Holy Envy: Writing in the Jewish Christian Borderzone by Maeera Y. Shreiber (review)

Reviewed by: Holy Envy: Writing in the Jewish Christian Borderzone by Maeera Y. Shreiber Dara Barnat Maeera Y. Shreiber. Holy Envy: Writing in the Jewish Christian Borderzone. New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. 170 pp. In Holy Envy: Writing in the Jewish Christian Borderzone, Maeera Y. Shreiber expertly employs multiple lenses—philosophical, religious, poetic, literary, cultural, biographical, and autobiographical—to investigate poetry and prose by Jewish writers and thinkers whose work reveals engagement with Jewish/Christian junctures. Shreiber deftly examines writers with varying connections (and resistances) to Jewishness, languages (with a special focus on Yiddish), and aesthetic styles, including Sholem Asch, Henry Roth, Emma Lazarus, Jacob Glatstein, Paul Celan, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, Karl Shapiro, Denise Levertov, and Leonard Cohen, in her words, "to explain what makes the site of Jewish Christian encounters so alluring, productive, and sometimes incendiary" (xiii). With gestures to non-Jewish writers like Gloria Anzaldúa (who wrote of the famous "borderlands") and Homi Bhabha, Shreiber designates these Jewish/Christian junctures as "borderzones." As she elucidates, literature in this borderzone is rich, while at times complicated and even contentious. Not shying away from self-reflection in the mapping of these Jewish/Christian works in the borderzone, Shreiber describes her research as informed by her lived experiences, such as adhering to Jewish Orthodoxy for a period, marrying outside the Jewish faith, and engaging in interreligious scholarly projects. She claims to present these more personal narratives "because it may help my readers understand more fully why I am invested in the language of 'borderzones' when it comes to talking about the spaces where Jewishness meets Christianity" (x). In chapter 1, Shreiber opens by mentioning the source for the first part of the book's title—"holy envy"—a notion, she notes, put forth by the Swedish theologian Bishop Krister Stendahl, a figure who "challenges us to be genuinely vulnerable and to recognize that there may be something about another faith that is genuinely lacking in one's own" (1). In line with this quote by Stendahl, I would argue that both the autobiographical elements and literary analysis of the book reflect an open, vulnerable, and sensitive approach. Also in chapter 1, Shreiber pertinently contemplates the nature of poetry itself, providing a theoretical framework for analysis of poetry in/of the borderzone, showing how through play with language, themes, and forms, poems can lend themselves to representing borderzones; she writes, "poems themselves are borderzones, spaces where one religious entity meets, interacts with, or otherwise engages the religious Other, in the course of realizing or articulating a version of End Page 231 the Self" (xii). Shreiber examines Christian themes, symbols, and imagery in poems including "The Crowing of the Red Cock" by Lazarus, "Good Night, World" by the Yiddish-language immigrant poet Glatstein, and Celan's "Tenebrae." Regarding prose, Shreiber provides insightful analysis of Jewish/Christian border-crossing in novels by Jewish authors, such as Asch's The Nazarene and Roth's Call It Sleep, which she calls "a paradigmatic example of a borderzone text" (20). In chapter 2, Shreiber focuses on two Jewish women poets—or "female mystics"—a category beset by the patriarchal idea in Jewish Orthodoxy that "women were not allowed to study the texts comprising mystic knowledge, as they are considered inherently impure" (27). Shreiber wonderfully explores how, intellectually, creatively, politically, and biographically, Loy and Stein challenge these strictures and reach into Jewish/Christian intersection(s): for example, "the flair for crossing religious boundaries" in Loy's "Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose" (34). Like Loy's work, Shreiber claims, Stein's libretto Four Saints, with allusions to St. Theresa, represents a "liminal text, a borderzone work by a non-Christian outsider" (51). Chapters 3 and 4 consider Louis Zukofsky and Karl Jay Shapiro, respectively. Shreiber observes intriguing poetic experiments in Zukofsky's poetry via the Jewish/Christian lens, while writing that his engagement with the borderzone is "darker" (55) and that "his work bristles with defiance, he also risks shame—as he confronts his genuine desire for the Christian Other" (56). I tend to agree with Shreiber's assertions that the poems "Poem Beginning 'The,'" as well as "A," reflect struggles with a "liminal...