Fiction writer, playwright, and political activist for whom Jewish identity, if not ritual strictness, remained central, Israel Zangwill used the term ghetto in his early work as shorthand for a Jewish traditionalism that could be viewed as either nurturing or confining as Jews entered modern life; in his 1898 Dreamers of the Ghetto, the ghetto of Venice signified both. Later, however, Zangwill looked beyond the ghetto to other sites and cities of Italy as inspiration for a wider philosophy. In Italian Fantasies (1910), Zangwill used the genre of the travel essay to develop ideas about art, religion, and society that grounded culture in the experienced life of place. At the same time, he sought to solidify his credentials as a significant figure in European thought, a Jewish commentator who was also cosmopolitan and modern, heir to a Victorian legacy of social critique. | |
January 2015: Meri-Jane Rochelson is Professor and Associate Chair of English at Florida International University, where she is also affiliated with the programs in Women’s and Gender Studies, Judaic Studies, and Religious Studies. She is the author of A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill (Wayne State University Press, 2008), editor of Zangwill’s 1892 novel Children of the Ghetto (Wayne State UP, 1998), and co-editor of Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s (Palgrave/Macmillan, 1994). A past president of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, she has published numerous articles and presented many papers on Victorian and Anglo-Jewish literature and culture. Among other projects, she is currently at work on a Broadview Edition of Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot. |
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