Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofJewish American Literature
- The Cambridge History ofJewish American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Book part
- Introduction
- Part I New World Encounters
- Part II Genres: Adopting, Adapting, Reinventing
- Part III Place and Peoplehood: Redefining “Here” and “There”
- Beyond America
- 13 Hebrew in America
- 14 Ladino in U.S. Literature and Song
- 15 Writing and Remembering Jewish Middle Eastern Pasts
- 16 The Ghost of the Holocaust in the Construction of Jewish American Literature
- 17 Israel in the Jewish American Imagination
- American Sites
- Part IV Creating Fields
- Part V New Perspectives
- Bibliography
- Index
13 - Hebrew in America
from Beyond America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2015
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Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofJewish American Literature
- The Cambridge History ofJewish American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Book part
- Introduction
- Part I New World Encounters
- Part II Genres: Adopting, Adapting, Reinventing
- Part III Place and Peoplehood: Redefining “Here” and “There”
- Beyond America
- 13 Hebrew in America
- 14 Ladino in U.S. Literature and Song
- 15 Writing and Remembering Jewish Middle Eastern Pasts
- 16 The Ghost of the Holocaust in the Construction of Jewish American Literature
- 17 Israel in the Jewish American Imagination
- American Sites
- Part IV Creating Fields
- Part V New Perspectives
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe carried some Hebraists to the United States, adding New York City to the major centers of Hebrew literary production. By the end of the nineteenth century, Hebrew writers in America included Naphtali Hertz Imber, whose poem Hatikvah later became the Israeli national anthem. In the introduction to his 1938 anthology of Hebrew poetry in America, Menachem Ribalow described the rise of modernism as a storm swept through all literatures and rocked the foundations of poetry. In the early 1920s, Hillel Bavli published a series of five articles on contemporary American poetry that shows how difficult it was for the Hebrew poet in America to see Anglo-American modernism as a resource and a model. To the extent that a new flowering of Hebrew culture in America such as the Hebraists accomplished is at all conceivable, it would be an extension of Israeli literature and not a center in its own right.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature , pp. 281 - 296Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015