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Email: [[mlraph]]
Office Phone: 757-221-2172
M.A., Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati
Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
An excerpt from the Introduction to Marc Lee Raphael's most recent book, Diary of a Los Angeles Jew, 1947-1972: Autobiography at Autofiction:
Three different interests came together to produce this book, a somewhat unusual combination of diary excerpts from the first 30 years of my life and my reflections on these entries during my seventh decade. These interests unfolded independently, but at a certain point it seemed convenient to link them into a single book.
The first was an interest in Jewish autobiography (autobiographical novels, memoirs, and autobiographies have become common everywhere in the world), initially because of a course I planned to teach, and increasingly because I found the genre so fascinating. Throughout this book the reader will find references to numerous autobiographies by one group of Jews, American rabbis.
At the same time, I became increasingly engaged in taking a fresh look at American Jewish life in the roughly 25 years after World War II, again for a course I was scheduled to teach. Historians of the American Jewish experience are rethinking the 1950s and 1960s, and I wanted to join the effort.
Finally, two models for this book came to my attention. The first is an unforgettable memoir, one that I have begun to use in my course on the Shoah, Rosetta Loy's First Words. Loy's combination of diary entries in Rome on the eve of and during World War II - as a young Catholic girl observing a Jewish family - and her reflections on those entries (with the benefit of research in the Vatican Archives) many years later, excited me, and I have tried to use this technique in my book.
The second is Amos Oz's Tale of Love and Darkness, what he calls a memoir, but the Library of Congress correctly catalogued as fiction. He not only describes in detail what women were wearing when he was seven, what was served at specific occasions when he was eight, and what people said, verbatim, 50 years earlier, when he was nine, but he reflects on the process of writing about such "memories."
Marc Lee Raphael
Nathan Gumenick Chair of Judaic Studies
Office: Wren Building 201Email: [[mlraph]]
Office Phone: 757-221-2172
Areas of Specialization
Jews and Judaism in America.
Education
B.A., University of California, Los AngelesM.A., Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati
Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
Academic Positions
Department of History, Ohio State University, 1971-1989
Department of Religious Studies, College of William and Mary, 1989-
Visiting Professor at California State University, Northridge;
University of California, Los Angeles; University of Pittsburgh; Brown
University; Wolfson College, Oxford University
Courses Taught
Introduction to the History of Jewish Thought (211), The Holocaust (309), Judaism in America (326), Sexuality Women, and Family in Judaism (327), Midrash: Jewish Interpretation of Scripture (328)
Research
A history of the synagogue in America (under contract with New York University Press).An excerpt from the Introduction to Marc Lee Raphael's most recent book, Diary of a Los Angeles Jew, 1947-1972: Autobiography at Autofiction:
Three different interests came together to produce this book, a somewhat unusual combination of diary excerpts from the first 30 years of my life and my reflections on these entries during my seventh decade. These interests unfolded independently, but at a certain point it seemed convenient to link them into a single book.
The first was an interest in Jewish autobiography (autobiographical novels, memoirs, and autobiographies have become common everywhere in the world), initially because of a course I planned to teach, and increasingly because I found the genre so fascinating. Throughout this book the reader will find references to numerous autobiographies by one group of Jews, American rabbis.
At the same time, I became increasingly engaged in taking a fresh look at American Jewish life in the roughly 25 years after World War II, again for a course I was scheduled to teach. Historians of the American Jewish experience are rethinking the 1950s and 1960s, and I wanted to join the effort.
Finally, two models for this book came to my attention. The first is an unforgettable memoir, one that I have begun to use in my course on the Shoah, Rosetta Loy's First Words. Loy's combination of diary entries in Rome on the eve of and during World War II - as a young Catholic girl observing a Jewish family - and her reflections on those entries (with the benefit of research in the Vatican Archives) many years later, excited me, and I have tried to use this technique in my book.
The second is Amos Oz's Tale of Love and Darkness, what he calls a memoir, but the Library of Congress correctly catalogued as fiction. He not only describes in detail what women were wearing when he was seven, what was served at specific occasions when he was eight, and what people said, verbatim, 50 years earlier, when he was nine, but he reflects on the process of writing about such "memories."
