The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America - Softcover

Freedman, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195151992 ISBN 13: 9780195151992

Publisher: Oxford University Press USA, 2000

Synopsis

From the beginning of modern intellectual history to the culture wars of the present day, the experience of assimilating Jews and the idiom of "culture" have been fundamentally intertwined with each other. Freedman's book begins by looking at images of the stereotypical Jew in the literary culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and America, and then considers the efforts on the part of Jewish critics and intellectuals to counter this image in the public sphere. It explores the unexpected parallels and ironic reversals between a cultural dispensation that had ambivalent responses to Jews and Jews who became exponents of that very tradition.

About this title

Review:

Where The Temple of Culture differs markedly from the usual accounts of literary anti-Semitism is that it also explores the response of Jewish individuals (academics, publishers and New York freethinkers) to the manifold discourses which brought together Jews and culture in increasingly odd conjunctions ... Achieves a great deal in a relatively short but remarkably intelligent book ... has, it is to be hoped, changed the terms of debate away from the many heated and fruitless exchanges which have steadfastly ignored the fundamental ambivalences which remain at the heart of Anglo-American culture. (Times Literary Supplement)

From the Publisher:

Reviewed by : Times Literary Supplement.
`Jonathan Freeman's account of Anglo-American literary anti-Semitism is rightly suspicious of ... too easy distinctions which lead, routinely, to the denigration of a colonial England at the expense of a more open and liberal United States.' Bryan Cheyette, TLS

`One of the strengths of The Temple of Culture is that it situates the language of racial difference within the cultural sphere' Bryan Cheyette, TLS

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0195151992
• ISBN 13: 9780195151992
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280