Word: jew
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...doctorate degrees in literature at Columbia. He joined the Columbia faculty in 1931 as an instructor of English. Two years earlier he had married Diana Rubin, also a distinguished critic, and they had one son James. As he worked toward a full professorship (in 1948 he became the first Jew to receive tenure in the English department) Trilling slowly gained the reputation of someone more than a courtly scholar. His doctoral dissertation on Matthew Arnold was published in 1939-in the heyday of the textual analyses by the New Criticism-and it restated the Arnoldian creed that "a work...
...take on the bad parts, the hustling, the rackets, the big cars and fine clothes." This emphasis pervades even the moments of comic relief provided by a lanky, effiminate short-order chef who wants to be a classical dancer--he takes lessons from a white Jew...
...Chekhov's story Rothschild's Fiddle, a Russian wills his violin to a Jew. Afterward, writes Chekhov, Rothschild plays a melody "so passionately sad and full of grief that the listeners weep ... and force him to play it as many as ten times." In Passions, Isaac Bashevis Singer's new collection, all 20 tales recall the earlier story, with its Russian theme transmuted by vibrant Yiddish inflection...
Communication breaks down. Recently a kind of group solipsism has emerged, a sense that "our" insights can only be shared and understood by our members, our kind. Unless one is a Pentecostalist, an Orthodox Jew, a woman, an Anglo-Saxon, a black, a yogi, a youth, an "ethnic," one whose consciousness has been shaped in a particular way, he or she remains an idiot, in the original meaning of the word, an ignorant outsider...
...Jew can marry neither a non-Jew nor a convert who does not meet halakhic standards (thus, according to the Orthodox, excluding those proselytized by Reform and Conservative Judaism, neither of which they recognize...