Comments | stilljewish: Jews in fantasy

polaris_starz in stilljewish

Jews in fantasy

Aug 01, 2008 14:42

I know people have been posting links to their own Jewish-themed fanfic, but I didn't seen a post for recommending other people's-- if there is, please point it out to me. But anyway, today I was looking through my bookmarks and stumbled over this: Kaddish, by copperbadge, which is a HP fic about Remus and Harry saying Kaddish for James, Lily, and Sirius ( Read more... )

Comments 37

technocracygirl August 2 2008, 15:07:21 UTC

Jews both Sephardic and Ashkenazic play big roles in Eric Flint's 163x-verse. (Alternate history putting a town from West Virginia in 2000 into 1632 Germany. It's now a sprawling soap opera-esque saga written by a lot of people, though all supervised by Flint.)

The biggest Jewish stuff published in print so far is mostly in the original 1632 and "The Wallenstein Gambit," a novella in Ring of Fire. I am avidly awating whenever the heck "1633/4: Bohemia" is to be published. There may be more Jewish stuff in the e-book stories that I haven't bought yet.

copperbadge August 2 2008, 18:26:14 UTC

Thank you for the recc! :D

This isn't quite what you're talking about, but Jewish culture is pretty rich in mysticism and "magic" and wonderful stories. I think it would be really interesting to write a story which is set inside that context -- I suppose I'm thinking of something like His Dark Materials only for Judaic mythology rather than Christian.

I actually started a novel a long time ago about a modern-day painter who strays into a Chasidic community and discovers he's an unwitting Tzaddik. I should have another look at it sometime.

Shavua tov! prezzey August 2 2008, 20:12:01 UTC

I'm not the best person to reply to this because I don't read much fantasy, I strongly prefer SF, but here are my 2 cents...

There are Jews in the World of Darkness universe, but I haven't read the novels, only some of the RPG sourcebooks... and there is also Librarything with its wonderful tag mashing service, try this. (This is based on user tags, but since there are plenty of users and most of them tag in a sensible way, it often comes in handy.)

medieval jews, repost (html) sub_divided August 5 2008, 03:16:55 UTC

There's a Jewish family in Tanith Lee's Book of the Beast, which is a fantasy/horror title set half in Medieval Paradys (Paris) and half in the Roman outpost of Par Dis. But it's kind of...the family conforms to medieval stereotypes about Jews. Not necessarily negatives ones (they are mystics and have Powers, etc) but, still.

The protagonist is Jewish in Phillipa Gregory's Queen's Fool, which is a romance novel badly disguised as historical fiction about Queen Mary, but also sort of counts as fantasy since Hannah has The Sight. (More mystic Jews here, but also a bit about the Inquisition and Jewish community in 1600s England.)

Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of al-Rassan is historical fiction thinly disguised as fantasy, set in an alternate Moorish Spain. There are three major religions in the book: Star-worshipers (Muslims), Moon-worshipers (Jews), and Sun-worshipers (Christian barbarians). The heroine is Jewish, but the book is more about the clash between two powerful men, each belonging to one of the other two religions (based on ( ... )

tiferet August 6 2008, 23:06:03 UTC

There are a lot of Jewish characters here at http://asylums.insanejournal.com/lightning_war, which is either a shared universe multifandom mashup writing project or an RPG, we run it more like the first but somewhat like the second. Currently the project still has Harry Potter serial numbers on it but when we close this round, version 3.0 will be urban fantasy with the HP characters' "names changed to protect the guilty" just like all the other characters' names are. Set in 1942, in a Britain (Britannia) with magick use ( ... )