The Jew's Body

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Routledge, Jan 11, 2013 - Literary Criticism - 316 pages
Drawing on a wealth of medical and historical materials, Sander Gilman sketches details of the anti-Semitic rhetoric about the Jewish body and mind, including medical and popular depictions of the Jewish voice, feet, and nose. Case studies illustrate how Jews have responded to such public misconceptions as the myth of the cloven foot and Jewish flat-footedness, the proposed link between the Jewish mind and hysteria, and the Victorians' irrational connection between Jews and prostitutes. Gilman is especially concerned with the role of psychoanalysis in the construction of anti-Semitism, examining Freud's attitude towards his own Jewishness and its effect on his theories, as well as the supposed "objectiveness" of psychiatrists and social scientists.
 

Contents

PREFACE The Fall of the Wall
1
1 THE JEWISH VOICE Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding Too Jewish
10
2 THE JEWISH FOOT A FootNote to the Jewish Body
38
3 THE JEWISH PSYCHE Freud Dora and the Idea of the Hysteric
60
4 THE JEWISH MURDERER Jack the Ripper Race and Gender
104
5 THE JEWISH GENIUS Freud and the Jewishness of the Creative
128
6 THE JEWISH READER Freud reads Heine Reads Freud
150
7 THE JEWISH NOSE Are Jews White? Or The History of the Nose Job
169
8 THE JEWISH ESSENCE AntiSemitism and the Body in Psychoanalysis
194
9 THE JEWISH DISEASE Plague in Germany 19391989
210
10 CONCLUSION Too black Jews and too white Blacks
234
NOTES
244
INDEX
296
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About the author (2013)

Sander Gilman is Goldwin Smith Professor of Humane Studies at Cornell University and Professor of the History of Psychiatry at Cornell Medical College.

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