ILANA BLUMBERG
JUST PUBLISHED
GEORGE ELIOT: WHOLE SOUL
The girl who would become George Eliot began her professional writing life with a poem bidding farewell to all books but the Bible. How did a young Christian poet become the great realist novelist whose commitment to religious freethinking made her so iconoclastic that she could not be buried in Westminster Abbey? Memorialized there today by a stone lain in the Poets' Corner in 1980, George Eliot wrote herself and her fellow Victorians through turbulent decades of moral and historical doubt in religious orthodoxy, alongside the unrelenting need to articulate a compelling modern faith in its place.
In this new account of George Eliot's spiritual life, George Eliot: Whole Soul, Ilana Blumberg reveals to us a writer who did not simply lose her faith once and for all on her way to becoming an adult, but devoted the full span of her career to imagining a wide religious sensibility that could inform personal and social life. As we range among Eliot's letters, essays, translations, poetry, and novels, we encounter here a writer whose extraordinary art and intellect offer us company, still today, in the search for modern meaning.
New essay, November 27, 2024: "I hope your loved ones remain safe: Dispatch from a Teacher-Scholar-Life Writer in Wartime" in Life Writing
GET THE BOOK HERE
BOOKS
OPEN YOUR HAND
HOUSES OF STUDY
VICTORIAN SACRIFICE
ESSAYS: LIFE WRITING
“Wartime Diary”.
Jewish Review of Books.
4 March 2024.
"People's Army."
Jewish Book Council. Witnessing Series.
30 November 2023.
"Things Keep Spinning."
Jewish Book Council. Witnessing Series.
8 November 2023.
"Mrs. Dalloway in Jerusalem, 2023."
Lilith Magazine.
24 January 2024.
"A Nation Running from Bad News."
Jewish Book Council. Witnessing Series.
15 November 2023.
“Degrading, Abusive, and Cruel.”
Haaretz.
11 August 2023.
"That They Be Safe in the Land."
Jewish Book Council. Witnessing Series.
12 October 2023.
“Jerusalem Diary.”
Jewish Book Council. Witnessing Series.
19 Octoberber 2023.
RECOMMENDATIONS
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"In this remarkable memoir,(Open Your Hand) Ilana Blumberg insists that classroom instruction entails moral commitments illuminated, in her case, through immersion in the humanities. A gift to anyone interested in the art and practice of teaching, and a powerful pedagogic manifesto."
Jonathan D. Sarna
Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Brandeis University
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"Open Your Hand will restore your faith in the power of teachers to make a difference. Blumberg offers her readers a thoughtful meditation on moral education by way of an entertaining and often poignant tour of the institutions in which she has taught. She describes her students with a level of empathy and insight that makes you wish that you had studied with her."
Jonathan Krasner
Jack Joseph and Morton Mandel Associate Professor of Jewish Education Research, Brandeis University
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"A smart, compelling, significant memoir. I enthusiastically recommend this particularly timely book as it makes a spiritual and ethical case for the humanities in action and for fact-based, rational discourse...Ultimately, Blumberg champions the sacred art of teaching and the power of reading and writing to make worlds and moral selves."
Helene Meyers
Author of Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness
TEACHING TESTIMONIALS
It’s the best book on teaching that I’ve read in a very long time, so I’ve already given away several copies of Ilana Blumberg’s Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American. What I found in this book astonished and surprised me. Blumberg, who has taught in colleges, elementary and secondary schools, and a university in Tel Aviv, writes about a classroom crisis she encountered and the ways in which it awakened her to what truly matters in teaching: the formation of character. -- Jill Baumgaertner, Christian Century
https://www.christiancentury.org/article/books/books-we-re-giving
I've done several workshops and courses over the years, but I had never encountered the level of insight that I gained from only a couple of hours with Ilana. Her scholarship came across, as did her writing ability, but what impressed me the most was her gift as an educator.
While she did touch upon certain (important) aspects of the craft of writing, these seem simple, almost banal, compared to the discussions about purpose and the doors she opened for me with choice of texts, the careful listening, the depth of her feedback, and ability to feel comfortable in such a mixed group. My one complaint - it was short. Too short.
Over the last seven years, I have attended writing workshops from time to time. None have been as excellent as this one from Ilana. Firstly, the choice of readings was so extraordinary - I had never encountered anything similar before.
The way Ilana handled the group was quite remarkable. Everyone felt that they were important and she was interested in every sharing that the group felt free and willing to do. The interaction I found quite remarkable between people who had not met before. There was such empathy and understanding from everyone because Ilana moderated the group in such in a quiet but purposeful manner. We learnt a lot from her but also from others which I think ideally is the way a workshop should happen.
BIO
Ilana Blumberg is the author of two memoirs, Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American, and Houses of Study: a Jewish Woman among Books, winner of the Sami Rohr Choice Award for Jewish Literature and shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies and the Moment Magazine Prize for Emergent Writers. She publishes regularly in the field of Victorian studies and is the author of the scholarly monograph, Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century England and the spiritual biography, George Eliot: Whole Soul.
Ilana was educated in Jewish day schools, at Drisha Institute, and Midreshet Lindenbaum, and earned her BA in English, summa cum laude, at Barnard College.
Ilana earned her M.A. in Creative Writing and her Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and twice from the Israel Science Foundation.
Ilana began her formal career in teaching at Beit Rabban in New York City. She has received awards for teaching excellence from the University of Pennsylvania and Michigan State University, where she taught for eleven years. Ilana currently teaches in the Department of English and the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University where she is a professor of English.
Ilana lives with her family in Jerusalem. She writes regularly in relation to current events and is currently at work on a long-term project teaching memoir and life writing to Jewish and Palestinian Israeli students under the rubric of a grant from the ISF entitled, "First-Person: Teaching Life Writing in Israeli Higher Education." She will post related work on this website.
CONTACT
Ilana is available for speaking engagements and master classes. Please contact her at:
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