Jay Geller, “Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews” (Fordham UP, 2017)

In Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (Fordham University Press, 2017), Jay Geller, Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Culture at Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Vanderbilt University Jewish Studies Program, presents the first in-depth study of what is at play when Jewish-identified writers tell animal stories. From Heine’s ironic lizards to Kafka’s Red Peter and Siodmak’s Wolf Man, this monograph brings together Jewish cultural studies and critical animal studies to ferret out these writers’ engagement with the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and animal questions converged and by which varieties of the species “Jew” were identified.

 Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au.

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