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This chapter examines the contribution of the German Jewry to the field of literature based on the 1886 book History of Jewish Literature by Gustav Karpeles. This book is divided into six periods: Biblical, Judaic-Hellenistic, Talmudic, Judaic-Arabic-Spanish, Rabbinic commentary, and Modern Jewish Literature. It provides profiles of the great writers produced by the Germany Jewry including Heinrich Heine, Karl Wolfskehl, and Franz Kafka. Another highlight of the Jewish literary achievements is the production many significant writers including Else Lasker-Schuler, Margarete Susman, Nelly Sachs, and Gertrud Kolmar.

‘Modern Israeli Paradigms of Identity’ considers how texts inscribe key elements within paradigms of Israeli identity from 1948 onwards and in doing so provides a general discussion of Zionism, the kibbutzim - old and new, and the self-division of diasporic Jews. Also referred to in this chapter is the cult of the ‘New Hebrew’ and the role of the Israeli army in the formation of Israeli identity. Cairns concludes with an exploration of the influence of the Francophone community in inflecting modern Israeli identities and Israel’s perception of France.

‘Intra-Israeli Conflict’ examines how the primary corpus represents conflict between different ethnic and political demographics among Jews in Israel. Using cognitive science, social psychology, and cognitive psychology, Cairns attempts to understand how and why conflict comes to be. The chapter takes an in-depth view at the immigrants who form the main constituents of Francophone communities in Israel, namely those of Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian descent, and highlights their intra-ethnic differences and the intense emotions felt between them.

‘Arab–Israeli Conflict’ explores Francophone Jewish writers’ representations of the Israeli-Palestinian/Jewish-Arab conflict. The chapter focuses in particular on the damage caused by the conflict between the two communities, and includes a discussion on the trauma experienced by survivors and victims, as well as Israel’s resulting vulnerability to attack and its subsequent need for constant military vigilance.

This chapter assesses the conflict between Israel and France, which exists as a consequence of France’s perceived systematic anti-Israeli/anti-Zionist bias. In her discussion, Cairns analyses the link between French hostility towards Israel and the increase of antisemitism in twenty-first century France and twenty-first century Israeli’s view of France as a deeply anti-Semitic country.

This chapter considers texts that inscribe key historical foundations of Israeli nationhood. It looks at significant literary representations of some key constituents in the historical foundations of Israeli nationhood, and includes discussion on Messianism, the early Zionist pioneers, and memories of the Shoah.

Roth’s first two decades in America were full of spiritual trials. He got married in 1918 but questioned his ability to love. He wrote acclaimed poetry, but most of it expressed a yearning for God based on guilty awareness of self-interest. He revived a Little Magazine he had previously edited while at Columbia University, but it failed because he did not have sufficient funds. His own Jewish American poetry benefited from the criticism of Marie Syrkin and Maurice Samuel and his understanding of Edgar Arlington Robinson’s dramatic monologues. He opened his Poetry Book Shop, but when it failed, he went to London, where he met and impressed many literary figures. After failing to attain a London publisher for a novel and a proposed anthology of American poetry, he returned to New York. He published two prophetic poems about the future of Zionism and of the moribund condition of European culture after World War I.

The discourse on racial liberalism at mid-century involved the debate over antisemitism, made more urgent by Hitler’s rise in Germany. Born Jewish but largely assimilated, Hobson protested the complicity of liberals with antisemitism in her post–WW II best seller, which featured a gentile journalist passing for Jewish to write his expose. This novel’s reliance on a discourse of empathy ties it closely back to Stowe’s and looks forward to the philosophy at the heart of Lee’s Mockingbird. Here the protagonist, Philip Greene, passes as a Jew to learn how antisemitism feels. Meanwhile his liberal girlfriend hesitates to rent her cottage in a restricted neighborhood to Philip’s Jewish war buddy. Both protagonists exhibit the limitations of liberalism as they confront systemic as well as emotional biases that threaten their idealism.

‘The Metaphysics and Poesis of Israel’ discusses the potency and ambivalence of Jerusalem as an aporetic ideal. It analyses the many connections relating to Israel, including those between the state of Israel and the Arab-Muslim world; Israelis and Palestinians; diasporic Jews and Israelis; religious and secular Israelis; and finally Ashkenazi and Sephardi/Mizrahi Israelis. The chapter also considers the image of Israel as marked by madness as well as the significance of the Hebrew language. Cairns concludes with a consideration on the frontier between Israelis living within internationally recognized Israeli boundaries and those living in the Occupied Territories.

This chapter concludes with a final thought on consensus and dissensus in Francophone Jewish writers’ affective and cognitive responses to Israel. With the support of a grant from the British Academy, Cairns conducts thirteen interviews with authors that ultimately helped to contribute to this text.

Hurst’s best-selling novel of the 1930s portrayed the life of a New Woman business tycoon and the African American maid whose family waffle recipe became the basis for an “Aunt Jemima” kind of product and fortune. Stereotypes such as the “mammy” and “tragic mulatta” are either damaging caricatures or images to expose racism, depending on the reader’s interpretation of the text. The novel’s use of limited point of view works to satirize Bea Pullman’s racism even as the novel looks sympathetically on her quasi-feminist ambitions. The decision of the light-skinned Peola to leave the United States presents an indictment of society’s racism, though it breaks her mother’s heart. The film version of the novel from 1934 offers an interesting comparison to more stereotypical black images in cinema at the time, though some critics still found it offensive.