Classics Transformed in Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian Receptions

Classics Transformed in Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian Receptions invites the reader to view classical antiquity through the writings of poets, translators, and scholars emerging from modern Jewish diasporas, Mandatory Palestine, and the State of Israel who engaged with Greek and Roman literary precedents. Whereas these voices have up to now been mostly studied independently of one another as separate fields of research, this volume brings some of these distinct voices, who nevertheless share a connection to Greco-Roman antiquity, into conversation with one another. Taking its cue from the crisis of humanism following the Holocaust, the chapters take as their themes the destruction of home, displacement, and different forms of wandering and homecomings, drawing connections to acts of translation and transmission of the classics to form a picture of cultural and textual states of alterity. The volume shows that Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian responses to the classics are entangled and even complementary despite their different trajectories. The chapters included here focus particularly on critical moments in Jewish and Palestinian existence when the reception of classical humanism is closely linked to issues of survival. On offer here is a historically grounded investigation into the ways Jews, Israelis, and Palestinians have used classical antiquity and classical philology to validate their identity in a rapidly changing society.

Vered Lev Kenaan, University of Haifa, Patricia A. Rosenmeyer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Vered Lev Kenaan is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. Her work focuses on the connections between classical studies, comparative literature, reception studies, and psychoanalysis. Among her numerous publications, she is the author of The Ancient Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and the Ancient Text (OUP, 2019), and Pandora’s Senses: The Feminine Character of the Ancient Text (Wisconsin University Press 2008).

Patricia A. Rosenmeyer is Paddison Distinguished Professor of Classics and Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She taught previously at Michigan, Yale, and Wisconsin. Her books include The Poetics of Imitation: Anacreon and the Anacreontic Tradition (Cambridge, 1992), Ancient Epistolary Fictions (Cambridge, 2001), Ancient Greek Literary Letters (Routledge, 2006), Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature ( Brill, 2013;), and The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus (OUP, 2018).