In her recently published new book, Viennese Jewish Modernism, Professor Abigail Gillman — associate professor of Hebrew and German, and instructor in the Core Humanities — takes a novel approach to exploring Jewish Modernism that goes beyond identity as Jewish or non-Jewish. Instead, Prof. Gillman focuses on the works of Sigmund Freud, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, Richard Beer-Hofmann, and Arthur Schnitzler as sources which illuminate the context for Modernism as a whole. In his blurb, William Donahue of Duke University writes:
Gillman’s book is as rich and paradoxical as Jewish assimilation itself, for the author is at once telling a particularly Jewish and a larger European story of aesthetic, cultural, and sometimes even political engagement with tradition.
Viennese Jewish Modernism, published by Penn State University Press in 2009, is available at the PSU website, via Google Books preview, and in hard copy at Mugar library. A reviewer for the Journal of Jewish Identity called the book “a major accomplishment”, one that “provides a wealth of new ideas and information.”
