LITMIR.BIZ

This work, the fruit of intense research work spanning several years, examines the first serious attempt by the descendants of the Sephardim—the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492—to “return to Sepharad” more than three decades after the abolition of the Inquisition. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a trend towards historical revisionism, backed by Liberals, whose influence was pivotal at the Cortes de Cádiz (the national assembly convened to assert Spanish sovereignty, introduce reform, and establish a modern Spanish nation), combined with economic factors, culminated in the abolition of the Inquisition in 1834. This paved the way, ideologically, for the freedom of worship to be proclaimed in Spain on the heels of La Septembrina, or La Gloriosa , the September Revolution of 1868 in which Queen Isabel II was deposed. European Sephardic Jews, galvanized by their perception of a tolerant Spain, decided to undertake a major project to initiate negotiations with the Spanish state.

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Twenty-five years ago, Ilan Stavans published his first book, Imagining Columbus: The Literary Voyage (1993). Since then, Stavans has become a polarizing figure, dismissed and praised in equal measure, a commanding if contested intellectual whose work as a cultural critic has been influential in the fields of Latino and Jewish studies, politics, immigration, religion, language, and identity. He can be credited for bringing attention to Jewish Latin America and issues like Spanglish, he has been instrumental in shaping a certain view of Latino Studies in universities across the United States as well abroad, he has anthologized much of Latino and Latin American Jewish literature and he has engaged in contemporary pop culture via the graphic novel. He was the host of a PBS show called Conversations with Ilan Stavans , and has had his fiction adapted into the stage and the big screen. The man, as one critic stated, clearly has energy to burn and it does not appear to be abating. This collection celebrates twenty-five years of Stavans’s work with essays that describe the good and the bad, the inspired and the pedestrian, the worthwhile and the questionable.

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