The focus of this volume is on essential themes, images and generic patterns, beginning with a Talmudic legend about four scholars. They, by means of daring mystical interpretations of Scripture, entered a Paradise, representing different means of imaginative reading, perception, memory and application of the law. One of them died, one went mad, another became a heretic and the other came back as a traditional exegete and teacher. Based on that legend, this book examines a small group of late 19th and early 20th century European Jewish intellectuals and artists in the light of their dreams, writings, and moments of crisis. These men and women, comedians in both the sense of stage actors and clowns or witty performers, believed they had entered a new secular and tolerant society, but discovered that there was no escape from their Jewish heritage and way of seeing the world. This monograph looks into the imperfect mirror of cultural experience, discovers a hazy world of illusions, dreams and nightmares on the other side of the looking glass, and sometimes constructs a midrashic conceit of the comical and grotesque screen between them.

These further six chapters of Jews in an Illusion of Paradise now focus on individual exemplary figures and clusters of poets, dramatists, critics, journalists, art historians—Jews whose achievements were once celebrated, but now are almost all but forgotten, not because of changes in aesthetic taste or style but because of social, political and other ideological issues. The book continues to examine the clash between their conscious and unconscious self-presentation as Jews in a culture that wilfully or inadvertently misunderstood or rejected this aspect of “otherness” the men and women represented from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Whereas the first volume concentrated on the themes, images and rhetorical motifs of this awkward status of Jewish intellectuals and artists, here the ambiguous personalities and repressed anxieties of the exemplary figures are stressed. For millennia, Jews were considered outside of normal history, passive victims of persecution; then suddenly, with Emancipation, they fell into history and out of their mythical place in the scheme of things. Everything seemed to crumble into dust and ashes.

A child born in an east European Jewish community retains his memory of life in Paradise in this novel based on Yiddish folklore.

"Uses Roth's novels as springboards to illuminate larger problematics of victimization, gender, racism and anti-Semitism"--

Presents an encyclopedia of Jewish culture from 1973 to 2005, including secular and religious examples from the visual arts, literature, and popular culture.

International Bestseller: “A moody, tightly constructed historical thriller . . . a good mystery story and an effective evocation of a faraway time and place.” —The New York Times After Jews living in sixteenth-century Portugal are dragged to the baptismal font and forced to convert to Christianity, many of these New Christians persevere in their Jewish prayers and rituals in secret and at great risk; the hidden, arcane practices of the kabbalists, a mystical sect of Jews, continue as well. One such secret Jew is Berekiah Zarco, an intelligent young manuscript illuminator. Inflamed by love and revenge, he searches, in the crucible of the raging pogrom, for the killer of his beloved uncle Abraham, a renowned kabbalist, discovered murdered in a hidden synagogue along with a young girl in dishabille. Risking his life in streets seething with mayhem, Berekiah tracks down answers among Christians, New Christians, Jews, and the fellow kabbalists of his uncle, whose secret language and codes by turns light and obscure the way to the truth he seeks. A marvelous story, a challenging mystery, and a telling tale of the evils of intolerance, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon both compels and entertains. “The story moves quickly . . . a literary and historical treat.” —Library Journal ''Remarkable . . . The fever pitch of intensity Zimler maintains is at times overwhelming but never less than appropriate to the Hieronymous Bosch-like landscape he describes. Simultaneously, though, he is able to capture, within the bedlam, quiet moments of tenderness and love.” —Booklist (starred review)