Magical American Jew: The Enigma of Difference in Contemporary Jewish American Short Fiction and Film

Abstract

Aaron Tillman’s Magical American Jew: The Enigma of Difference in Contemporary Jewish American Short Fiction and Film is a worthy contribution to our understanding of the workings of Jewish identity within a number of canonical as well as less known short stories, a movie, and a stand-up performance. Tillman is skilled at reading the interplay of belonging in the United States and being an outsider at the same time, even in texts by writers and performers who are deeply assimilated into American culture. He brings forward a variety of themes and perspectives such as excess, masochism, shame, trauma, Judaism as a religion, and narcissism to present different aspects of his main theme, which is the dual identity of Jews as it is expressed in magical realist works of fiction and film.This main theme, magical realism in Jewish American culture, however, is the Achilles’ heel of this book when one looks at it as a unified text and not one chapter at a time. Even though each chapter on its own is highly useful for either teaching or building one’s own argument about a specific artist, I remain unconvinced by the argument that Magical American Jew presents as a whole. The issue that bothers Tillman is that of the elusive difference within Jewish American identity. American Jews feel, look, and act more or less like any other white American, and yet there remains a sense that they maintain a unique identity. Tillman characterizes this “indefinite yet undeniable difference” as “enigmatic” (2). That is to say, the survival of Jewish particularity is explored not on the basis of sociology or culture, but as mystifying conundrum, indeed an enigma.If—a big if—Jewish American identity is mysterious rather than a result of certain social-cultural constellations that might be explained by researchers and scholars, it makes perfect sense to analyze this magic of being an American Jew through a mode of magical realism. And I think that paying attention to texts that are not realist in the traditional sense is a good direction, especially if one shares Tillman’s preoccupations. However, it seems to me that “magical realism,” the central term in the book, is defined so widely and so amorphously that it does justice neither to magic nor to realism, nor to Jewishness for that matter.In this book magical realism is a label that is attached to any text that features events that are impossible in our own world but still connected to our sense of reality. That is to say, Tolkien-derived fantasy novels are not magical realism because they are set in a distinct universe. But this exclusion of hardcore fantasy still leaves many texts in. Tillman therefore includes texts that I do not believe to be productively labeled magical realism because they have little to do with realism. There is no expectation of realism from a standup special like Sarah Silverman’s Jesus Is Magic, the subject of the final chapter. Rather, we expect the exaggeration, farce, and absurdity that are common features of comedy. The fact that Silverman’s gags (like a flying car) are more visual than those of most other stand-up comedians does not make her a magical realist. I would make a similar argument regarding Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, where the nonrealistic features are part of a comic language, rather than a magical one.Granted, Tillman is not alone in expanding the term (he quotes many sources to show this trend). Still, I think magical realism’s definition should be more restricted. Mainly, this term is most effective when describing moments when the nonrealistic or magical elements are in some ways part of what the characters (or sometimes the writer) can see as possibly existing in their world, where magic is part of reality, not an intrusion upon it. So, if Isaac Bashevis Singer’s characters seem to believe in angels and demons and at times they are real and other times not, it does make sense to call him a magical realist. When Western academics and literati start to levitate in Cynthia Ozick’s story (chapter 2), it is a symbolic gesture and an intrusion of the surreal. It is a collapse of realism, not an admittance of the magical into its framework. Much of what Tillman describes would fit more comfortably under other rubrics such as “postmodern,” a term Tillman also uses often.So I am skeptical both of the problem posed by the book and of the main term used to approach it. Still, let me describe and comment on the individual chapters because it is there that the book’s strength lies. The first chapter discusses Woody Allen as a “postmodern neurotic,” focusing almost exclusively on Annie Hall, which most would agree is at the center of the director’s body of work. Tillman sees the film presenting what he calls in the chapter’s title “Jewish American Excess” (13): the sense that Jews are both mainstream white Americans and at the same time something beyond. This issue creates the well-known Jewish neurotics so typical of Allen. We get a tour of the film’s many unrealistic “magical” devices, including Marshall McLuhan’s appearance in order to tell off a pompous pseudo-intellectual. According to Tillman, “[t]o illustrate the excess of this Jewish American neurotic identity, the film is augmented to take more space, represent more life, employ more technology, and encompass a multifaceted persona that is trying to get its ‘mind around’ an expanding universe, an enigmatic ethnic difference, and a fissure in a personal relationship with the dominant culture” (29).The second chapter interestingly tries to shift the focus from “guilt,” an emotion often associated with Jews, to “shame,” one that is often associated with Christianity. It does so through a convincing analysis of Cynthia Ozick’s “Levitation,” a story about two mediocre writers. In making this shift, Tillman engages with the fraught issues of interfaith marriages, the memory of the Holocaust, and how they might be intertwined. One of the main characters in the story, Feingold, who has married a non-Jewish woman, feels shame over it, not because it is wrong, but because intermarriage is experienced as “rejecting part of himself” (39). This shame results in an obsession with the history of anti-Semitism. The levitation of the Jewish characters at the end of the story seems to confirm the difference that is at the center of Tillman’s book. Chapter 3 analyzes Melvin Jules Bukiet’s “The Library of Moloch” in the context of trauma and masochism. In chapter 4 Tillman approaches one of the major fissures of Jewish identity: is it a religious identity or an ethnic one? He does so through a close reading of Nathan Englander’s “Gilgul of Park Avenue” and Steven Stern’s “The Tale of a Kite,” two stories that use comedy and magic to express Jewish “unease” (71). Chapter 5 is about the standup comedian and actor Sarah Silverman and especially the performance film Jesus Is Magic. Silverman is a challenging cultural figure worthy of scholarly attention. For Tillman, “[w]hat is most intriguing and controversial about Sarah Silverman relates to her edgy and satirical persona through which she elicits laughs and provokes minds by performing an outrageous and ironic insensitivity” (94). Silverman of Jesus Is Magic—and this changed in the 2010s somewhat—operates by presenting her persona in the worst light possible. Tillman identifies in this persona and Silverman’s use of fantasy (“magic”) a way of facing the double identity of American Jews as both consenting and dissenting members of American society, especially within the context of a consumer culture that promotes narcissism. As Tillman points out, much of these issues are addressed through a reworking of the Jewish American princess (JAP) stereotype, which expresses consumerist narcissism on the one hand and a refusal to conform to the mainstream on the other. Explaining jokes without ruining them is no mean trick. Tillman often succeeds.To conclude, I do not think that the claim that Jewish American identity is magical is the way to move forward in the study of American Jewish culture. However, Tillman does present a number of convincing and thought-provoking readings within this framework. I believe that students, teachers, and scholars of Jewish American identity and culture will find Tillman’s contribution highly useful, even as I hope they will not accept his paradigm.DAVID HADAR received his Ph.D. in American literature from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and went on to a postdoctoral position at the Open University of Israel and at the Freie Universität Berlin. He teaches at Beit Berl College and the Hebrew University. His work has appeared in academic journals such as Narrative, Studies in AmericanJewish Literature, and Studies in Canadian Literature. His first book, Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, August 2020), is about how writers build their public personae through connections with other writers.