Jewish American Literature: A Scholar's Map

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the new millennium, Jewish American literature is rarely taught within its own tradition in America's English departments. This bibliographical essay provides a scholar's gateway map replete with headnotes and introductory explanations of the primary divisions and subdivisions of the relevant academic traditions of Jews writing in America. Accordingly, it covers Jews in American history; anthologies; encyclopedias; bibliographies; periodicals; Hebrew, Sephardic, and Yiddish traditions; Holocaust materials; Jewish American poetry, drama, fiction, memoirs, women writers, gay and lesbian writers, comic books, graphic novels, humor, folklore, and literary theory. It also delineates all major periods in Jewish literary production such as Yiddish theater, immigrant literature, early twentieth-century fiction, the so-called Jewish Decades (1950–70), Holocaust literature, the Jewish American literary resurgence (1980–present), and the New York literary resurgence (2000–present).