BiblioVault - Books about Awe

Days of Awe

Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians

Atalia Omer

University of Chicago Press, 2019

For many Jewish people in the mid-twentieth century, Zionism was an unquestionable tenet of what it meant to be Jewish. Seventy years later, a growing number of American Jews are instead expressing solidarity with Palestinians, questioning old allegiances to Israel. How did that transformation come about? What does it mean for the future of Judaism?

In Days of Awe, Atalia Omer examines this shift through interviews with a new generation of Jewish activists, rigorous data analysis, and fieldwork within a progressive synagogue community. She highlights people politically inspired by social justice campaigns including the Black Lives Matter movement and protests against anti-immigration policies. These activists, she shows, discover that their ethical outrage at US policies extends to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. For these American Jews, the Jewish history of dispossession and diaspora compels a search for solidarity with liberation movements. This shift produces innovations within Jewish tradition, including multi-racial and intersectional conceptions of Jewishness and movements to reclaim prophetic Judaism. Charting the rise of such religious innovation, Omer points toward the possible futures of post-Zionist Judaism.

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Edge of Awe

Experiences of the Malheur-Steens Country

Alan L. Contreras

Oregon State University Press, 2019

This compelling anthology gathers together personal impressions of the Malheur-Steens country of southeastern Oregon, known for its birding opportunities, its natural beauty and remoteness, and, more recently, for the 2016 armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Contributors of poetry and narrative nonfiction include biologists, students, tourists, birders, and local residents, thus reflecting the perspectives of both visitors and residents.

Edge of Awe celebrates the immense variety of human experience in the Malheur-Steens region. This high-desert marsh country has long been a place of human habitation, work, and recreation, but this compendium is weighted toward the writing of visitors over the past one hundred years. It encompasses a wide range of experiences, such as fishing the Blitzen River, attending the Steens Running Camp, leading a mule train on Steens mountain, looking for rare migrant birds, boating on the great marshes, and much more.

Anyone who has visited the awe-inspiring Malheur-Steens country or plans to do so, and anyone with an interest in the region, will find inspiration in this literary companion.

CONTRIBUTORS
Chas Biederman
Charles E. Bendire
Greg Bryant
Sean Burns
Alan L. Contreras
Harry Fuller
Ira N. Gabrielson
Quinton Hallett
Ada Hastings Hedges
David Hedges
Hendrik Herlyn
Meli Hull
William Kittredge
Ursula K. Le Guin
Maitreya
David B. Marshall
John F. Marshall
Tom McAllister
Thomas C. Meinzen
Peter Pearsall
Dallas Lore Sharp
William Stafford
Noah K. Strycker
Peter Walker
Ellen Waterston
C.E.S. Wood

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Gates of Awe

Holy Day Prayers for Young Children

Rabbi Howard Bogot

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1991

The second in a series of prayerbooks for early childhood use, Gates of Awe contains rich and enchanting illustrations combined with poetic text that enhances the sense of awe found during the Holy Days. The special qualities of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur are skillfully introduced to young worshippers through the inspiration of prayer, the excitement of the Shofar and the lessons in the stories of Abraham and Torah.

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Just Wonder

Shifting Perspectives in Tradition

Pauline Greenhill

Utah State University Press, 2024

Inspired by folklore, television, fairy tales, social media, novels, and films, Just Wonder addresses crucial themes in social and ecological justice efforts. Moving into the mid-twenty-first century, wonder—as a potentially critical sociocultural, ecological, and individual stance—will play a significant role in reconceptualizing the present to imagine a different and better world.

These essays examine fairy tales and other traditional forms of the fantastic and the real to offer alternative expressions of justice relevant to gender, sex, sexuality, environment, Indigeneity, class, ability, race, decolonizing, and human and nonhuman relations. By analyzing fairy tales and wonder texts from various media through an intersectional feminist lens, Pauline Greenhill and Jennifer Orme consider how wonder genres and forms blend with diverse conceptions of seeking and enacting justice. International collaborators—both established and emerging scholars who self-identify with different subjectivities, locations, and generations and come from an impressive range of inter/disciplines—engage with contemporary and historical texts from various languages and cultural contexts, including interventions, counterparts, and comparisons to the fairy tale. Just Wonder offers a critical look at how creative wondering can expand the ability to resist modes of oppression while fostering equity, as well as encourage curiosity and imagination.

In a world that can be overwhelming and precarious, this book presents scholarly, artistic, personal, and collective-action interventions to identify and respond to injustice while centering wonder and, thus, imagination, questioning, and hope. Just Wonder will appeal to fairy-tale scholars; folklorists; students and scholars of film, media studies, and cultural studies; as well as a general audience.

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Shock and Awe

American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

William V. Spanos

Dartmouth College Press, 2013

Inspired by the foreign policy entanglements of recent years, William V. Spanos offers a dramatic interpretation of Twain’s classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, providing a fresh assessment of American exceptionalism and the place of a global America in the American imaginary. Spanos insists that Twain identifies with his protagonist, particularly in his defining use of the spectacle, and thus with an American exceptionalism that uncannily anticipates the George W. Bush administration’s normalization of the state of exception and the imperial policy of “preemptive war,” unilateral “regime change,” and “shock and awe” tactics. Equally stimulating is Spanos’s thoroughly original ontology of American exceptionalism and imperialism and his tracing of these forces, through a chronological examination of Twain studies and criticism over the past century. As an examination of an overlooked text, and a critical history of American studies from its origins in the nation-oriented Myth and Symbol school of the Cold War era to its present globalizing or transnationalizing perspective, Shock and Awe will appeal to a broad audience of American literature scholars and beyond.

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