Jewish Frontiers Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities

Jewish history has generally been understood as the history of a people displaced from their homeland, and this has played a defining role in how we understand Jewish identity. Looking at the representation of Jews and Jewishness in film, literature, and history, Gilman suggests that we study Jewish history as the story of people living on a 'frontier,' instead of focusing on 'diaspora.'

Sander L. Gilman is Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago and Director of the Humanites Laboratory. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over sixty books. He lives in Chicago.

Preface * Introduction: The Frontier as a Model for Jewish History * Part I: Representing the Shoah at the Frontier * The First Comic Film about the Shoah: Jurek Becker and Cultural Opposition within the GDR * Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny? On the Frontier between Acceptable and Unacceptable Representations of the Holocaust in Some Newer and Older Films * Part II: Diseases and Boundaries * Smoking Jews on the Frontier * A French Frontier: Proust's Nose * A Dream of Jewishness on the Frontier: Kafka's Tumor and "A Country Doctor" * Private Knowledge: Jewish Illnesses and the Process of Identity Formation * Part III: Jewish Bodies on the Multicultural Frontier * "We're Not Jews": Imagining Jewish History and Jewish Bodies in Contemporary Multicultural Literature * Notes * Supplemental Reading * Index