Including a historical inquiry into the status of Jewish poetry as a marginalized kind of writing, this work helps us think about the ways in which displacement, exile, mourning, gender, and prayer contribute to the shaping of the Jewish American imagination and its poetic production.

"Singing in a Strange Land" explores how the history and cultural conditions of Jewish poetry and poetic production--from the destruction of the Second Temple and Babylonian exile to medieval Spain, the Nazi Holocaust, the contemporary Gulf War, and the second Palestinian intifada--have shaped "Jewish American poetry"; and, through analyses of important poems by significant Jewish American poets, how they shape Jewish American cultural identity.

"Whereas scholarship on Jewish American Literature has tended to focus on writers of fiction, Shreiber calls attention to the achievement of Jewish American poets, which, as she demonstrates, is remarkable by any measure . . . What we find, in short, is an example of what can be done with poems, and for those of us who choose to do this-who choose to read modern Jewish literature against the backdrop of traditional sources, Shreiber's book offers an inspiring model indeed."