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By the time anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda was widely analogizing Jews to rodents and other nonhuman animals in need of extermination, the accusation that Jewish people might be subhuman, or nonhuman, had been informing non-Jewish perceptions of the Jewish people for hundreds of years. As Jay Geller has detailed, casting Jews as lone wolves, or as rats or mice (and beyond), has a long and powerful history. Indeed, this insidious maneuver—dehumanize a threatening community through animalization in order to justify its oppression, or at times, extermination—is familiar to virtually every marginalized community and absolutely relies on consensus that the “natural” order places human beings above animals. This dissertation argues that post-Holocaust, Jewish American poets help us reconsider the boundaries of “human” and “animal” in the American imagination, ultimately creating an animal poetics that flips the script, demonstrating that yes, we are all animals, which demands not only a human commitment to justice and respect between cultures but also to ecological justice and respect between species. Through examining prominent animal poems by three Jewish American post-Holocaust poets, Gerald Stern, Adrienne Rich, and Maxine Kumin, this dissertation asks, “What does it mean to behave like a Jew when it comes to our ecological connections to other animal species?” and, more specifically, “What is the connection between post-Holocaust Jewish American poets, ecologically informed animal representation, and Jewishness?” My readings model a novel approach to these poets’ work by using Jewish traditions, such as teshuvah (an atonement ritual) and biblical prophecy, to illuminate layers of meaning in the poems that might otherwise have stayed shadowed, particularly for readers without ready access to a Jewish framework. Because these poets’ animal poems are best read as both ecological as well as Jewish, this dissertation makes a case for including animal poems by Stern, Rich, and Kumin in the syllabi and anthologies that represent American ecological literature and ecopoetry—and not just including them, in fact, but contextualizing them within a Jewish framework. All three poets suggest that behaving like a Jew, when it comes to nonhuman animals, means taking responsibility for our brutal humanity as well as our essential animality—which is at least as often noble and good as it is otherwise. By highlighting the value of a Jewish ecocritical lens, this dissertation suggests that there may be as many culturally situated versions of ecocriticism as there are cultures, which could increase our appreciation of our interconnection within and beyond our species. Further, by bringing a Jewish lens to these three Jewish poets’ animal poems, this dissertation situates Jewish animality specifically as a source of strength and wisdom. In so doing, this project defiantly counters millennia of efforts to dehumanize Jewish people, instead reminding that all human beings’ ability to thrive on this earth requires mutual respect between, and within, animal species. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that these Jewish American poets, who came into their adulthood and poetic expressions in the shadow of the Nazi Holocaust, light the way to a Jewish—and human—animal whose survival will not depend on random birthplace but on the dignifying interconnection of all animal species, and all the varieties therein. / English

With All Due Modesty: The Selected Letters of Fanny Goldstein is an annotated edition of the correspondence of Fanny Goldstein (1895–1961), librarian, social activist, and founder of Jewish Book Week. Goldstein’s accomplishments include building a significant collection of Judaica for the Boston Public Library; compiling some of the earliest bibliographies of Jewish literature in English; evaluating manuscripts for publishers; writing book reviews; and lecturing and writing on a wide range of subjects related to Jews and Judaism. The purpose of the edition is to provide a picture of Goldstein’s life as a Jew, a woman, a librarian, and a social activist and in so doing, to contribute to a more complete understanding of Boston’s Jewish community in the first half of the twentieth century. I have included in the edition both incoming and outgoing letters with a wide range of correspondents, including Charles Angoff, Mary Antin, Isaac Asimov, Alice Stone Blackwell, Felix Frankfurter, Molly Picon, Ellery Sedgwick, and Friderike Zweig. The letters span the years from 1930 to 1960. The edition includes extensive annotation based on Goldstein’s newspaper and magazine articles, pamphlets, book reviews, and other writings; hundreds of Goldstein’s letters not published here; accounts published in the Jewish press and the mainstream press; and correspondence neither written nor received by Goldstein but bearing on her life and work.

This article explores how the Americanization of the Holocaust is in part responsible for the paradigm that the mention of the Holocaust is vital for a Jewish writer of postwar fiction to be taken seriously. In keeping with the need for people to find meaning in catastrophe, to derive humanity from inhumanity and order out of chaos, Jewish literature's apparent 'success' or international reach often depends on reflecting on the Holocaust as an empowering movement that pushed survivors and other Jews to feel a sense of unity and inclusiveness. By using the Holocaust to generate interest in audiences as opposed to educating the masses, the general perception of Jews as well as of the Jewish religion is reduced to nothing more than an acknowledgment of the traumatic historic event they endured. I argue that this perception of Jewish identity is disillusioned as well as destructive, and that survivor literature paints a more realistic image of what the Holocaust was like while still maintaining the Jewishness within the story. The aim of this article is to examine the trauma in Holocaust literature through the lens of Judaic studies, analyzing the way that it is written as well as providing an analysis of the trends in this postwar genre of writing from survivors and non-survivors. Being analyzed are the writings of Tadeusz Borowski and Cynthia Ozick; "This Way for Gas, Ladies & Gentlemen" and "Silence" by Borowski, and "Rosa" as well as "The Shawl" by Ozick. While Borowski's stories were developed based on his own personal experiences as a victim of the Holocaust, Ozick is an American-born Jewish woman whose stories correlate particularly well with Borowski's despite not having been through the traumatic experience herself. The goal in analyzing this type of literature is to bring to light the realities of the Holocaust and exactly how gruesome, inhumane and disturbing these events were and to contrast these images with more heavily edited and/or fictionalized literature, particularly the Americanized version of "The Diary of Anne Frank". When structured for entertainment purposes, fictional literature set in the time period of the Holocaust tends to develop unrealistic portrayals of the event itself and the Jewish population affected by it. The intention of this article to draw attention to the lack of Jewish identity and religion in postwar Holocaust literature, to challenge the accuracy in Holocaust retellings and to outline the destructiveness of both characteristics in this genre of literature to the general perception of Jewish people.

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