Despite the great strides in Zohar scholarship, the major work of the Spanish Kabbalah has rarely been analyzed as literature. Focusing instead on historical, philological, exegetical, and theosophical questions, Zohar scholars have made only tentative forays into the literary analysis of the kabbalistic masterpiece.

What has become of the so-called literary approach to the Bible since Robert Alter published The Art of Biblical Narrative in 1981? What gave rise to this approach in the first place? How has it been influenced by recent trends in biblical studies and literary scholarship? And what is its future, both in general and as part of the particular project that Prooftexts represents? The essay addresses these questions as a way of introducing what is at stake in the present volume.

Lisa Silverman, Zwischenzeit and Zwischenort: Veza Canetti, Else Feldmann, and Jewish Writing in Interwar Vienna, Prooftexts, Vol. 26, No. 1-2, Special Issue: Literacy Mappings of the Jewish City (Winter/Spring 2006), pp. 29-52

In the spring of 1926, David Bergelson changed his affiliation, breaking with Abraham Cahan's Forverts and joining the writers who grouped around the pro-Soviet Frayhayt. By the end of the same year, Bergelson (a Berlin resident in 1921–33) was dispatched to the Soviet Union to report the achievements of the Communist country. In the meantime, the Forverts sent its Warsaw-based corresspondent I. J. Singer to the Soviet Union. The article introduces and analyzes Bergelson's and Singer's Moscow travelogues, translated for this publication.

Hanna Soker-Schwager, Dalya Bilu, A Godless City: Shabtai's Tel Aviv and the Secular Zionist Project, Prooftexts, Vol. 26, No. 1-2, Special Issue: Literacy Mappings of the Jewish City (Winter/Spring 2006), pp. 240-281

In the face of the total destruction of European Jewry, three Yiddish poets — Yitshak Katzenelson in Warsaw, Simkhe-Bunem Shayevitsh in Lodz, and Abraham Sutzkever in Vilna — underwent a period of radical self-confrontation, whereupon each poet assumed the mantle of prophecy. Rather than merely mimic Bialik, however, each poet subverted his poetic legacy in different ways. By combining the lyric and epic, the present and ancient past, sorrow and rage, the fate of the individual and that of the people as a whole, they repudiated Bialik's romantic agony. Whereas heretofore, only the male poet could arrogate to himself the voice of a biblical prophet, the ghetto poets, each in his own way, broke down the internal barrier between male and female victims and voices. And finally, it was the very scope of the catastrophe that made it imperative for the surviving poet to adopt such a commensurate literary genre: monumental, high rhetorical, and nationally significant.

BECAUSE THE HOLOCAUST DOMINATES our historical awareness, it is doubly important to recover the force of the events at Kishinev in 1903 on their own terms. How the memory of Kishinev shaped the responses of the actors and bystanders during the Holocaust period and how, in turn, the memory of the Holocaust shaped the memory of Kishinev are all, to be sure, legitimate and even crucial questions. But we must start with the event itself. The case for the status of Kishinev as a turning point in modern Jewish history rests on its relationship to the wave of pogroms that were visited upon Jewish communities in southern Russia in 1880 – 81. It was that earlier outbreak that was the real surprise. In contrast to the common notion that the story of Eastern European Jewry is the story of one pogrom after another, the pogroms of 1880 – 81 were wholly unprecedented in their volume, ferocity, and concerted nature. They marked the appalling debut of a modern form of antisemitism that was fomented by both the Right and the Left, and, within the internal sphere of Jewish culture, they brought the lingering aspirations of the Enlightenment to a crashing demise. What had shifted profoundly between 1881 and 1903 was Jewish political self-awareness. The shame of mass victimization had spurred the emergence of political Zionism and Jewish socialism, both of which emphasized the exigent need for organized self-defense. This was a priority taken up not only on the level of ideology but at the most applied local level in the Zionist and socialist clubs and associations that were established in almost every Jewish population ❙ 1