Mapping Jewish American Literary Studies in the New Century

Abstract

Writing in the Introduction to a now obscure anthology, Jewish-American Literature (1974), its editor Abraham Chapman argued for the importance of Jewish American expression during that transitional moment—the early 1970s—in U.S. cultural and political history. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the winding down of the Viet Nam War, and at the onset of the so-called “ethnic revival” that, later in the decade, would prompt the search for “roots” and “identity” (now problematic, contested terms, especially in Jewish Studies), Chapman asserted that “the literature of the Jewish experience may be particularly meaningful in the present historical epoch, when the struggles against cultural imperialism and racism have reached unprecedented dimensions, and specifically in the United States, which is a multiracial, multilingual, and multireligious society, in which the struggle for cultural pluralism remains very much alive.”1Today, almost half a century later, Chapman’s claims on behalf of the relevance of Jewish American literature, above all its potential as oppositional discourse—authorizing in his view “the right to dissent within one’s own culture, the right to criticize institutions and the wielders of power within a culture”2—sounds like a report from another country. In 2018 Jewish American literature apparently exists apart, relegated to the margins of the English department, more or less ignored by scholars in ethnic literatures, studied and analyzed almost exclusively by Jews. “How did this happen?” (4), Hana Wirth-Nesher asks in the Introduction to the collection of essays in The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature. She explains that her editorial aim was not only “to enrich the study of American and Jewish literatures” but “to expand the scope of ethnic and minority literary study such that the role of Jewish American writing in the making of American culture can be recognized and the literature can be explored and savored” (13). The volume is certainly rich and varied and expansive. To be sure, its thirty-one chapters treat familiar subjects like immigrant writing, Jewish American fiction at mid-century, Yiddish literature, New York City as a site for creative expression, overviews of Jewish American poetry, drama, popular culture, and humor. But not only. There are also sections that invite re-thinking of the geographic and linguistic boundaries of the field, thus expanding our idea of what “Jewish American literature” (each term also under interrogation these days) represents as a subject of academic inquiry.3 In this respect the Cambridge History begins an important remapping of the field. It may not, however, achieve Wirth-Nesher’s other aim—a desire among Jewish Americanists for “recognition” by colleagues in minority literatures and ethnic studies. But the publication of the Cambridge History may, perhaps, enable conversations across disciplines and their respective archives to begin.Most readers of SAJL, I assume, are familiar with the issues concerning the status of Jewish American literature and its relation to cultural theory in general, especially critical ethnic and whiteness studies. A number of scholars in Jewish Studies, many of whom contribute chapters to the Cambridge History, have been addressing questions like “Does the English Department have a Jewish Problem?” or considering the issue of “Jewishness, Pedagogy, and Multi-Ethnic Literature,” or reflecting on “The Future of Jewish American Literary Studies.” Taken together, these panels and journal symposia highlight the vexed relation between Jewish American literary studies and what Jonathan Freedman calls “other Others.”4 How can serious theoretical attention to Jewish American literature deepen, enliven, or simply engage adjacent fields like postcolonial studies, whiteness studies, and critical ethnic studies?A major voice arguing for the critical import and explanatory power of the new Jewish cultural studies, Freedman (who contributes a chapter on “Jews and Film”), has spoken elsewhere of a lamentable “disciplinary self-blindness” with respect to current American Studies modes of inquiry; “such blindness,” he observes, has “unfortunate consequences when it comes to raising questions of Jewish difference in the context of other ethno-racial configurations.”5 In Freedman’s view, colleagues in ethnic studies tend to miss, and thus miss out on a potential, as yet untapped alliance. Jewishness as a mode of inquiry—its insider/outsider’s perspective, its ways of seeing through dominant discourses—can be linked with the critical project of ethnic studies in general. By equating “Jewishness” reflexively with “whiteness,” scholars in ethnic-literary-cultural studies ignore what Freedman calls the “active consideration of Jewish difference”; if the project of Jewish studies were to be actively engaged, he argues, such recognition “might work to enrich and complicate the terrain of study, even if it means the redrawing of disciplinary boundaries for all concerned.”6 After all, as Benjamin Schreier (who contributes a chapter on “Making It into the Mainstream 1945-1970”) reminds us, “the critique of roots is at the root of Jewish culture.”7Of course this is a radically distilled account of an ongoing conversation, perhaps one-sided, in current Jewish American literary studies. Rather than entering, let alone trying to resolve this debate, I offer instead a number of reflections-responses-suggestions inspired by various subjects explored in the Cambridge History—areas that I have studied, or am currently writing about—and, above all, thoughts on those chapters that alter my own more traditional mapping of Jewish American literary history, beginning with Antin, Cahan, Yezierska, and the New York City–based Yiddish poets. In light of the Cambridge History’s revisionary aims, its laudable decentering energies, I want to ask: What is the status of certain canonical authors? What are some exciting emergent fields in Jewish literary studies? What zones of Jewish American cultural history might have received more attention?Among its achievements, the Cambridge History situates a number of major authors in a range of interpretive matrices, allowing us to appreciate the multi-vocal dimension of their art. Philip Roth, for example, figures prominently in chapters on Jewish languages (Wirth-Nesher, who contributes a section on “Encountering English”), post–World War II literary “emergence” (Benjamin Schreier), contemporary fiction (Michael Wood, who contributes a chapter on “New Voices, New Challenges 1970–2000,” a lively synthesis of late-twentieth-century authors, including figures he feels have been unjustly ignored),8 Holocaust writing (the late Emily Budick’s “The Ghost of the Holocaust in the Construction of Jewish American Literature”), humor (Marc Caplan, whose essay “Jewish Humor in America” reads Portnoy’s Complaint in terms of early twentieth-century performances of “Jewface”), and race (Adam Zachary Newton, in “Jews on America’s Racial Map”). In this respect Roth remains, not surprisingly, perhaps the most important writer in the Jewish American canon.9Another theme threading through the History might be called, following the French historian Pierre Nora’s famous phrase, New York City as a “lieux de mémoire,” a “site of memory.” In this respect the chapters by Murray Baumgarten (“Their New York: Possessing the ‘Capital of Words’”) on figurations of New York as “diasporic homeland” (387) in fiction and autobiography and Mikhail Krutikov on Yiddish writers (“Spaces of Yiddishkayt: New York in American Yiddish Prose”) complement each other; set in dialogue, they highlight the intersection of “Jewish spaces,” language, and visual culture. Indeed, Krutikov’s exploration of relatively obscure New York–based Yiddish writers who created what he calls “a new urban kind of American Yiddishkayt” (401) stirs the following speculation: Imagine mixing Ben Katchor’s graphically imagined diaspora spaces of spare drawings and hilarious Yiddish-inspired word-scapes with, say, Malamud’s early Yiddish-inflected stories set along the spatial and emotional margins of the city, Arthur Miller’s Focus (1945), Bellow’s The Victim (1947) and Seize the Day (1956) along with Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1952). Add to that urban stew a character in David Opatoshu’s 1920 novel Hebrew, who encounters “the rhythm of boisterous New York” (401). In Krutikov’s brief but evocative readings of Opatoshu, Sholem Asch’s East River (1946) and Lamed Shapiro’s Newyorkish (1931) (also discussed by Wirth-Nesher), among other New York–centered writers, the affective-textual-aural-material landscape of immigrant America thickens, reverberates. As a site of multi-directional memory, “New York” in Krutikov’s analysis possesses the “unique facility” “to harbor a European past as its ‘spatial unconscious’” (409). Thus at some level these Jewish writers, émigrés writing in their native Yiddish, embracing New York as New World diaspora, could be said to enact, to embody Nora’s notion of Jewish memory as a site of “identity” (however that vexed term is currently being re-defined). “With memory ineluctably engulfed by history,” Nora observes, “the historian has become no longer a memory-individual but, in himself, a lieu de mémoire.”10Other zones re-mapped in the Cambridge History prove enlightening as well, above all the set of interrelated chapters that, read collectively, enlarges our sense of the archive of Jewish expression vertically, across North and South American borders: Rebecca Margolis’s “Across the Border: Canadian Jewish Writing”; Sarah Phillips Casteel’s “Landscapes: America and the Americas”; Monique Rodrigues Balbuena’s “Ladino in U.S. Literature and Song”; and Dalia Kandiyoti’s “Writing and Remembering Jewish Middle Eastern Pasts.” In Kandiyoti’s essay contemporary figures like Iranian-born Gina Nahai and Dalia Sofer, who fashion complex encounters with the experience of exile and memory, emerge as writers that scholars focused on the Eastern European immigration experience should know more about.11Another thread in the Cambridge History—one of many promising areas that ought to inspire future research—gathers chapters showcasing the richness and variety of Jewish American women poets and poetics in general, from Emma Lazarus through the Yiddish and American poets distilled by Kathryn Hellerstein in her contribution, “Gender Poetics in Jewish American Poetry.” Among contemporary women poets, as Maeera Y. Shreiber explains in “Secularity, Sacredness, and Jewish American Poets 1950–2000,” it seems clear that Irina Klepfisz has emerged as a major voice, a deeply secularist and multi-voiced experimental poet in dialogue with the traditions of Yiddish literature. And a cohort of younger poets, like Rachel Tzivia Back and Jacqueline Osherow are, in Shreiber’s assessment, “expanding the boundaries of ritual expression” (197) in their use of Jewish liturgy, especially in poems inspired by, even as they deconstruct, the Kaddish.As for the current scenes of Jewish American cultural expression—areas that absorb my own attention these days—the chapters on comic books and graphic novels by Laurence Roth (“Jewish American Comic Books and Graphic Novels”) and newer writing by Josh Lambert (“Since 2000”), above all the immigrant writers born in the Former Soviet Union are among the strongest, most engaging in the Cambridge History. Roth shows how formal innovations in graphic texts intersect with variations on what he calls “Jewish American self-construction” (568) from major early figures like Will Eisner to Art Spiegelman, Katchor, and the rising generation of female graphic artists, and the sub-cultural scene of comics devoted to “young Orthodox-identified” (580) readers.12 In this respect, all those interested in the importance of Jewish comics and their relation to Jewish ethnicity and the issues related to representing “identity” visually need to begin with Roth’s mapping of this emergent mode of Jewishly-inflected visual culture.Lambert’s selective survey of recent literary and cultural expression concludes the Cambridge History by summarizing what he calls the “flourishing” of literature over the past two decades. By way of explanation for this Jewish “revival,” he highlights the importance of MFA programs in developing younger writers; the impact of various birthright programs on Jonathan Safran Foer and Dara Horn; the organizing prowess of the Jewish Book Council; and the role of the New Yorker in showcasing Former Soviet Union writers, thus creating opportunities for new Jewish stories to be told. However, given Lambert’s wide-ranging knowledge of contemporary sites of Jewish comedy (as, say, orthodox standup) and the uses of social media for exploring the performance of Jewish “identity,” I miss his lively voice on (to name some recent sites of Jewish creativity) the hilarious video anthology “Yidlife Crisis,” or the post-modern, Montreal-based klezmer hip-hop artist Socalled (aka Josh Dolgin), especially his provocative rap video, “(Rock the) Belz,” a brilliant mash up of Theodore Bikel’s cover of the famous nostalgia-drenched Yiddish folk song, replete with puppets of Bikel and Dolgin himself as a luftmensch levitating through a bus rooftop.13 More than any contemporary critic, Lambert is able to navigate the various borders, the edges of contemporary Jewish American self-fashioning. As the new century unfolds, bombarding us with all manner and modes of Jewish cultural expression, I would be interested in Lambert’s responses to some of the following: How did Tablet Magazine become a key cultural arbiter on Jewish matters? How should we situate the subversive comedy of, say, Broad City in terms of the traditions of Jewish humor, above all the line of “unkosher” comediennes? How might we read the exploration of Jewish memory and gender fluidity in the television series Transparent?14 And what, ultimately, are the social and historical, religious and psychological contexts for the current flourishing, the unprecedented vitality of Jewish American writing and popular culture in our own time? In the end, indeed at the end of this eclectic volume, Josh Lambert’s coda to the Cambridge History points us in rich, if still uncharted directions.By way of concluding, let me offer a few more brief observations on the Cambridge History, reflections relating to omissions, assumptions, aspects of the History I find curious. [I realize, of course, that the History, as Wirth-Nesher explains in the Introduction, “does not aim to be comprehensive” (15)]. Some reflections, in no particular order:In “On Being a Jewish Critic,” the British scholar of Jewish literatures Bryan Cheyette speaks on behalf of “impurity of culture” as opposed to what he terms “the language of identity politics—religion, roots, tradition, and victimhood”—problematic notions he associates with the later American-focused novels of Philip Roth and parochial approaches to Jewish literary study in general. In his recent Diasporas of the Mind (2014) he invites Jewish literary scholars to engage theorists like Arendt, Fanon, Césaire, and Paul Gilroy for the potential affiliations between Jewish and postcolonial studies. Perhaps a way to spur cross-cultural dialogue between Jewish Americanists and literary scholars in ethnic and postcolonial studies would be to elevate the theoretical profile of Jewish American literary study.18Will the publication of The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature forge inter-disciplinary dialogue leading to mutual “recognition” among and between scholars in Jewish and multi-ethnic literary-cultural studies? I suppose we’ll have to wait and see. Such necessary collaborations, challenging the bounded-ness of univocal ethnic literary “traditions,” however, have already begun, or are forthcoming.19 In gathering the essays for the Cambridge History, Hana Wirth-Nesher has indeed “expanded the boundaries” (14) of our chosen field. For that, and for the energy and vision it requires to accomplish such a remarkable publishing feat, those of us engaged in the professional study of Jewish American literatures should be grateful indeed.