Unsettling Difference: Music Drama, the Bible, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity (Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought)

Synopsis

Unsettling Difference challenges the major-minor pattern that has framed discussions of German Jewish difference, focusing on instances that fall outside traditional understandings of minority culture. Exploring expressions of Jewish identity and difference in biblical-themed musical dramas and their literary sources, Adi Nester argues that the issue of Jewish difference should be treated as an aesthetic question in the first half of the twentieth century, even amid the rise of pseudoscientific theories about race and blood.Drawing on the fraught, parallel histories of opera and the modern reception of the Hebrew Bible in Germany, both significant in debates at the time about the nature of Jewish separateness, Unsettling Difference shows how this discourse troubles concepts of Jewish marginality and (non-Jewish) German dominance. Through innovative readings of key works in this tradition—Rudolf Borchardt's poem, Das Buch Joram; Paul Ben-Haim's oratorio, Joram; Arnold Schoenberg's opera, Moses und Aron; Joseph Roth's novel, Hiob; and Eric Zeisl's opera, Hiob—Nester shows how these biblical adaptations foreground alternative notions of difference that rely on confusion, ambiguity, radical heterogeneity, excess, and repetition.

Copyright:

2020

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

Book Size:

294 Pages

ISBN-13:

9781501779701

Related ISBNs:

9781501779695, 9781501779671, 9781501779688

Publisher:

Cornell University Press

Date of Addition:

01/15/25

Copyrighted By:

American Association of Teachers of German.

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Religion and Spirituality, Social Studies, Drama, Plays and Theater, Language Arts

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.