Jewish related works form a significant part of Bernstein’s oeuvre. He draws from Hebrew texts taken from the bible and liturgy and also uses traditional Jewish melodies. Bernstein had a strong Jewish upbringing in his synagogue, Mishkan Tefila in Boston. Throughout his life Jewishness provided an approach to express his heritage and larger humanitarian ideas. This chapter discusses the Jewishness in Bernstein by investigating various works, including his three symphonies. In 1945 Bernstein was commissioned to write a setting of the Hashkiveinu prayer for a Friday evening service by the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York. This piece is discussed as a demonstration of various compositional styles that Bernstein applies that are not derived from Jewish tradition. Through differing approaches of direct use of melodies and text from the Jewish tradition, Bernstein provides an example of Jewishiness in art music with a complex and varied approach.

A large number of artists with Jewish American backgrounds have been deeply influential to the development of comics (notably of the superhero variety), social and political cartoons, and graphic novels. This chapter examines the recurrence of trauma and grief in the works of several Jewish authors, both as core motifs and as narrative/visual devices. It follows the career of graphic pioneer Will Eisner, who moved from realistically drawn crime and adventure fiction (with The Spirit, an early example of long-form comic appealing to adult readers) to more personal themes such as family history and loss in A Contract with God, the first US publication self-labeled as a “graphic novel.” Art Spiegelman’s work (Maus, 1986 and 1991; In the Shadow of No Towers, 2004) confronts similar themes grounded in trauma, suffering, and transgenerational testimony, where the artist’s memorialization of the past and experience with the present construct a graphic negotiation with grief. The chapter finds echoes of this approach in more recent works from Jewish graphic novelists such as Roz Chast and Ken Krimstein.

This chapter presents an overview of the structure of 1 Peter to lay the groundwork for the analysis of future chapters. Following Lutz Doering, this chapter argues that 1 Peter is a Christian diaspora letter. As such, it has much in common with Jewish diaspora letters. This chapter then examines the epistolary prescript (1:1-2) and postscript (5:12-14) to examine how these features are infused with the letter’s theology and anticipate its themes of diaspora, marginalization, divine regeneration, election, holiness, and peoplehood. Moving to the letter body, the chapter outlines the main structural divisions through attention to rhetorical devices, themes, and other features.

This chapter examines modern and ancient conceptions of ethnicity. For Smith, six elements constitute ethnicity: a name, myth of collective descent, history, culture, territory, and a sense of solidary. However, a connection with a special territory and the myth of common descent are particularly important. David Horrell has demonstrated that these six elements are active in 1 Peter. Ethnicities are expressed in culturally specific ways. Therefore, this chapter examines conceptions of ancient Jewish and Greek ethnicity, with particular focus on putative common descent. Most Jews in the Second Temple period were Jewish by birth. However, the possibility of conversion and apostasy complicate the picture. Along with birth, Jewish identity was maintained through social praxis. In the Hellenistic period, “Greekness” came to be identified with paidaeia, or education. Those not born Greek could become Greek. Yet, “Greekness” never fully lost its connection to birth. In both Jewish and Greek culture, birth and paidaeia continued to constitute ethnic identity in a complex tension.

Forster’s Wagnerism is the focus of the fourth chapter. Instead of following previous critical examples to map out the narrative parallel between Wagner's music drama and Forster's fiction, the chapter turns to the way in which Forster negotiates Wagner's cultural and political status through tackling and questioning the heroism of Siegfried. Examining a variety of texts, ranging from his 1907 novel, The Longest Journey, to his political essays in the 1930s and wartime pamphlet Nordic Twilight (1940), and to a postwar radio broadcast for the BBC, ‘Revolution at Bayreuth’ (1954), the chapter considers how Forster was attentive to a complex web of discourses on Wagner’s anti-Semitism, posthumous reception in Britain, and links to the Nazis in the first half of the twentieth century. Forster’s consistent critique of Wagnerian heroism for its apocalyptical vision suggests his opposition to the political extremism and masculine exceptionalism celebrated and advocated by many contemporaries. Analysing Forster’s criticism of the Wagnerian hero, the chapter discusses his contribution to topical debates about fascism, Jewishness, war, violence, and hero-worship.

Archival practice and recovery have been foundational to feminist criticism and theory, and continue to be advocated by those who perceive, with dissatisfaction, ongoing gender disparities within the broadly inclusive mandate of the new modernist studies. Starting with the supposition that taxonomy is somatic, this chapter explores the long, complex history of the categorised body in relation to the archives of Mina Loy and Anna Mendelssohn. Modernist and late modernist respectively, Loy and Mendelssohn were British, Jewish, and feminist; both worked productively from the margins of male avant-garde kinship groups. Excision from or discomfort with identificatory labels are abiding themes of their literature, truths highly evident in their conflicted, archived writings on artistry and parenting, which challenge and contort stereotypical classification. In tandem with Loy’s and Mendelssohn’s taxonomic ambivalence, this essay posits a generative interstitiality that reworks archival frameworks and categories alike.

Robin Peel explains the resonance of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in The Bell Jar. As the event fades into history, its extraordinary impact on 1950s American psychology can easily be forgotten. The electrocution of the Rosenbergs for espionage is important to Plath’s novel because of the resonance of their Jewishness, insider/outsider status and apparent vindication of Cold War paranoia. In addition, Peel reads the event from a retrospective and transatlantic perspective. The thirty year old adult woman writing in the persona of senior student mirrors the simultaneous political engagement and distancing that has troubled so many readers.