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This chapter focuses on the nationalist identitarianism underwriting the current academic isolation of the historicist mainstream of Jewish American literary practice. It first considers the Jewish problem as the problem of “Jewishness” before turning to a discussion of the Jewish identity that underwrites Jewish American literature and how a critical vocabulary capable of liberating Jewish American literary study from the historicist criterion can be developed. It then explores how the specific academic history of Jews and their studies has enabled identitarianism to hinder a critical theorization of the identity of Jewish American literature. It also examines how Jewish literary study can articulate itself in an analytical vector that aims to secure Jewishness as a legible object of both scrutiny and practice, a vector it calls “semitism.” The chapter concludes by noting the importance of the genealogy of the historicism of currently ascendant professional languages of identity in “semitic” literary criticism.

This chapter presents a critical analysis of the New York intellectuals within the context of Jewish identity, and particularly the legibility and affectivity of Jewish identity, in order to disengage the political problematic of literary criticism from biologistic nationalism. It examines how the texts of Lionel Trilling and his fellow recognizably Jewish New York intellectuals parody the interpretive compulsion to recognize or identify them as Jewish. It also considers the link between Jewish New York intellectuals and the history of Jewish American literature, along with a racialist-nationalist biographical project that interprets the emergence of Zionist neoconservatism from the belly of the New York intellectuals as a natural or inevitable emergence overseen by a concept of responsibility to Jewish polity. Finally, the chapter shows how a biologistic interpretive framework displaces the possibility of critical interrogation of the ways in which Jewishness becomes legible.

This book explores how Jewish American literary study has alienated itself—in the form of insiderism, trivialization, and ghettoization—compared to American studies and ethnic American literary formations. It examines the lines of relation and mutuality between Jewish American literary study and those institutional establishments from which it persists in isolation, such as American studies, multicultural and multiethnic studies, critical theory, and Jewish studies. It also considers the Jewishness that anchors the field of Jewish American literature specifically and Jewish studies more generally, along with multiple and often discontinuous histories and agents accounting for the field's ghettoization. The book employs a literary critical concept of Jewishness to reveal the history, meaning, and power of Jewish identity and articulates a concept of particularity for the study of identity that is neither positivistically opposed to some ontological concept of universality nor grounded in what is inevitably nationalized and biologized ethnic self-evidence.

The past quarter-century has seen a sea change in the way we view Jewish American literature—that is, the texts that we read and the ways in which we read them. This chapter examines two aspects of this change: new developments in the way we approach Jewish American women's writing and new trends in the growing body of Jewish American literature by women. It discusses how Jewish feminist literary scholars traversed the terrain marked by three minefields: patriarchy, feminism, and religion. It explains the so-called “new wave” of Jewish American writing published at the turn of the century. This form of writing tends to be less polemical and more nuanced than the writing of the 1980s, which first introduced issues of Jewish feminism into a literature that had not encompassed them before.

This chapter articulates a literary historical legitimation for critiquing the legibility and circulation of Jewish categoricalness. Through a close reading of Abraham Cahan's novella “The Imported Bridegroom,” it envisions an identity-based literary critical practice that seeks its authorization from a future of identification about which it remains uncertain. It shows how Cahan's text undermines a certain kind of literary history that expects to find in Jewish American literature the secure representation of a Jewish American subject it wants to recognize, while also illuminating a path toward an alternate literary history, a counterdiscourse to the dialectical conservation of a Jewish identity anchored in the past. The chapter proposes a “Zionist” scholarly desire for self-evidence as a way of marking the pernicious historicist tendency to think about Jewishness in statist terms.

This chapter shows how the early comic strip was developed and then came to influence comic fiction in the early twentieth century. As the editor of the New York Journal‘s comic supplement, Rudolph Block regularized the use of panels, repetitive storylines, and caricature, resulting in the multi-panel format that defines the comic-strip genre. Block’s role in the development of the comic strip has gone largely unrecognized; as a writer of Jewish American literature, Block has been forgotten. Using the pseudonym Bruno Lessing, Block published nearly a hundred stories between 1905 and 1920 in popular magazines. These humorous stories, full of rich dialect and accompanied by vibrant illustrations, translated the multiethnic culture of the Lower East Side for a mainstream, English-speaking audience. Block represented dialect and caricature as opportunities for negotiation and play, providing ways to display identity in multiple and shifting forms.

This introductory chapter briefly examines the ways in which the authors featured in this book explore, satirize, and experiment with the social values, political assumptions, and ethical commitments that underwrite the social transitions in post-civil rights America. Through their art, these writers expose the cynicism, limitations, blind spots, and conceptual aporias that nonetheless advance into mainstream political claims for group-based rights and recognition. Rights and recognition form the core of the chapter's discussion, alongside a third concept—“proximity”—and how these lead to new configurations of being and belonging. In so doing the chapter also explores the ambiguities surrounding “Jewish American Literature” as a concept, and thereafter lays out the background and methodology undertaken in the making of this book.

This chapter examines Saul Bellow’s use of Jewish vernacularity within his world-writing project. Focusing on the 1960s and ’70s, the height of his fame, the chapter analyzes how Bellow embeds his characters in post-immigrant Chicago, yet also active within global networks—and all while still longing, dialectically, for the universal. To reflect this dialectic, Bellow created a style that translates and aestheticizes Yiddish and immigrant colloquialisms. The result is writing characterized by obsessive, exhausting acts of compensation in which Bellow’s narrator must balance descent into Jewish vernacularity with a reach for sublime metaphor. Bellow’s attempts to translate Jewishness without abandoning the vernacular lead to an underdetermined attachment to Jewishness, producing, paradoxically, a parochial world literature—writing that hinges on the possibility of the local as a site of transcendence. But this locality remains untranslatable, such that instead of arriving at the universal Bellow is left with a set of uncertainties.

This book has explored the status quo between Jewish American literary study, Jewish studies, “ethnic” or multicultural studies, and English and American literature, along with the current state of Jewish studies and critical identity formations more generally. It has noted the relative lack of interest in talking about Jewish identity on the part of other fields such as American studies and comparative ethnicity studies as one of the axes of Jewish American literary study's professional alienation. It has also discussed sweeping claims about what Jewish American literary study can and should do with Jewish American literature; the dangers of linking Jewish literary criticism to a concept of a Jewish people; normalization as the modality of the identitarian investment of thought; and the recuperative, generative history that is necessary to nationalistic anthropologism.

This chapter takes the satirization of multiculturalism in Gary Shteyngart's novel Absurdistan as a challenge to the discussion of pluralist recognition of the preceding chapters. For Shteyngart's antihero, the Russian Jewish scion and practitioner of global multiculturalism Misha Vainburg, multiculturalism is the transcendent truth amid the commodification of everything under global capitalism. Misha derives his multiculturalism from his liberal arts alma mater “Accidental College,” and Shteyngart's swipe at academia is the occasion for this chapter's discussion of how and why culture has become so venerated by some commentators and so discredited by others. Working toward a reconstructed pragmatic account of the efficacy of culture, the chapter also considers what culture has meant and can come to mean again for Jewish American literature, by looking backwards to a text with surprising parallels to Absurdistan, the memoir of the nineteenth-century Jewish homesteader Rachel Calof.

Great works of literature always take root in particular linguistic, cultural and national traditions, but they are at the same time capable of transcending the limitations of the local and the parochial to reach readers beyond the boundaries of their provenance, either in the original forms or in successful translations....

This chapter examines American Jewish literature produced in 1929, with particular emphasis on Michael Gold's “proletarian novel” Jews without Money, Charles Reznikoff's By the Waters of Manhattan, and the English translation of Isaac Babel's revolutionary Russian story sequence Red Cavalry Stories. It considers how the three texts shed light on and enact some of the changes of 1929 that had affected Jews and non-Jews alike, including the founding of the Jewish Agency, the Hebron riots in Palestine, the U.S. stock market crash, and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 that instituted a quota system for immigrants to the United States. It also explores aspects of the texts that are harder to analyze as historical phenomena in order to understand the culture of American Jews during the period and what made these works successful.

This chapter studies Omri Asscher's Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews (2020). This book employs translation to think about how two groups — American and Israeli Jews — understand and relate to one another. It stresses how adoption of different everyday languages and residence in distinct territories produced two collectives possessing divergent modern Jewish identities: when Jewish people and institutions came to mediate, manage, and regulate the social meanings of translated texts in the United States and Israel, they employed translations to define their center in contradistinction to its perceived antipode. Asscher also convincingly demonstrates how Israeli critics of the 1950s through the 1980s took pride in the literary successes of American Jewish writers, while dismissing the contents of their writing on ideological grounds. In contrast with his points about American Jewish translations of Israeli literature and Israeli translations of American Jewish literature from the 1950s to the 1980s, Asscher's broader claim about translation lacks effective substantiation.

This chapter examines how Philip Roth responds to Jewish American readers and contexts in his fiction. Roth exploits the tensions and transitions in Jewish American political aspirations in the period, setting heated political debates about assimilation and particularism against different measurements of value in the novel. By using live cultural debates from the period, Roth courts ethnic categorization, while ultimately relativizing such categories in his attempt to pursue alternative understandings of literary value. In Roth’s earlier ‘Nathan Zuckerman’ fictions, the comedy and intelligence emerge through his practice of contrasting the ‘humble needs’ of a desiring body with the rush either to pass political judgement or to withdraw the novel from the complications of embodied life. The second half of the chapter demonstrates how Roth engages both directly and indirectly with the work of Hannah Arendt and the 1950s context for thinking about the Holocaust. This section of the chapter focuses in particular on an unpublished screenplay housed in Roth’s literary archive.

The Epilogue offers a reflection on the possible “elsewheres” of Jewish American writing, looking for further articulations of Glatstein’s non-institutional world literature to-come in the writing of Anna Margolin and Grace Paley. Margolin in Yiddish and Paley in English rarely expected recognition from patriarchal institutions, yet they were writers who depended on the translational modes of modern literature as part of their writerly practices. They inscribe in their work a futurity that is beholden to Jewish vernacularity while searching for new vocabularies for personal and collective redemption. Reading the politics of “tiptoed waiting” in Margolin’s final published poem and parsing the genealogy of justice in Paley’s writing, this chapter considers what it means to inhabit a world literature to-come grounded in a practice of vernacular listening.

Roth’s first two decades in America were full of spiritual trials. He got married in 1918 but questioned his ability to love. He wrote acclaimed poetry, but most of it expressed a yearning for God based on guilty awareness of self-interest. He revived a Little Magazine he had previously edited while at Columbia University, but it failed because he did not have sufficient funds. His own Jewish American poetry benefited from the criticism of Marie Syrkin and Maurice Samuel and his understanding of Edgar Arlington Robinson’s dramatic monologues. He opened his Poetry Book Shop, but when it failed, he went to London, where he met and impressed many literary figures. After failing to attain a London publisher for a novel and a proposed anthology of American poetry, he returned to New York. He published two prophetic poems about the future of Zionism and of the moribund condition of European culture after World War I.

Hurst’s best-selling novel of the 1930s portrayed the life of a New Woman business tycoon and the African American maid whose family waffle recipe became the basis for an “Aunt Jemima” kind of product and fortune. Stereotypes such as the “mammy” and “tragic mulatta” are either damaging caricatures or images to expose racism, depending on the reader’s interpretation of the text. The novel’s use of limited point of view works to satirize Bea Pullman’s racism even as the novel looks sympathetically on her quasi-feminist ambitions. The decision of the light-skinned Peola to leave the United States presents an indictment of society’s racism, though it breaks her mother’s heart. The film version of the novel from 1934 offers an interesting comparison to more stereotypical black images in cinema at the time, though some critics still found it offensive.