When searching for the perfect title for her work, Barbara Kingsolver explains this defining process, or possible dilemma, in the back of her latest novel The Lacuna: “A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all, it is the jump-off place into wonder.” Authors, like Kingsolver, map …
Category: Essay
Be Like Us, and You Will Become One of Us: The Jew Store and the Double Bind
Sander L. Gilman’s Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews offers an in-depth, theoretical view on Jewish assimilation into American culture, shedding perspective on particular areas where Jews struggled to maintain an old identity, while simultaneously trying to establish a new one in a culture where Jews were seen as insignificant, or …