The Modern Jewess and Her Wondering Jewish Identity

Abstract

ABSTRACT:"The Modern Jewess and Her Wondering Jewish Identity" argues that Margot Singer and Elisa Albert represent Jewish exile as women's stories. In their narratives, women's selfhood is historically and culturally inflected with both the imperative of Jewish women's obligation and exile within Jewish communal life. Their modern Jewesses wonder about the foundational urgency of sustaining and regenerating, even against all odds, Jewish identity and continuity. Albert and Margot Singer portray the modern Jewess as wandering and wondering—entering the fray of a perennially contested and changing Jewish American history and social and cultural site: the absent presence of the Holocaust, the Jewish home, family, and community, and the evolving nature of Jewish American literature and characterization.