David Bezmozgis, and Lara Vapynar, among many others, signaled for some critics (myself included) a generation of new “immigrant” writers whose novels and stories engaged, as they refashioned, the core Jewish American literary themes of anxious arrival to a new world and the fraught, yet often comic ordeal of assimilation. In this respect, the unforeseen emergence of Soviet-born writers appeared to overturn what Irving Howe
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/181/image/coversmallSoviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction by Karolina Krasuska (review)2026-05-01text/htmlen-USSoviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction by Karolina Krasuska (review)2026-05-012026TWOProject MUSE®137962026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-05-01Cover Artist’s Statement
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989515
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Regarding my artwork the serpentess lifted me, which appears on the cover of Shofar 43.3: The Hebrew text “The Serpentess Lifted Me” is from the regendered version of the traditional Genesis story of the Garden of Eden (Bereshit 3:13). Through the regendering of this story, Beit Toratah provides language to shift out of the patriarchal paradigm into more expansive storytelling. Instead of “the serpent tricked me” [into eating from the tree of knowledge] the words are “the serpent lifted me” [and now the meaning of life and death, of good and evil have been revealed to me].
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/181/image/coversmallCover Artist’s Statement2026-05-01text/htmlen-USCover Artist’s Statement2026-05-012026TWOProject MUSE®23282026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-05-01Introduction: The Editors and Tamar Hess
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989516
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The editors of shofar are pleased to present this special issue devoted to Queer Jewish Modernism. This publication grew out of “Jewish Homosexual Modernism in the German Speaking World and in Mandatory Palestine/Israel,” a project conducted by a joint research group with scholars from Humboldt University of Berlin and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and led by literary scholars Andreas Kraß and Tamar Hess, and historian Moshe Sluhovsky. This work was generously funded by the Einstein Foundation Berlin from January 2020 to December 2022.The articles in this issue explore the thesis that between 1890 and 1945 a corpus of literary texts—a “Jewish Homosexual Modernism”—came into being in the German cultural
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/181/image/coversmallIntroduction: The Editors and Tamar Hess2026-05-01text/htmlen-USIntroduction: The Editors and Tamar Hess2026-05-012026TWOProject MUSE®65342026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-05-01