Contents -- Foreword -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION -- Confluent Myths: Two Lives -- LITERATURE IN ITS HISTORICAL CONTEXTS -- Back to Moses: Reflections on Reflections on Freud's Reflections on Jewish History -- The Beilis Trial in Literature: Notes on History and Fiction -- A Crusades Triptych in Modern Hebrew Literature -- Kafka: The Margins of Assimilation -- INTERPRETATION OF TRADITIONAL TEXTS -- Swallowing Jonah: The Eclipse of Parody -- The Politics of Scripture: The Hasidic Tale -- Folklore, Literature, and Scripture: The Bratslav Tale -- ISRAEL AND ZIONISM -- From Diaspora to Homeland: The Transfer of the Hebrew Literary Center to Eretz Yisrael -- The New Diasporism and the Old Diaspora -- Adumbrations of the Israeli "Identity Crisis" in Hebrew Literature of the 1960s -- The Impact of Statehood on the Israeli Literary Imagination -- MODERN HEBREW LITERATURE -- A Jewish Existentialist Hero: Agnon's "A Whole Loaf" -- The Evolving Masks of S. J. Agnon -- The Author, His Code, and His Reader: The Kafka-Agnon Polarities -- Agnon Encounters Freud -- OTHER HEBREW WRITERS -- The Beginnings of Modern Hebrew Literature: Perspectives on "Modernity" -- The Ahad Ha-Am-Berdyczewski Polarity -- The Sacralization of Language in Bialik's Essays -- The Archaeology of Self Deception: A. B. Yehoshua's Mar Mani -- ANTI-SEMITISM AND HOLOCAUST -- Refractions of the Blood Libel in Jewish Literature -- Scholarship as Lamentation: Shalom Spiegel on "The Binding of Isaac" -- JEWISH STUDIES AND THE COMMUNITY -- Our "She'ela Nikhbada:" Whose Hebrew Is It? -- Jewish Literature in the University -- Jewish Studies in American Liberal Arts Colleges and Universities -- Popular Fiction and the Shaping of Jewish Identity.