Space and Place in Jewish Studies - (Key Words in Jewish Studies) by Barbara E Mann (Paperback)

About the Book

Space and Place in Jewish Studies embraces how notions of "Jewish space," diaspora, and home continue to resonate within contemporary discourse, bringing space to the foreground as a practical and analytical category. Barbara Mann takes us on a journey from medieval Levantine trade routes to the Eastern European shtetl to the streets of contemporary New York, introducing readers to the variety of ways in which Jews have historically formed communities and created a sense of place for themselves. Combining cutting-edge theory with rabbinics, anthropology, and literary analysis, Mann offers a fresh take on the Jewish experience.

Book Synopsis

Scholars in the humanities have become increasingly interested in questions of how space is produced and perceived-and they have found that this consideration of human geography greatly enriches our understanding of cultural history. This "spatial turn" equally has the potential to revolutionize Jewish Studies, complicating familiar notions of Jews as "people of the Book," displaced persons with only a common religious tradition and history to unite them.

Space and Place in Jewish Studies embraces these exciting critical developments by investigating what "space" has meant within Jewish culture and tradition-and how notions of "Jewish space," diaspora, and home continue to resonate within contemporary discourse, bringing space to the foreground as a practical and analytical category. Barbara Mann takes us on a journey from medieval Levantine trade routes to the Eastern European shtetl to the streets of contemporary New York, introducing readers to the variety of ways in which Jews have historically formed communities and created a sense of place for themselves. Combining cutting-edge theory with rabbinics, anthropology, and literary analysis, Mann offers a fresh take on the Jewish experience.

Review Quotes

"Space and Place in Jewish Studies is a valuable introduction to the roles that locations, real and imagined, have played in Jewish historical experiences, literary and artistic works, and scholarship."
-- "Sh'ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility"

"Written in an engaging and accessible style, Mann's contribution to the Key Words in Jewish Studies series from Rutgers University Press offers a rich and carefully historicized meditation on the relevance of contemporary spatial theory to Jewish cultural analysis... Full of fresh insight, and establishing a spatial lexicon that compellingly reveals the extent to which time and space are mutually imbricated in Jewish culture, Space and Place in Jewish Studies is bound to become an essential reference for Jewish studies students and scholars."-- "Studies in American Jewish Literature"

About the Author

BARBARA E. MANN is an associate professor of Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. She is the author of A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space and co-editor in-chief of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.