The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity

177 Pages·2020·1.708 MB·English

by  Benjamin Schreier

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature
JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS
Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania
Series Editors: Shaul Magid, Francesca Trivellato, Steven Weitzman
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature
Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity
Benjamin Schreier
Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be
reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Schreier, Benjamin, author.
Title: The rise and fall of Jewish American literature : ethnic studies and the challenge of identity / Benjamin Schreier.
Other titles: Jewish culture and contexts.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Series: Jewish culture and contexts |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020004257 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5257-6 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: American literature—Jewish authors—History and criticism. | Jewish literature—United States—History
and criticism. | Jews—Identity.
Classification: LCC PS153.J4 S373 2020 | DDC 810.9/8924073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004257
To Michael P. Kramer
Contents
Introduction. What’s the “History” in “Jewish American Literary History” the History Of?
Chapter 1. The History of Jewish American Literary History: “Breakthrough” and the
Institutional Rhetoric of Identity
Chapter 2. Before Jewish American Literature
Chapter 3. After Jewish American Literature
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction
What’s the “History” in “Jewish American Literary History” the
History Of?
We must free ourselves from the sacrilization [sic] of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as
superfluous something so essential in human life and in human relations as thought.…
Criticism is a matter of … show[ing] that things are not as selfevident as one believed … see[ing] that what is
accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such.
—Michel Foucault
Nothing testifies to the etiolation of the field of Jewish American literary study—my field—
so much as the fact that so few people ever fight about anything. There are no big
methodological or theoretical disputes, no open rivalries between competing theories or
methodologies. One could be excused for having the impression that nothing is at stake—or
at least the impression that few intellectuals operating in the field believe there’s anything at
stake.
Sometimes I wonder if an alternative title for this book could have been “Jews and
Truth.” Michel Foucault is so important for this project because he helps us understand the
effects of thinking about power rather than about representation. The main function of the
shift to power was to replace the self-evidence of a system of dominant representations with
questions about, indeed a field of analysis of, the procedures and techniques by which power
relations and the knowledge practices they organize and enable are actually effectuated.
Representation tends to presume something represented, and begins and ends there, with its
object of scholarly desire. But it’s the job of critical thinking to not start with the end.
Anyway, now vee may perhaps to begin.…
Ask anyone, or at least anyone who cares: the dominant event of Jewish American literary
history is “emergence” or “breakthrough”—the irruption in the 1950s of Jewish American
writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley into the heart of
the American cultural scene. In fact, or maybe (more cautiously) more to the point, the “fact”
of breakthrough is the primal scene of the Jewish American literary field: the more or less
formalized or academically disciplined study of Jewish American literature grew up around
the consolidating self-evidence of the breakthrough narrative, and the field’s legibility and
condition of possibility have from the start been articulated with it. The prevailing accounts
of Jewish literature in the United States inevitably orbit, even if only implicitly or
inconspicuously or once or twice removed, in the gravitational field of this central event,
which also establishes an assimilationist—if also pluralist or multiculturalist—temporality
that’s exceedingly easy to take for granted as culturally and socially self-evident, a before and
an after of Jewish American confidence, security, and success.1 Though Jewish American
literary study, unlike its sibling U.S. ethnic literary formations (which have for at least a
generation been trying to denaturalize the link between identity and body), has mostly
resisted the urge to explicitly theorize itself and its practices—a refusal that’s intimate with
Jewish studies’ more general difficulty or discomfort with understanding itself (that is, as an
institutional entity, or even just an academic program) as “political” or “resistant” in the same
way that, say, African American studies understands and is comfortable with itself (it would
be interesting to see how many teach-ins about Charlottesville, for example, were held by
African American studies units vs. by Jewish studies units; and it’s in any case notable that
the Association for Jewish Studies has as of this writing refused to follow the lead of other
professional academic organizations in denouncing Trump’s December 2019 executive order
“clarifying” the meaning of antisemitism, with its express curbs on academic freedom)—the
narrative of breakthrough has operated as a deputized proxy for the only real theory, however
sporadically and insufficiently acknowledged, of Jewish American literature that has ever
been able to carry any currency—either professionally, in the academy, or publicly, among
lay readers of Jewish American writing: namely, immigration.2 Thus, if Jewish American
writing before World War II can mostly be characterized by a parochial or provincial angst,
and can often easily fit into such stalwart U.S. literary historical compartments as “immigrant
writing” or “regionalism” or “urban fiction,” categories as durable as the dependability with
which they consign their constituents to a decidedly second-tier prestige—so this
foundational paradigm goes—then within two or three decades of the war’s end it had rapidly
shed these marginalizing limitations and come to represent American literature at its most
central and innovative and ascendant, the Jewish American standing as the representative
modern figure and the Jewish American writer the spokesperson for the modern condition in
toto. Accordingly, as Jewish American literary study has tended, certainly in some of its
recent formations, to become more diverse in focus and more sophisticated in scope, it often
draws its warrant for these critical investments from—and it reproduces an image of its own
intellectual responsibility in the name of—the increasing diversity, sophistication, and
independence of Jews in America. Jewish American literary study persists in imagining itself
as part of the enduring historical reality of breakthrough.
Significantly, in this narrative of sociocultural movement from margin to center and rear
guard to leading edge, Jewish American literature dependably tracks the career of Jewish
America: the breakthrough narrative of Jewish American literature normalizes itself as a
straightforward—I use this term ironically, of course, informed by Antonio Gramsci’s critical
keyword commonsense—and largely politically innocent reflection of or representational lens
on Jewish Americans conceptualized as a population, as a mode of representational access
that suppresses critical theorization in the name of instrumental or productivist—which is to
say self-evident—ethnological history, leveraging its hegemony on the assumption that
literary history is itself neither theoretical nor historical. This book begins in a critical
suspicion about the way in which professional academic formations, including both English
department–based literary study and Jewish studies–based interdisciplinarity, have taken
Jewish American literature for granted—and about the way in which Jewish American
literary history has itself reflected these predispositions, taking for granted its own literary
historical warrant. My critical targets are the disciplinary and intellectual modes in which the
Jewish American literary field’s exceptionalist estrangement from the mainstream of
humanistic critical self-regard have been carried out. By historicizing the practice of Jewish
American literary study and destabilizing the assumption that Jewish American literary
history operates under the ethnological authority of an inquiry into the lives and times of
Jews in America, I hope to make it easier for humanists to imagine and act on a critically
self-aware intellectual practice. Breakthrough needs to be approached primarily as an event
in Jewish American historiography, not Jewish American history.
I certainly don’t pretend that there was no institutionally housed study of writing by Jews
in America before the 1950s, or that the literary intellectuals of the breakthrough invented the
idea of thinking about what we now easily call Jewish American writing. To be sure, before
World War II there was fiction and belles lettres being written by Jews in the United States,
there were scholarly works written that took as their object the representation of Jews in
English and American literature, and there was of course the persuasive tradition of
nineteenth-century German-Jewish Wissenschaft des Judentums premised on the cultural-
nationalist logic of a transhistorical unity of Jewish cultural expression, a tradition that, in
Michael P. Kramer’s description, “shifted the locus of Jewish selfdefinition from Judaism as
a revealed religion to Jewishness as national character” and imported and legitimized “the
Romantic notion of literature as the expression and repository of the spirit or genius of a
people, of its Volksgeist … as the primary justification for the study, cultivation, and
dissemination of Jewish literature.”3 But before the discursive innovation of breakthrough,
scholarship could not yet take for granted the field unity of a canon of literature organized,
defined, and essentially interpretable by the Jewish American identity of its authors; this was
a postwar development and it has a history that itself cannot be extracted from the
gravitational pull of the “breakthrough” narrative. The innovation of breakthrough was not
simply to link, inevitably and unimpeachably, the Jewish authors and Jewish texts of Jewish
American literature but to reorient thinking about literary texts written by Jews in America
around authors as representatives of Jewish American people, experience, and culture;
Jewish American literary study would professionalize over the following decades as
scholarly focus shifted from the object of literary representation to its subject, from Jews as a
community written about to Jews as a population writing.
This was an epistemological transformation likely encouraged (if not enabled) by the
concept of Jewish “peoplehood,” the revisionary, 1930s-era American crossing, particularly
in the writings of people like Stephen Wise and Mordecai Kaplan, of, on the one hand,
Wissenschaft’s cultural nationalist investment in the Volksgeist of the Jews and, on the other,
the rise of Zionism as a full-fledged political, intellectual, and nation-building movement. As
Noam Pianko has argued, “The language of peoplehood translates some of Zionism’s
fundamental assumptions into a vocabulary that serves as a kind of code word for
nationhood, internalizing those assumptions while erasing the term nation from the