Postmodern Love in the Contemporary Jewish Imagination: Negotiating Spaces and Identities [Paperback]

Introduction  1. All You Need is Love?  2. From Auschwitz to Yavneh  3. Body and Nation  4. Transgression and Return  5. Destroying Israel  6. The Afterlife of Love  Coda  Bibliography

Efraim Sicher is a professor of English and comparative literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. In 2020 he was a research fellow at the Israeli Institute of Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published widely in modern Jewish studies and has edited the short stories of Isaak Babel in Russian, English, and Hebrew. Among his most recent books are Babel in Context (2012); Under Postcolonial Eyes: Figuring the Jew in Contemporary British Writing (with Linda Weinhouse, 2012); Race Color Identity: Discourses of the Jew in the Twenty-First Century (as editor, 2013); The Jews Daughter: A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative (2017); and Reenvisioning Jewish Identities: Reflections on Contemporary Culture in Israel and the Diaspora (2021).

Offering a radical critique of contemporary Israeli and diaspora fiction by major writers of the generation after Amos Oz and Philip Roth, this book asks searching questions about identity formation in Jewish spaces in the twenty-first century and posits global, transnational identities instead of the bipolar Israel/diaspora model.

The chapters put into conversation major authors such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, and Nathan Englander with their Israeli counterparts Zeruya Shalev, Eshkol Nevo, and Etgar Keret and shows that tlsp