The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America | National Humanities Center

Work of the Fellows: Monographs

The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America

By Jonathan Freedman (NHC Fellow, 1994–95)

Cultural Assimilation; Jews; Anti-Semitism; English Literature

New York: Oxford University Press, 2000

From the publisher’s description:

From the beginning of modern intellectual history to the culture wars of the present day, the experience of assimilating Jews and the idiom of "culture" have been fundamentally intertwined with each other. Freedman's book begins by looking at images of the stereotypical Jew in the literary culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and America, and then considers the efforts on the part of Jewish critics and intellectuals to counter this image in the public sphere. It explores the unexpected parallels and ironic reversals between a cultural dispensation that had ambivalent responses to Jews and Jews who became exponents of that very tradition.

Subjects
Religion / History / Literary Criticism / Cultural Assimilation / Jews / Anti-Semitism / English Literature /

Freedman, Jonathan (NHC Fellow, 1994–95). The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.