Contents
Acknowledgments....................xi
Meet the Preface Stephen Paul Miller....................xiii
Introduction Daniel Morris....................1
Radical Jewish Culture / Secular Jewish Practice Charles Bernstein....................12
Who or What Is a Jewish American Poet, with Specific Reference to David Antin, Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Jerome Rothenberg Hank Lazer....................18
The House of Jews: Experimental Modernism and Traditional Jewish Practice Jerome Rothenberg....................32
Zukofsky at 100: Zukofsky as a Body of Work Bob Perelman....................40
Addendum: On "The Jewish Question": Three Perspectives Bob Perelman....................49
Light(silence)word Norman Fischer....................60
On Yiddish Poetry and Translation of Yiddish Poetry Kathryn Hellerstein....................71
An "Exotic" on East Broadway: Mikhl Likht and the Paradoxes of Yiddish Modernist Poetry Merle Bachman....................79
Revisiting Charles Reznikoff's Urban Poetics of Diaspora and Contingency Ranen Omer-Sherman....................103
Looking at Louis Zukofsky's Poetics through Spinozist Glasses Joshua Schuster....................127
"Can a jew be wild": The Radical Jewish Grammar of Gertrude Stein's Voices Poems Amy Feinstein....................151
Remains of the Diaspora: A Personal Meditation Michael Heller....................170
Secular and Sacred: Returning (to) the Repressed Alicia Ostriker....................184
Midrashic Sensibilities: Secular Judaism and Radical Poetics (A personal essay in severalchapters) Rachel Blau DuPlessis....................199
Secular Jewish Culture and Its Radical Poetic Discontents Norman Finkelstein....................225
Radical Relation: Jewish Identity and the Power of Contradictions in the Poetics of Muriel Rukeyser and George Oppen Meg Schoerke....................245
"Yes and No, Not Either/Or": Aesthetics, Identity, and Marjorie Perloff's Vienna Paradox Daniel Morris....................274
"Sound Scraps, Vision Scraps": Paul Celan's Poetic Practice Marjorie Perloff....................287
Language in the Dark: The Legacy of Walter Benjamin in the Opera Shadowtime Charlie Bertsch....................310
Danger, Skepticism, and Democratic Longing: Five Contemporary Secular Jewish American Poets Thomas Fink....................323
Relentlessly Going On and On: How Jews Remade Modern Poetry without Even Trying Stephen Paul Miller....................343
Azoy Toot a Yid: Secular Poetics and "The Jewish Way" Eric Murphy Selinger....................354
A Jew in New York Bob Holman....................378
Imp/penetrable Archive: Adeena Karasick's Wall of Sound Maria Damon....................379
In the Shadow of Desire: Charles Bernstein's Shadowtime and Its Kabbalistic Trajectories Adeena Karasick....................397
Hijacking Language: Kabbalistic Trajectories Adeena Karasick....................409
Letter to the Romans Benjamin Friedlander....................418
White Paul Auster....................439
Contributors....................441