Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification

Reviews / Votes

"Until I saw the cover of Neil Levi's book, I had no idea that 'Jewification' was a real world. It certainly got picked up in spellcheck. But after I read just a few pages of Levi's book, I knew exactly what he meant. The word, strange and twisted as it seems, is an apt way to describe a modern phenomenon that seems to defy description. Levi argues that 'both aesthetic modernism and modern anti-Semitism seek formal solutions to the problem of how to render intelligible the experience of modernity, and that the figure of the Jew is made to personify otherwise unrepresentable, disorienting experiences that enter a condition of chronic crisis in modernity'. Levi contents that many modern and avant-garde works of art neither by Jews nor about Jews can still be interpreted as Jewish, given the way they were conceived and the projections put upon them by those who conceive them and those who 'appreciate' them. Thus, we arrive at the Judaization of art or its Jewification." -Erica Brown, Jewish Quarterly "In this bold and original study, Neil Levi offers a radical unsettling of the relations between aesthetic modernism and the anti-Semitic imagination. Exploring the multiple fantasies and projections woven around notions of Judaism, Levi provides a deeply penetrating insight into modern literature's complex negotiations with the antisemitic imaginary. This is a book no student of modernism should ignore." -- -Peter Nicholls New York University "Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification is an essential contribution to the recent attempt to analyze the phantasms and ideological formations that configured the Jew as a dirty or polluting influence that supposedly permeated modern culture and played a distinctive role in its aesthetic productions. Levi is addressing issues that go beyond the aesthetic while nonetheless playing an important role in it. His analysis is fine-tuned and convincing both as literary criticism and as ideology critique." -- -Dominick LaCapra Cornell University "Neil Levi's brilliant reading of the relationship between Jewishness and modernism recodes the politics of modernism in a highly original and revealing way in a transnational field. From Wagner and Nordau via Wyndham Lewis and Joyce to Beckett and Adorno we are offered theoretically informed readings that cut through many misunderstandings of this riven field of fascism, modernism, and violence. It turns out that European literary modernism is deeply embedded in issues of Jewishness and anti-semitism. A must read for any scholar of modernism!" -- -Andreas Huyssen Columbia University