Table of Contents

Note on Transliteration and Names
Introduction / Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran
Part 1: Reinventing the "Jews" in Ethnographic Writing
1. The Voice of a Native Informer: Salomon Maimon Describes Life in Polish Lithuania / Liliane Weissberg
2. Legends of Authenticity: Das Buch von den polnischen Juden (1916) by S. J. Agnon and Ahron Eliasberg / Sylvia Jaworski
3. The Cold Order and the Eros of Storytelling: Joseph Roth's "Exotic Jews" / Andreas Kilcher
4. Yiddish Ethnographic Poetics and Moyshe Kulbak's "Vilne" / Jordan Finkin
Part 2: Seeing, Hearing, and Reading Jews
5. Listening in the Dark: The Yiddish Folklorists' Claim of a Russian Genealogy / Gabriella Safran
6. Ethnoliterary Modernity: Jewish Ethnography and Literature in the Russian Empire and Poland (1890-1930) / Annette Werberger
7. Imagining the Wandering Jew in Modernity: Exegesis and Ethnography in Feuchtwanger's Jud Süss / Galit Hasan-Rokem
8. Exclusion and Inclusion: Ethnography of War in Kriegsgefangene (1916) and Das Ostjüdische Antlitz (1920) / Eva Edelmann-Ohler
9. Avant-Garde Authenticity: Ethnography and Identity in Moï Ver's Photobook Ein Ghetto im Osten / Samuel Spinner
Part 3: Spaces of Jewish Ethnography between Diaspora and Nation
10. Zionism's Ethnographic Knowledge: Leo Motzkin's and Heinrich York-Steiner's Narratives of Palestine (1898-1904) / Alexander Alon
11. Eastern Europe in Argentina: Yiddish Travelogues and the Exploration of Jewish Diaspora / Tamar Lewinsky
Part 4: Politics and the Addressee of Ethnography
12. From Custom Book to Folk Culture: Minhag and the Roots of Jewish Ethnography / Nathaniel Deutsch
13. In Search of the Exotic: "Jewish Houses" and Synagogues in Russian Travel Notes / Alla Sokolova
14. Ballads of Strangers: Constructing "Ethnographic Moments" in Jewish Folklore / Dani Schrire
Appendices
Note to Readers
A. What Is Jewish Ethnography? (Handbook for Fieldworkers) / Naftoli Vaynig and Khayim Khayes, Translated by Jordan Finkin
B. Research Your Shtetl / H. Aleksandrov, Translated by Jordan Finkin
C. "A Strange Experience" / A. Almi, Translated by Gabriella Safran
List of Contributors
Index

About the Author

Andreas Kilcher is a professor at ETH Zurich and author of The Linguistic Theory of Kabbalah as an Aesthetical Paradigm and Dictionary of German-Jewish Literature.

Gabriella Safran is the Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies at Stanford University and author of Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky.

Reviews

Writing Jewish Culture is a significant work in the field of Jewish Studies as well as German-Jewish and Yiddish literature and will be of great interest to scholars in these fields.
*Slavic Review*

Writing Jewish Culture looks at the ethnographic issues while defining Jewishness in a very fresh, sophisticated way. The contributors in this volume are accomplished and unmatched scholars. It is a very timely and important addition to the literature on Jewish ethnography.
*Washington Book Review*

This book significantly contributes to our knowledge of Jewish ethnography, history, literature, and culture and should be very interesting for scholars as well as a wider audience.
*The Russian Review*