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Ora Wiskind-Elper. Tradition and Fantasy in the Tales of Reb Nahman of Bratslav. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. viii, 310 pp.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2003

Arnold J. Band
Affiliation:
University of California at Los Angeles Los Angeles, California
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Extract

Few critical terms in use over the past two decades have been so abused and hence rendered almost meaningless as “postmodern.” And yet the term can be used to advantage to describe a period, its critical suppositions, and its inherent dispositions. It does signify the blurring of categories and styles, the shifting of identities, the often self-conscious invasion of the objective by the subjective. When the author of a serious scholarly study of a complex, seminal religious figure—a major influence and icon in modern Jewish narrative art like Reb Nahman of Bratslav (1772–1810)—designates herself a postmodern and conducts her investigation as a postmodernist scholar, we cannot ignore this hermeneutic stance.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Copyright
© 2002 by the Association for Jewish Studies

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