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Podcast: New Books in Jewish Studies
Episode: Sheila E. Jelen, "Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies" (Wayne State UP, 2020
Description: In Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies (Wayne State University Press, 2020), Sheila Jelen explores how American Jewish post-Holocaust writers, scholars, and editors adapted pre-Holocaust works, such as Yiddish fiction and documentary photography, for popular consumption by American Jews in the post-Holocaust decades. These texts, Jelen argues, served to help clarify the role of East European Jewish identity in the construction of a post-Holocaust American one. In her analysis of a variety of "hybrid" texts-those that exist on the border between ethnography and art-Jelen traces the gradual shift from verbal to visual Jewish literacy among Jewish Americans after the Ho...