Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 'The Jewish Cemetery at Newport': An Enigmatic Musing on Jewish History and Culture

The history of Jews in host cities often depict a story of success or of failure when it comes to relations between the Jews and the Christians in Europe. Historian Jonathan Elukin, author of Living Together, Living Apart, presents the integration as a success process with rare, and special cases, of failure. On the other side of the spectrum is historian Raymond P. Scheindlin. Scheindlin’s novel, A Short History of the Jewish People, presents many cases of integration between the Christians and Jews that led to massacres and brutal endings for the Jewish community. There are many monumental events that take place during the long span of time that oversees European Jewish history, and both historians study and evaluate the events, however, they do so through different lenses.

By ending the poem with this it leaves the reader stunned and at awe, for one could never fathom the pain of such horrific task. It is here that I was most drawn to “An Anti-Semitic Demonstration” because it really goes into depth of showing how horrendous and fearful life was for the Jewish people. It also gave the poem a greater meaning when we discover he is discussing this about his own mother.

In my opinion, the author gives an interesting logic to the audience. More often than not, we tend to judge people without knowing more about them. Actually, in most cases, we tend to stereotype them according to the shallow information we have about the general character of their background. We rarely pause and ask ourselves why they behave like that. We just pass judgment, which mostly is usually biased and reasoned according to our background. No time is given to them to give their side of the story; our summary judgment is usually final. “’Jew bastards will charge me if you break anything’ he cursed” (70). Without any prior knowledge

The title of the poem makes it clear that the Jews are angry and psychologically hurt up till now because of the painful experience they suffered from. Consequently, they will never be able to forget what happened. The poem deals with many ideas to justify the choice of that title. The main idea

During the time this poem was written, racism and prejudice towards African Americans was prevalent and habituated to whites. From the first stanza alone, the tone is already set as uncharitable and

“High Holy Days” is a poem in which the author, Jane Shore, conveys the emergence of an innocent youth into a cruel and anti-Semitic world. It is told from a point of reflection on a childhood memory but as if it was presently occurring. This poem primarily focuses on Judaism along with the prejudice experienced by the Jewish community. The speaker is characterized as a child on the cusp of a transition in maturity and attitude. This plays a key role in understanding the text. While the speaker appears to be merely a child, no greater than thirteen-years-old, she is presented with feelings of great responsibility to lead her people and “defend them against the broken windows” (Shore 59) and “the spray-painted writing on the walls,” (Shore

“The experience of the Jewish families in the United States over the last century has been one of acculturation and accommodation to the norms and the values of the American society.” (“Jewish American Family” 2). At the same time, Anti-Semitism in America reached its peak during the interwar period between the 1940s and 1960s. The self-hating Jew appeared as a phenomenon of the Depression and the 1940s. At that time, almost all of the Jewish American writers simply presented realistic portrayals of their fellow immigrants or their parents’ generation. Later, some other Americans, partial to Anti-Semitism, found confirmation of negative stereotypes in the new Jewish American Literature. Indeed, some parent-hating or self-hating Jewish American writers of the second or the third generation consciously reinforced negative stereotypes with satire and a selective realism. Philip Roth, whose portrayal of the tensions between these figures borders on self-hatred and an almost Anti-Semitic view of the Jewish family in America, is a great example of this phenomenon. In his book, Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth touched on the assimilation experiences of American Jews, their relationship to Israeli Jews, and his experience as inherent in being the son of a Jewish family which led him to be self-hating Jew to escape from the harsh reality.

This occurs when the jews are being transported to the camps. The author uses descriptive language to show the cruelty of the S.S. officers. This is significant because this is the moment when the jews realize the severity of the situation.

It was challenging to try to find security in being a part of the Jewish community when there was not only the fear of persecution but also sometimes a lack of enthusiasm for other Jews to try and come together when they were faced with their own problems. These people who were not only cast out of their homeland, but also had to hide their cultural background in order to survive, truly know what it means to be homeless. They were not well received in the countries they immigrated to neither by native Jews nor non-Jews. They did not feel help from anyone in the world and therefore felt no sense of security. Amery says that “Genuine homesickness” was when he looked back at his life before any of this had happened and felt self-contempt and his hatred for his loss of self. These emotions are intensified when “Traditional homesickness” or nostalgia for the way things were kicks in, causing Amery to hate himself more for wanted to be back in the land that turned against him. He goes on to claim that people need a sense of home, and that without a sense of home people age very poorly. He says that young men are always seeing themselves as men of the future, while old men see themselves as what they were in the past. One grows with his “home” and needs that growth in order to look back on his life and be satisfied with being a man of the past.

Ti and Longfellow were both trying to get a message out to the world. The way they were speaking showed they’ve witnessed the struggles.Both Ti and Longfellow had similarities but also many differences

Explore conflicting accounts of Jewish Identity in The Mandlebaum Gate. The Mandlebaum Gate is a novel by Muriel Spark set in the territories of Jerusalem and Jordan during the Eichmann Trials. Within the novel there is a character "Barbara Vaughan" who is a Gentile Jewess. She travels within Israel and Jordan on a pilgrimage to see the holy shrines and has various adventures and encounters during her trip.

To read “The Jew” either solely as an anti-Semitic campaign or as a sympathetic plea to the Jews does not do this poem justice. However, reading this poem as a cause and effect story can allow one a clearer picture of the action of the poem and it can help the reader

I think that the message of the poem is that we should never forget what happened to the six million Jews in World War II who died in the concentration camps. Even in the second last verse of the poem it gives us a hint. It says that, ?After immense suffering someone

One of the most striking things about this poem is the continuous metaphor Plath uses comparing the speaker’s father to a Nazi and the speaker to a Jew. This simile conveys to the reader the degree to which the narrator has suffered at the hands of her father. The narrator indicates that she is not actually Jewish in her use of simile here: she states that she is “like a Jew” (34), which implies that the speaker is distancing herself from actual Jews. However, the speaker says she “may well be a Jew” (35) because her father’s words served as “an engine Chuffing [her] off like a Jew [...] to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen” (33). In choosing to describe her relationship with her father as analogous to the holocaust- one of the most horrific, cruel, and inhumane events in human history- the narrator conveys the feeling of being tortured by her father. The narrator paints herself as a helpless victim by saying that she related to people on trains to concentration camps. Although this is a gross exaggeration of the speaker’s circumstances, her use of this metaphor shows the undeniably intense pain the speaker experienced at the hands of her father.

In “A Psalm of Life”, Longfellow develops ideas on Carpe Diem through visual representations. The poet, using a powerful extended metaphor in stanza 5, expresses life as a battle using striking visual imagery with the phrase, “In the world’s broad field of battle”. A military battle negatively connotes “hardship” and “unpredictability”, reflecting the nature of suffering in life. The metaphor continues throughout the stanza conveying to readers not to be “dumb, driven cattle” whereas to be a “hero in the strife!”. This compelling idea supports the theme of creating a legacy and promotes being courageous. Longfellow reinforces his agnostic ideas, which are disagreed with by Herrick, about religion several times in the poem, suggesting religion holds people back from seizing the day. In stanza 6, the