Exemplary Bodies

Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture, 1880s to 2008

Inbunden, Engelska, 2009

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This book explores the construction of the Jew's physical and ontological body in Russian culture as represented in literature, film, and non-literary texts from the 1880s to the present. With the rise of the dominance of biological and racialist discourse in the 1880s, the depiction of Jewish characters in Russian literary and cultural productions underwent a significant change, as these cultural practices recast the Jew not only as an archetypal 'exotic' and religious or class Other (as in Romanticism and realist writing), but as a biological Other whose acts, deeds, and thoughts were determined by racial differences. This Jew allegedly had physical and psychological characteristics that were genetically determined and that could not be changed by education, acculturation, conversion to Christianity, or change of social status. This stereotype has become a stable archetype that continues to operate in contemporary Russian society and culture.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2009-11-19
Mått155 x 234 x 24 mm
Vikt585 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieBorderlines: Russian and East European-Jewish Studies
Antal sidor300
FörlagAcademic Studies Press
ISBN9781934843390

Tillhör följande kategorier

Introduction; Russian Anthropological & Biological Sciences & Jewish "Race," 1860s-1930; Stereotypes of Pathology: The Medicalization of the Jewish Body by Anton Chekhov, 1880s; Carnal Jews of the Fin-de-Siecle: Vasily Rozanov, the Jewish Body, & Incest; Ilya Ehrenburg & His Picaresque Jewish Bodies of the 1920s; Criminal Bodies & Love of The Yellow Metal: The Jewish Male & Stalinist Culture, 1930s-1950s; Sadists' Bodies of the Anti-Zionist Campaign Era: 1960s-1970s; Glasnost & the Uncensored Sexed Body of the Jew; The Repatriated Body: A Russian Jewish Woman Writer in Israel, or the Corporeal Fantasy of Dina Rubins, 1990s to the Present; The Jewish Patient: Alexander Goldstein & the Post-modern Russian Jewish Body in Israel, 2000s; The "Real" Jewish Bodies of Oligarchs: Important Jewish Personalities & Post-Soviet Corporophobia; The Post-Soviet Assault on the Jew's Body: The New Racial Science; Conclusion; Index of Names; Index of Subjects.

"Henrietta Mondry’s Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture since the 1880s is one of the most important books to appear in the burgeoning field of Russian-Jewish studies this decade. Taking seriously the problematics of real Jews in the Russian speaking lands, Mondry examines the fantasies about their bodies in writings from Anton Chekhov to the new Russian racial science of the 2000s. This is a readable and engaging study offering methodological and critical insights into anti-Semitism and its images. It provides the reader with a detailed understanding of the function of such images over the past century from Romanoff Russia through the short and bloody history of the USSR to Putin’s Russia. It gives one pause about the continuities in Russian images of the Jew into the future."