Norman Finkelstein
As you may have noticed, we're expanding our list of contributors here at A Big Jewish Blog. I'd like to extend a welcome to all of them. Hopefully we'll hear from quite a few folks in the near future, and things will get lively.
David, thanks very much for your post--that's just the sort of commentary we're hoping for. I'd say that the idea of a "Jewish tone," ranging from the aggressively comic to the sentimental, is well worth considering in our endless quest to identify what makes a modern poem peculiarly "Jewish." Of course, this range doesn't preclude other tonal possibilities. One thinks of the psalmic tendency (Oppen's "Psalm," obviously, but there are many other instances) or the prophetic (much of Alan Grossman; for instance "How to Do Things With Tears").
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I couldn't agree more. In my enthusiasm, I made the mistake of implying that Jewish modernism was limited to that one strain I described. Psalms, prophetic stances, biblical narrative--all of these are obviously Jewish. I was just trying to trace a genealogy for works that were not so clearly Jewish in either stance or mode, and yet still struck me as being somehow (that is tonally) Jewish.
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