In this collection of new essays, Sander Gilman muses on Jewish memory and representation throughout the twentieth-century. Bringing together the worlds of literature, medicine, and popular culture in his characteristic ways, Gilman looks at new, post-diasporic ways of understanding the limits of Jewish identity. Topics include the development of the genre of Holocaust comedy, the imagination of the relationship of the body, disease, and identity, and the place of Jews in today's multicultural society.

'Provocative and imaginative, Gilman's essays offer a unique glimpse into the mechanism of cultural identity.' - Anna Dogole, The Jewish Eye

'An extraordinarily learned, endlessly fascinating book that deals with a hot contemporary subject.' - Elaine Showalter, Princeton University, USA

'[A] fascinating work...Gilman has an eye for detail, yet remains aware of the wider perspective. He also raises important questions...In [this] rich, elegant and beautiful [book] he shows that the history of aesthetic surgery is too important to be left to the surgeons.' - Jonathan Cole, Times Literary Supplement

'[Gilman] tells a strange, macabre, and often richly comic story of shifting desires. His book shows a dazzling European erudition...There is now less furtiveness attached to aethetic surgery. But the question remains - and Gilman asks it cleverly, humanely, and persistently - whether new appearances just gloss over old problems and often create new ones.' - New York Review of Books

'The effervescent Sarder L. Gilman's latest volume, is a characteristically lively series of essays which examines the concept of Jewish identity from fresh and stimulating perspectives...and casts a cultural microscope over Jewish history on a wide frontier.' - The Jewish Chronicle

Introduction: The Frontier as a Model for Jewish History
REPRESENTING THE SHOAH
The First Comic Film about the Shoah: Jurek Becker and Cultural Opposition within the GDR
Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny?: On the Boundary Between Acceptable and Unacceptable Representation of the Holocaust
DISEASES AND BOUNDARIES
A Dream of Jewishness on the Frontier: Kafka's Tumor and 'The Country Doctor'
Private Knowledge: Jewish Illnesses and the Process of Identity Formation
A French Frontier: Proust's Nose
JEWISH BODIES AND HISTORY TODAY
'We're not Jews': Imagining Jewish History and Jewish Bodies in Contemporary Multicultural Literature

SANDER L. GILMAN is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is one of the foremost critics of literature and Jewish culture.