Comparative Jewish Literatures

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2025 | Viewed by 796

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Department of Jewish Studies, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA
Interests: holocaust literatures; diasporic narratives; testimonio in Latin American Jewish narratives; Haskalah Jewish experience; secular Jewish studies; modern Jewish thought; comparative Jewish literatures from antiquity to modernity
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Within Comparative Literature, the new subfield of Comparative Jewish Literatures offers scholars another way of thinking about the multivalent nature of Jewish writing. For this Special Issue, the editors seek contributions that examine different theoretical approaches to Jewish writers, to texts that explore representations of the Jewish lived experience, to the diachronic development of Jewish secular traditions in multiple languages as well as national traditions, and to the transformation of sacred Judaic content into profane objects of knowledge pertinent to non-Judaic cultural expressions. Hence, new ways of analyzing Jewish writing against the grain of scholarship rooted exclusively in the Jewish lived experience are particularly welcome.
Papers might include the following:

  • Comparative analyses of Jewish writers in different national traditions;
  • Jewish writing beyond English and American traditions;
  • The Hebrew Bible as literature;
  • Jewish writers and/or Jewish writing from the Global South;
  • Jewish writing in a post-colonial context;
  • Theoretical approaches to Jewish texts;
  • The tradition of the Jewish literary critic.

Prof. Dr. Kitty Millet
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • comparative literature
  • Jewish studies
  • Jewish writer
  • sacred text
  • profane
  • Talmud
  • Hebrew bible
  • kabbalah
  • Yiddish
  • Hebrew
  • national traditions
  • post-colonial
  • Global South

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

16 pages, 494 KiB  
Article
Kaddish and Other Millin Setimin: Esoteric Languages in Jewish–American Narratives
by Ofra Amihay
Humanities 2025, 14(7), 149; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070149 - 15 Jul 2025
Viewed by 268
Abstract
In this article, I analyze the use of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic texts—and the Kaddish in particular—as esoteric tongues in Jewish–American narratives, including poems, plays, television shows, and films. I suggest that by doing so, the creators of these works evoke the Lurianic [...] Read more.
In this article, I analyze the use of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic texts—and the Kaddish in particular—as esoteric tongues in Jewish–American narratives, including poems, plays, television shows, and films. I suggest that by doing so, the creators of these works evoke the Lurianic notion of millin setimin or “secreted words”—utterances that transcend the communicative function of everyday speech and partake in some profound revelations. I hope to show that from Allen Ginsberg, through Tony Kushner, to the Coen Brothers and beyond, Jewish–American creators have been evoking Jewish tongues both as symbols of a lost past and as millin setimin that aspire to restore the connection to that past, within the Jewish–American community and beyond. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Comparative Jewish Literatures)
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