Dr. Ezra Cappell is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Inter-American Jewish Studies Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. Cappell teaches and publishes in the fields of Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Jewish American Literature. He has published numerous articles on American and Jewish American writing and he is the author of American Talmud: The Cultural Work of Jewish American Fiction(SUNY Press). Cappell is a frequent lecturer on Jewish American culture and Holocaust writing. This article appears in issue 11 of Conversations, the journal of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals.
“It’s strange the way circles hook up with themselves.” —Bob Dylan, Chronicles, p. 288 Read more
Steal This Book: Jewish Literature in the Yeshiva World
Dr. Ezra Cappell is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Inter-American Jewish Studies Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. He has published numerous articles on American and Jewish American writing and he is the author of the critically-acclaimed book, American Talmud: The Cultural Work of Jewish American Fiction.<em> This article appears in the fourth issue of Conversations, dealing with Orthodoxy and Religious Education.
“I tell you, all the madness of the human race is in the sanctification of that book. Everything going wrong with this country is in the first five books of the Old Testament. Smite the enemy, sacrifice your son, the desert is yours and nobody else’s all the way to the Euphrates. A body count of dead Philistines on every other page—that’s the wisdom of their wonderful Torah.” (Philip Roth, The Counterlife, p. 75) Read more