Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice ed. by Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman, and: The New Jewish American Literary Studies ed. Victoria Aarons

Abstract

Reviewed by: Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice ed. by Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman, and: The New Jewish American Literary Studies ed. Victoria Aarons Laura Arnold Leibman (bio) Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice. Edited by Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman. University of Virginia Press, 2019. 352 pp. The New Jewish American Literary Studies. Edited by Victoria Aarons. Cambridge University Press, 2019. 242 pp. Since the publication of Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (2001) and Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher's Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (2003), the field of American Jewish literature has changed dramatically not only in terms of how it is defined but also in methods used for interpreting that new diversity. Enter these recent essay collections. In Caribbean Jewish Crossings, editors Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman shed light on Jewish life in the Caribbean through an analysis of literature from this region by and about Jews. The essays deliberately cross disciplinary borders, borrowing from history, art, and anthropology. In contrast, The New Jewish American Literary Studies as edited by Victoria Aarons takes a more theory-driven approach and self-consciously engages in a philosophical discussion of the goals and methods used in literary analysis. The different strategies speak to a more fundamental split in comparative literature and cultural studies. While both approaches are equally valid, Caribbean Jewish Crossings may prove more useful for those outside of literature departments. It is also the more radical in its implicit challenge to US-centered interpretations of "Americanness." The essays included in Caribbean Jewish Crossings take a broad approach to defining Jewish American literature. First, there is the location of the Caribbean itself. A key shift in Jewish American literary studies since 2001 has been a change in how "America" is understood. Caribbean Jewish Crossings rethinks both "America" and the methods used for interpreting that diversity. Prior to 1825, the largest Jewish communities in the Americas were all in the Caribbean, and for the first time, Caribbean Jewish Crossings provides an overview of what Caribbean Jews have contributed to American literary studies. Second, the volume sidesteps policing who or what is a Jew by embracing authors of Jewish [End Page 285] descent—regardless of their halachic status--as a way of thinking about Jewishness in the Caribbean as inherently cross-cultural. Third, and equally important, the volume balances analysis of writings by Jewish-descended people from the Caribbean with those by non-Jewish Caribbean authors who "have a long tradition of weaving together African and Diasporic narratives and, in the process, have identified or forged cultural and historical connections between them" (2). Methodologically, the volume is also interested in "critical ambivalences" as it moves between the vocabularies of Jewish and Caribbean studies (4). This ambivalence reflects the scholars' refusal to position Jews as solely victims or solely oppressors. This tactic is crucial, as it allows the essays to address both the impact of slavery and the Holocaust on Caribbean Jewish literature without privileging one over the other. In all of these arenas, the book functions as a case study of how scholars can rethink Jewish American literary history by thinking about American Jews—and American Jewish studies--as part of an intertwined, transnational nexus. Caribbean Jewish Crossings is divided into four sections. "The Emergence of Caribbean Jewish Literary Culture" begins in the second half of the eighteenth century in Suriname with an analysis of David Nassy's Essai historique (1788) by Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger. This essay points to the way that the volume willingly engages questions of how the definition of "literature" has changed across the centuries. "Revisiting the Inquisition and the Sephardic Caribbean" focuses on the inquisition, providing important ideas for how the Caribbean literature stands at the crossroads of Europe as well as North and South America. "Colonialism and Caribbean Holocaust Memory" uses writing both by and about Jews to decenter the Holocaust as a Jewish study by looking at how Jewish and Black diasporas intertwine. Compellingly, "Contemporary Voices: Narrative and Poetry" consists of a brief selection of contemporary literature by writers from a wide geographic range, including works translated from Dutch. The drawbacks...