Description
Book SynopsisWallace Stevens' dark rabbi, from his poem "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle", provides a title for this work on modern Jewish poetry in English. Norman Finkelstein here offers a passionate argument for the importance of Jewish-American poetry to modern Jewish culture—and to American poetry.
Trade ReviewDark Rabbi's richness is the way it contains this multi-dimensional, contradictory, sacred and profane, but always throbbingly alive poetics. It might be likened to a mysterious broad river never content to flow in just one coherent direction. . . . In his scholarly wanderings, Finkelstein has constructed an exemplary crooked bridge across which Jewish culture and Jewish life merge. --Robert Hirschfield, The Canadian Jewish News, January 30, 2020
...with all the alarming simplifications of religion in the public square, the best thing about Finkelstein's book is that it teases out its deeper meanings, especially, here, in its entanglements with poetry. I enjoyed and learned from this book of essays, and better still, discovered a few poets I'll be following from now on. --Joe Safdie, Dispatches From the Poetry Wars, January 17, 2020
Table of ContentsPreface
1. Introduction: Two Shapiros: Thoughts On Poetry and Secular Jewish Culture
2. Ghosts of Yiddish; or, Postvernacularity in Jewish American Poetry
3. Charles Reznikoff: Modernism, Diaspora, and the Problem of Jewish Identity
4. Allen Grossman and the Poetry of Holiness
5. Michael Heller: Between the Sacred and the Profane
6. Chana Bloch: Surfaces and Depths
7. "The darker wisdom of the Jews": Henry Weinfield's Dialectical Irony
8. Rachel Tzvia Back: Between Israel and the Diaspora
9. Dark Rabbis and Secret Jews
10. Afterword: "Diasporas of Imperfection"
