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.
Readership: Students of Jewish studies and literature.
Jonathan Freedman, Department of English, University of Michigan
"Where The Temple of Culture differs markedly from the usual accounts of literary anti-Semitism is that it also explores the response of Jewish individuals (academics, publishers and New York freethinkers) to the manifold discourses which brought together Jews and culture in increasingly odd conjunctions ... Achieves a great deal in a relatively short but remarkably intelligent book ... has, it is to be hoped, changed the terms of debate away from the many heated and fruitless exchanges which have steadfastly ignored the fundamental ambivalences which remain at the heart of Anglo-American culture." - Times Literary Supplement
Acknowledgements Preface 1: The Jew in the Museum 2: The Temple of Culture and the Market for Letters:The Jew and the Way We Write Now 3: The Mania for the Middlebrow: Trilby, the Jew, and the Middlebrow Imaginary 4: Henry James and the Discourses of Anti-Semitism 5: Henry James among the Jews Afterword: Beyond the Battle of the Blooms
