472 research outputs found
Amy Levy Collected Writings
No full textAmy Levy’s writings belong to a tradition in Jewish literature characteristic of the modern Diaspora. This marginalized literature was formulated in the context of the Haskalah and the rise of Zionism and political emancipation. Levy’s writing, expressed in the vernacular beyond the typical Yiddish and Hebrew, was further influenced by her national context of imperialism, social Darwinism, and insidious antisemitism. Her novels, short stories, poetry, and essays thus reflect not only Levy’s sense of being Jewish, but also her struggle with hegemonic Christianity, antisemitism, and nationalist social, political, and literary cultures. In placing this collection – which includes many texts that will be new not only to readers but also to scholars interested in Levy’s life – in its diasporic, modern, and late-Victorian context, we continue the process of piecing together and further understanding Levy’s biography and her complex relationship with her Jewish identity and Jewish history, with biblical and literary traditions, and with Anglo-Jewish communal politics. In addition to reinspiring interest in Levy, her multi-layered writings, and her incisive sense of humour, Collected Writings aims to provide something that Levy perhaps never enjoyed in her own lifetime: a sense of belonging to a tradition of modern Jewish literature
From Anglo-First-Wave Towards American Second-Wave Jewish Feminism : Negotiating with Jewish Theology and its Commitments in the Writing of Amy Levy and Lily Montagu
No full textFrom Anglo-First-Wave towards American Second-Wave Jewish Feminism: Negotiating with Jewish Feminist Theology and its Communities in the Writing of Amy Levy and Lily Montagu (June 2010), by Luke Devine. Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
This doctoral thesis seeks to elucidate the relationship between the fin de siecle Anglo-Jewish writing of Amy Levy and Lily Montagu and SecondWave Jewish feminist theory and activism. The thesis does not claim that Second-Wave feminists were wholly unaware of this earlier stage of activism, but rather that the conceptual - as opposed to historical - links between the two phases are under-examined. Accordingly, the thesis calls into question assumptions that the rise of Jewish feminist theology can be predominantly situated in 1970s America through the work of Rachel Adler, Marcia Falk, and Judith Plaskow. Instead, the study demonstrates that the possibility of Jewish feminist theology, and aspects of Jewish feminist spirituality and theory, should also be traced to England, particularly in Levy's midrashic poetry, and Montagu's figuration of the feminine aspect of the divine presence, the Shekhinah.
This hypothesis is substantiated first by locating the writing and activism of Amy Levy and Lily Montagu within their historical context, and in doing so, seeks to challenge historiographical estimations of Levy's religiosity, and assumptions about the marginality of Montagu's role in the rise of Liberal Judaism. In opposition to much of the extant historiography, the thesis demonstrates that Levy's writing is less anti-Judaic and more profoundly inflected by the religious concerns of German Reform Judaism than has previously been supposed. While Levy incorporates aspects of the religious tradition such as Messianic redemption, Montagu, rather than being intellectually reliant on Claude Montefiore, developed proto-feminist theological discourse utilising both the rabbinic and mystical traditions. Both of these women's writings constitute a genre whose female subjectivity evidences a concern for justice and authority that prefigures numerous aspects of Second-Wave Jewish feminist theory and its spiritual, theological, and theoretical underpinnings.
As this abstract suggests, my research invites some reappraisal of Amy Levy as an alienated Anglo-Jewish woman unable to locate the divine presence in the tradition, or in the Reform and Orthodox institutions of her day, yet unwilling to compromise her spirituality, or for that matter, her Jewishness. Likewise, my study encourages reassessment of Lily Montagu - her theological writing, her activism, and her role in the Liberal Jewish movement- demonstrating that, like Levy, she was unable to locate the divine presence in a purely masculinist theology, and was as much concerned as Levy to broaden the definition of Jewish spirituality to incorporate the needs and aspirations of assimilated women estranged by the androcentrism of the tradition's sacred texts, liturgies, and halakhic practice
Active/Passive, ‘Diminished’/‘Beautiful’, ‘Light’ from Above and Below: Rereading Shekhinah’s Sexual Desire in Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim (Song of Songs)
No full textIn Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim, the Zohar’s reading of Song of Songs, Shekhinah, echoing themes associated with the Shulamite of the biblical text, consistently initiates cosmic union. Sexual desire in the zoharic texts is a form of capital necessary to facilitate sefirotic intercourse, although scholarly readings of the zoharic corpus often identify Shekhinah as a passive receptacle. This, however, is only true if the endemic contradictions within the texts are glossed over. In Song of Songs, the Shulamite’s sexual ‘initiative’ is core. This was not lost on the author(s) of Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim, who, in struggling to explain Shekhinah’s sefirotic role in line with the erotics of Song of Songs, inescapably echoed the ‘depatriarchalizing’ themes of the biblical text. As this article demonstrates, in Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim, Shekhinah is active and repeatedly encourages and frustrates cosmic sexual intercourse. Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim shows that it is possible to reread Shekhinah’s role beyond the androcentrism of the authors as well as scholarly assumptions about her passivity
Psychological predictors in context: an empirical study of interactions between determinants of car use intentions
No full textThis paper is from the PhD work of Wall, the lead author, supervised by Devine-Wright and Mill.
The work described here and in Output 1, and other parts of the thesis from which they were derived, was extensively cited in the DfT (2006) report “An Evidence Base Review of Public Attitudes to Climate Change and Transport Behaviour”
Post-secondary planning paradoxes: how regular kids prepare for the future in the college-for-all era
No full textThis dissertation examines the interactional processes that lead to stratified post-secondary planning and outcomes among high school students. In contrast to most sociological research on education, I study “regular” students, neither the overachievers nor those at risk of dropping out. I address how the mundane details of students’ daily lives are patterned to produce and reproduce systems of privilege. In the first of two waves of research, I interviewed 28 New Jersey counselors. In the second wave, I spent two years shadowing students through 11th and 12th grades at one racially and socioeconomically diverse high school in the suburban fringe of New York City. Multiple ethnographic methods included focus groups, school-day shadowing and repeated interviews of 17 focal students, and interviews with teachers, parents, counselors, and administrators. I argue that students’ lives are structured by a series of paradoxes, beginning with the college-for-all paradox: we expect all students to go to college, and yet fewer than half do. I explore a number of sub-paradoxes that structure student experience in high school. First, some counselors employ a pedagogical role; they scaffold post-secondary planning to foster a “dependent independence” that makes it (incorrectly) appear that students are doing it on their own. Second, New Jersey High School (NJHS) sends a series of complex mixed messages about college in response to a student body with diverse post-secondary outcomes. Mixed messages appear in formal and informal interactions and in the school’s institutional structures. NJHS tells students that college is for everyone, but it’s actually not for all of them. Third, students must navigate through these vague messages to figure out where they fit vis-à-vis their classmates and how that might inform their post-secondary plans. They must do this in a cultural space in which they are just learning which comparisons are acceptable and which must be left implicit. These strategies allow students to adjust their expectations while absolving teachers and counselors from giving advice that is difficult to hear. This leaves students with often mistaken impressions of solid college plans, and they thereby come to understand not going to college as a personal failure.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Audrey Elizabeth Devine Elle
Equity: Conscience Goes to Market by Irit Samet
No full textIn first-year Contract Law, I was mildly bemused to learn that from approximately the fourteenth to nineteenth century, England found itself with two separate court systems dispensing two separate bodies of law. There was the familiar, predictable Common Law, and then there was “Equity,” dishing out relief to deserving parties as a matter of good “conscience.” To the green law student who expected this profession to provide hardline rules, Equity’s doctrines appeared annoyingly vague. Further, it seemed incongruous with the rule of law (ROL) that, even after the fusion of the two court systems, Equity endured as a doctrinally distinct body of law
How Shekhinah Became the God(dess) of Jewish Feminism
No full textShekhinah, the ‘cloud of Yahweh’ in the Bible, a synonym for God’s presence in the rabbinic tradition, and a feminine hypostasis in the Kabbalah, is a popular theological image in contemporary Jewish feminist circles. Shekhinah currently exists in many forms: she is another name for God, feminine, relational, experiential; she is a Goddess and the singular image that is sufficiently adaptable for a diverse range of postmodern feminist interpreters. However, the processes by which Shekhinah
became the God/dess of Jewish feminism have not been researched. Therefore, this article tracks the evolution of Shekhinah iconography in the Jewish tradition to gain an understanding of the appeal of these images within the context of Jewish feminism’s quest for an alternative to the androcentric Holy One, blessed be He. The article then traces the extent of Shekhinah theologies engendered by Second, Third-Wave and recent Jewish feminisms concluding that the plurality of contemporary spirituality and the general rejection of ‘systematic’ models of theology are not necessarily problematic. Rather, Shekhinah is argued to be a binding agent for diverse religionists, and one which has become normative to Jewish feminist theology
“I Sleep, but My Heart Waketh”: Contiguity between Heinrich Heine's Imago of the Shulamite and Amy Levy's “Borderland”
No full text“Borderland,” by Amy Levy (1861–89), a refiguring of the
Song of Songs’ traditional allegory, reverses Song 5:2–6’s climax in which the Shulamite unwittingly neglects the advances of her “beloved” while he waits at the door. In “Borderland,” the Shulamite “lover” assumes the initiative by visiting her “beloved,” while he is instead passive. The diverse ways in which “Borderland” can be read reveal contiguity with “Das Hohelied” and “Lyrisches Intermezzo”
by German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), texts also dependent on the Songs of Songs. Indeed, Heine was Levy’s “favourite poet”; “Borderland” accordingly reflects her reading of Heine and the employment of similar poetics, though not necessarily continuity or unoriginality. This article therefore looks for what Dan Miron has labelled
“literary contiguity,” a process by which “tangible contacts” between “players” in the “modern Jewish literary complex” are identified. This approach identifies “relatedness” between Heine and Levy, but also acknowledges the “differences.
Law & Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State by Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule
No full textAs the argument goes: Over the last hundred years or so, Congress has steadily delegated away its law-making responsibility through broad grants of rule-making and discretionary authority to an unelected and unaccountable federal bureaucracy. And the US Court, in decisions such as Chevron and Auer v Robbins, has similarly relinquished any right it once asserted to oversee the interpretation and performance of that delegated authority. On this reading, the sprawling federal administrative apparatus, which touches on virtually every aspect of American life, exists in contravention of the proper division of powers under the Constitution and is, therefore, not legitimate. In Law & Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State (“Law & Leviathan”), Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule set out to confront this (in their view, exaggerated) narrative and to inspire some conservative confidence in the administrative state
Warrior dreams: playing Scotsmen in mainland Europe, 1945 – 2010
No full textAt the beginning of the twenty first century, thousands of adult
Europeans are playing Scotsmen. They dress up in kilts and
tartan, parade in military-style bagpipe bands, toss tree trunks
at Highland Games, commemorate Scottish soldiers of the past,
and re-enact their vision of Scottish history at ‘Celtic’ and
medieval fairs. Their largest festivals attract more than 25 000
people each year, and their more elaborate clubs are recognised
by Scottish Clan chiefs.
The ‘Scots’ of Europe do not usually claim to be Scottish –
neither by birth, descent, or residence. Their performances are
Scottish masquerades, and openly declared so. Unlike their
cousins in North America and Australasia, the European
impersonators only very rarely insist that their Scottish
performances express their ‘ethnic’ identity.
And yet, the European masquerade is a quest for roots and
ancestors, too. This study demonstrates that by playing
Scotsmen, the ‘Scots’ of Europe attempt to reconnect with their
Celtic, Nordic, or otherwise pre-modern heritage. They feel that
their own customs, songs, games, and tribes were lost to the
forces of modernisation – but that some of it survived in the
Scottish periphery. They employ Scotland as a site of memory,
as ersatz history.
This thesis is a study of European nostalgia. It examines the
many men and women who attempt to rediscover their
traditions and histories. It is concerned with what Jay Winter
calls the ‘memory boom’; the growing public preoccupation with
history and its remembrance. It argues that Scotland – or
rather, dreams of Scotland – have a special resonance in the
European memory boom.
This study touches upon the fields of public history, memory,
and festive culture. In order to understand how the past is
remembered and re-imagined in Europe today, the author left
the archive and questioned the commemorators. This study
relies on original fieldwork conducted in Belgium, France,
Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Scotland
during 2009 and 2010. The thesis’ focus is a qualitative one
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