Bruno Schulz’s Poetics of Golus

On the Polish language as a medium for diasporic modernism

For many readers, Bruno Schulz‘s interwar short story collections evoke the memory of Jewish life in Poland before the Holocaust. To Karen Underhill, Schulz’s stylistically innovative writing is also a movement through transient forms—the Polish language and childhood experiences in interwar Poland—into the exegetical “margins” of Jewish tradition." Recently, Underhill ...
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Bruno Schulz’s Poetics of Golus

Paul Gilroy: Race and ‘Useful Violence’

Aimé Césaire called it: the so-called west is a decaying civilization. In both the United States and Europe, where institutions are receding, a base level of race-talk and racial solidarity is revealed as metastasizing beneath them. In such dim times, I turn to the writings of Paul Gilroy as offering ...
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Paul Gilroy: Race and ‘Useful Violence’

Israel and the Jewish Diaspora

In 1990 the scholar David Vital wrote how Jews in the Diaspora and Jews in Israel were heading in different directions. For better or for worse, this observation is proving to be increasingly accurate. For many Diaspora Jews, however, this direction of travel is undesirable. There exists a strong bond ...

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Israel and the Jewish Diaspora