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The 1990s have marked a watershed in Jewish women's writing both in Great Britain and the United States. While traditionally, Jewish writing was the domain of male writers (and in Britain not very visible at all), during the 1990s a considerable number of younger British and American Jewish women writers started publishing successfully in all literary genres. Their topics, such as life as an Orthodox woman in a Hasidic community or the memory of the Holocaust, caught the interest and imagination of a larger reading public, transcending ethnic boundaries and adding the perspective of Jewish women to the cultural and literary heritage of the two countries. In order to critically assess these developments, an interdisciplinary conference was held at Mainz University, Germany, in 2003, where experts from all over Europe and America, as well as some of the authors themselves, discussed the situation of British and American Jewish women's writing in the 1990s and beyond. This volume fills a gap in that it gives a contrastive overview over the current developments in Great Britain and the United States, investigating from various perspectives concepts of Jewish identity, self and other in the Diaspora and after the Holocaust. Gender studies and memory theory form important points of departure in an interpretation of the representations of religious and non-religious Jewish life in America and Great Britain, attitudes towards Israel and cross-national literary influences.
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