Unsettling Difference: Music Drama, the Bible, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity

Author:   Adi Nester
Publisher:   Cornell University Press
ISBN:  

9781501779671


Pages:   277
Publication Date:   15 January 2025
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
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Unsettling Difference: Music Drama, the Bible, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity


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Overview

Unsettling Difference challenges the major-minor pattern that has framed discussions of German Jewish difference, focusing on instances that fall outside traditional understandings of minority culture. Exploring expressions of Jewish identity and difference in biblical-themed musical dramas and their literary sources, Adi Nester argues that the issue of Jewish difference should be treated as an aesthetic question in the first half of the twentieth century, even amid the rise of pseudoscientific theories about race and blood. Drawing on the fraught, parallel histories of opera and the modern reception of the Hebrew Bible in Germany, both significant in debates at the time about the nature of Jewish separateness, Unsettling Difference shows how this discourse troubles concepts of Jewish marginality and (non-Jewish) German dominance. Through innovative readings of key works in this tradition—Rudolf Borchardt's poem, Das Buch Joram; Paul Ben-Haim's oratorio, Joram; Arnold Schoenberg's opera, Moses und Aron; Joseph Roth's novel, Hiob; and Eric Zeisl's opera, Hiob—Nester shows how these biblical adaptations foreground alternative notions of difference that rely on confusion, ambiguity, radical heterogeneity, excess, and repetition.

Full Product Details

Author:   Adi Nester
Publisher:   Cornell University Press
Imprint:   Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
Weight:   0.907kg
ISBN:  

9781501779671


ISBN 10:   1501779672
Pages:   277
Publication Date:   15 January 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

On Jewish Difference, the Bible, and the Great Artwork 1. Rudolf Borchardt's Das Buch Joram and the Restoration of aBiblical Language 2. Opening the Work: The German Oratorio and Paul Ben-Haim'sJoram 3. Moses and Aron Representing the People 4. On Being Superfluous 5. Inorganic Quotations Afterword

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Adi Nester is Assistant Professor of German and Levine-Sklut Fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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