Et in Ashkenazia ego: Utopias of the Holocaust?

This article interrogates examples of alternative histories in contemporary British Jewish writing which redraw and reinterpret the topography of the Holocaust. More specifically, it explores the tensions which arise in Clive Sinclair’s short story ‘Ashkenazia’ (1980) and Dan Jacobson’s novel The God-Fearer (1992) between notions of a Jewish heterotopia, the re-inscription of historical topographies, and the imaginary of the Holocaust. Set in an imaginary Jewish state, which is mapped onto the pre-existing Jewish topography of the loosely defined Ashkenaz of historical reality, both texts unfold alternative histories which, though imagined, nevertheless cannot un-think the historical occurrence of the Holocaust

Between or Beyond? Jewish British Short Stories in English since the 1970s

Looking at short stories by writers as diverse as Brian Glanville, James Lasdun, Jonathan Wilson, Ruth Fainlight, Clive Sinclair, Jonathan Wilson, James Lasdun, Gabriel Josipovici, Tamar Yellin, Michelene Wandor, and Naomi Alderman, and extending from the center of British Jewish British writing to its margins, the article seeks to locate the defining feature of their ‘Jewish substratum’ in conditions particular to the Jewish post-war experience, and to trace its impact across their thematic plurality which, for the most part, transcends any specifically British concerns that may also emerge, opening up an Anglophone sphere of Jewish writing. More specifically, it is argued that the dis-easeunease pervading so many British Jewish British short stories since the 1970s is a product of, and response to, what may very broadly be described as the Jewish experience and the precarious circumstances of Jewish existence even after the Second World War and its cataclysmic impact. It is suggested that it is prompted in particular by the persistence of the Holocaust and the anxieties the historical event continues to produce; by the confrontation with competing patterns of identification, with antisemitism, and with Israel; and by anxieties of non-belonging, of fragmentation, of dislocation, and of dissolution. Turned into literary tropes, these experiences provide the basis of a Jewish substratum whose articulation is facilitated by the expansion of Jewish British writers into the space of Anglophone Jewish writing. As a result, the British Jewish British short story emerges as a multifaceted and hybrid project in continuous progress

"Historical Argument" or "Cowboys and Indian"? Arnold Wesker's TV Screenplay of Arthur Koestler's Thieves in the Night

In October 1989, a TV adaptation of Arthur Koestler’s novel Thieves in the Night (1946) was aired in three parts in Germany. The final script of the German-Israeli co-production was written by Wolfgang Storch who also directed the mini-series. An earlier version of the screenplay had been commissioned by the German TV and radio station NDR from the British Jewish playwright Arnold Wesker. Based on the copious archival material held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin which includes the original drafts of the author’s scripts and his correspondence relating to the project, this article explores Wesker’s involvement in the production from 1983 to 1985 and the eventual publication of an extract from the dramatist’s third draft in the Jewish Chronicle in 1986. Wesker’s screenplay was ultimately rejected because his conception of a “historical argument” was not compatible with the “cowboys and Indian version” which, in the dramatist’s words, was expected of him. It is argued that the increasingly acrimonious relationship between the screenwriter, the originally retained director François Villiers, and various producers originated not only in conflicting approaches to the commercial and artistic dimensions of the project but also in divergent perceptions of the position of Israel and its history and that it reveals different strategies of instrumentalising the literary text and its TV adaptation for an understanding of the present

Writ(h)ing Images: Imagination, the Human Form, and the Divine in William Blake, Salman Rushdie, and Simon Louvish

In this paper, we address issues in segmentation Of remotely sensed LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging) data. The LIDAR data, which were captured by airborne laser scanner, contain 2.5 dimensional (2.5D) terrain surface height information, e.g. houses, vegetation, flat field, river, basin, etc. Our aim in this paper is to segment ground (flat field)from non-ground (houses and high vegetation) in hilly urban areas. By projecting the 2.5D data onto a surface, we obtain a texture map as a grey-level image. Based on the image, Gabor wavelet filters are applied to generate Gabor wavelet features. These features are then grouped into various windows. Among these windows, a combination of their first and second order of statistics is used as a measure to determine the surface properties. The test results have shown that ground areas can successfully be segmented from LIDAR data. Most buildings and high vegetation can be detected. In addition, Gabor wavelet transform can partially remove hill or slope effects in the original data by tuning Gabor parameters

Screaming 'Black' Murder: Crime Fiction and the Construction of Ethnic Identities

A significant segment of crime fiction is concerned with the representation of ethnic identities and may to some extent be considered paradigmatic of the participation of literary texts in discourses on race and minorities. This article explores constructions of ethnic identities in American, British, and South African crime fiction from the 1920s to the early twenty-first century. In particular, the focus will be on such texts in which the ethno-cultural identity of the detective gives special prominence not only to the ethnic particularity of the fictional character itself and of its environs but frequently also to that of its author. Main texts discussed are Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure Man Dies (1932), Earl Derr Biggers’ The House Without a Key (1925) and The Black Camel (1929), Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) and Little Scarlet (2004) as well as James McClure’s The Gooseberry Fool (1974) and Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights (2005). It is argued that all of these texts have a distinct subversive potential of which the construction of ethnic identities becomes the main vehicle because these identities are the products and the catalysts of the conflicts negotiated in ethnic crime fiction and correlating to ‘reality’

Orientalist Strategies of Dissociation in a German "Jewish" Novel: 'Das neue Jerusalem' (1905) and its Context

This article traces notions of Jewish Orientalism current in German-speaking countries around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Expounding the cultural context of its production, it focuses in particular on an anonymously published novel which provoked a short but heated debate among German-Jewish critics. Purporting to be the work of a Jewish author, but in fact written by a non-Jewish anti-Semite, Das neue Jerusalem appears to be situated quite deliberately at the interface between anti-Semitic and Zionist discourses and to be the vehicle of subversive strategies of dissociation: it presumes not only to speak to its Jewish readers but, from an (allegedly) inside perspective, to speak for them. Thus, in effect, it attempts to insinuate Orientalist stereotypes to its Jewish readers with the aim of relegating them quite literally to "their" place in the Orient (Palestine). But it is obviously also intended to intervene in the contemporary debate about the "authenticity" of Jewish cultural production and ventures to set prescriptive standards to proper Jewishness, especially in the field of literary production. For its gentile reader, the supposedly Jewish provenance of the novel confirms Jewish otherness, lends credibility to its allegations, and seemingly takes the edge off its anti-Semitism: Jewish dissociation appears to be justified and, indeed, mutually desirable