Awards

• Short-listed for American Academy of Religion Award for Religion and the Arts 2024

Overview

"What is between us and the Christians is a deep dark affair which will go for another hundred generations . . ."" (Amos Oz, Judas) Among the great social shifts of the post-World War II era is the unlikely sea-change in Jewish Christian relations. We read each other's scriptures and openly discuss differences as well as similarities. Yet many such encounters have become rote and predictable. Powerful emotions stirred up by these conversations are often dismissed or ignored. Demonstrating how such emotions as shame, envy, and desire can inform these encounters, Holy Envy: Writing in the Jewish Christian Borderzone charts a new way of thinking about interreligious relations. Moreover, by focusing on modern and contemporary writers (novelists and poets) who traffic in the volatile space between Judaism and Christianity, the book calls attention to the creative implications of these intense encounters. While recognizing a long-overdue need to address a fundamentally Christian narrative underwriting twentieth century American verse, Holy Envy does more than represent Christianity as an aesthetically coercive force, or as an adversarial other. For the book also suggests how literature can excavate an alternative interreligious space, at once risky and generative. In bringing together recent accounts of Jewish Christian relations, affect theory, and poetics, Holy Envy offers new ways into difficult and urgent, conversations about interreligious encounters. Holy Envy is sure to engage readers who are interested in literature, religion, and, above all, interfaith dialogue."

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9781531501723

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Reviews

Having spent much of the last two decades writing non-fiction books and articles about what Shreiber calls the Jewish Christian Borderzone, I feel a strong kinship with this beautiful and significant work. This book, the first of its kind, complements my work on biblical texts by exploring the same topic through magnificently explicated modern novels and poems. In Holy Envy, Shreiber moves from Krister Stendahl's concept of holy envy to her own innovative notion of holy insecurity, giving us powerful language for inter-religious dialogue, and a wonderful set of tools for anyone trying to appreciate the religion of the other.---Marc Zvi Brettler, Morton and Bernice Lerner Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, Duke University, and co-author, with Amy-Jill Levine, of The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently.,

Author Information

Maeera Y. Shreiber is Associate Professor of English, and former Director of Religious Studies, at the University of Utah, where she teaches and writes about poetry, Jewish American literature, ethnic American studies, religious studies, and interfaith relations. Professor Shreiber is the author of, among other books, Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics.

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