Overview

2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Jewish writers have long had a sense of place in the United States, and interpretations of American geography have appeared in Jewish American literature from the colonial era forward. But troublingly, scholarship on Jewish American literary history often limits itself to an immigrant model, situating the Jewish American literary canon firmly and inescapably among the immigrant authors and early environments of the early twentieth century. In A Hundred Acres of America, Michael Hoberman combines literary history and geography to restore Jewish American writers to their roles as critical members of the American literary landscape from the 1850s to the present, and to argue that Jewish history, American literary history, and the inhabitation of American geography are, and always have been, contiguous entities.  

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Michael Hoberman has opened up freshly the pathway in Jewish American writings about the sense of place, how Jewish life in America has come to be and feel at home. --Jules Chametzky professor, University of Massachusetts-Amherst; founder and editor of The Massachusetts Review Hoberman brilliantly revises notions of how quintessentially American landscapes shaped American Jewish writing. Elegantly written and cogently argued, this study unsettles the stories we think we know about Jewish immigration and territorial belonging in America. --Rachel Rubinstein author of Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination A Hundred Acres is a worthy and lucid genealogy of the under-explored Jewish American geographical imagination, presented convincingly as an engagement with as well as departure from certain forms of dominant U.S. spatiality. Hoberman's nimble treatment of key texts captures the Jewish stamp on iconic American places, from 'the frontier' to the city and the 'suburban pastoral' as well as the Americanization of Jewish spaces elsewhere and, importantly, contributes to a shift in Jewish American literary scholarship away from the classic topics of immigration and assimilation toward a multidimensional criticism. --Dalia Kandiyoti author of Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures At once critically imaginative and rigorously methodological, A Hundred Acres of America is a genuinely exciting, pathbreaking work of breathtaking historical, geographical, and cultural scope. --Ranen Omer-Sherman JHFE Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Louisville

Michael Hoberman has opened up freshly the pathway in Jewish American writings about the sense of place, how Jewish life in America has come to be and feel at home. --Jules Chametzky professor, University of Massachusetts-Amherst; founder and editor of The Massachusetts Review Hoberman brilliantly revises notions of how quintessentially American landscapes shaped American Jewish writing. Elegantly written and cogently argued, this study unsettles the stories we think we know about Jewish immigration and territorial belonging in America. --Rachel Rubinstein author of Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination The Jewish Preview of Books--December 2018 by Rachel Scheinerman--The Jewish Review of Books A Hundred Acres is a worthy and lucid genealogy of the under-explored Jewish American geographical imagination, presented convincingly as an engagement with as well as departure from certain forms of dominant U.S. spatiality. Hoberman's nimble treatment of key texts captures the Jewish stamp on iconic American places, from 'the frontier' to the city and the 'suburban pastoral' as well as the Americanization of Jewish spaces elsewhere and, importantly, contributes to a shift in Jewish American literary scholarship away from the classic topics of immigration and assimilation toward a multidimensional criticism. --Dalia Kandiyoti author of Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures At once critically imaginative and rigorously methodological, A Hundred Acres of America is a genuinely exciting, pathbreaking work of breathtaking historical, geographical, and cultural scope. --Ranen Omer-Sherman JHFE Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Louisville

Hoberman brilliantly revises notions of how quintessentially American landscapes shaped American Jewish writing. Elegantly written and cogently argued, this study unsettles the stories we think we know about Jewish immigration and territorial belonging in America. --Rachel Rubinstein author of Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination Michael Hoberman has opened up freshly the pathway in Jewish American writings about the sense of place, how Jewish life in America has come to be and feel at home. --Jules Chametzky professor, University of Massachusetts-Amherst; founder and editor of The Massachusetts Review At once critically imaginative and rigorously methodological, A Hundred Acres of America is a genuinely exciting, pathbreaking work of breathtaking historical, geographical, and cultural scope. --Ranen Omer-Sherman JHFE Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Louisville A Hundred Acres is a worthy and lucid genealogy of the under-explored Jewish American geographical imagination, presented convincingly as an engagement with as well as departure from certain forms of dominant U.S. spatiality. Hoberman's nimble treatment of key texts captures the Jewish stamp on iconic American places, from 'the frontier' to the city and the 'suburban pastoral' as well as the Americanization of Jewish spaces elsewhere and, importantly, contributes to a shift in Jewish American literary scholarship away from the classic topics of immigration and assimilation toward a multidimensional criticism. --Dalia Kandiyoti author of Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures

Hoberman brilliantly revises notions of how quintessentially American landscapes shaped American Jewish writing. Elegantly written and cogently argued, this study unsettles the stories we think we know about Jewish immigration and territorial belonging in America. --Rachel Rubinstein author of Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination Michael Hoberman has opened up freshly the pathway in Jewish American writings about the sense of place, how Jewish life in America has come to be and feel at home. --Jules Chametzky professor, University of Massachusetts-Amherst; founder and editor of The Massachusetts Review The Jewish Preview of Books--December 2018 by Rachel Scheinerman--The Jewish Review of Books The book discusses a variety of places important to Americans, including the evolving West of the 19th century, the small towns of the Midwest and 20th-century suburbia. It ends with a landscape that has been significant to the Jewish people for thousands of years: Israel [and] suggests that the works it examines ask questions that aren't easy to answer -- but then asking hard questions is a sign of good literature. --Greenfield Reporter Highly recommended. --Choice Hoberman's study...chal-lenges us to recon-sid-er what the canon of our lit-er-a-ture ought to be in a series of orig-i-nal read-ings of both obscure and major fig-ures whose vision of land-scape -- above all sites of mem-o-ry and myth -- shaped their vision of Amer-i-ca in rich and strik-ing ways. --Jewish Book Council June 8-9, 2019: Jewish American Journeys: Michael Hoberman's Books http: //americanstudier.blogspot.com/2019/06/june-8-9-2019-jewish-american-journeys.html--American Studies Blog Hoberman Reads from Book, mention in The Shelburne Falls and West County Independent--The Shelburne Falls/West County Independent A Hundred Acres is a worthy and lucid genealogy of the under-explored Jewish American geographical imagination, presented convincingly as an engagement with as well as departure from certain forms of dominant U.S. spatiality. Hoberman's nimble treatment of key texts captures the Jewish stamp on iconic American places, from 'the frontier' to the city and the 'suburban pastoral' as well as the Americanization of Jewish spaces elsewhere and, importantly, contributes to a shift in Jewish American literary scholarship away from the classic topics of immigration and assimilation toward a multidimensional criticism. --Dalia Kandiyoti author of Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures At once critically imaginative and rigorously methodological, A Hundred Acres of America is a genuinely exciting, pathbreaking work of breathtaking historical, geographical, and cultural scope. --Ranen Omer-Sherman JHFE Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Louisville

Author Information

MICHAEL HOBERMAN is a professor of English studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. He is the author of several books, including New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America.

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