The Literary Impact of Jewish Culture

Abstract

ondary and college levels has been the interest in the literary contributions of American writers of Jewish descent. According to Jewish Studies in American Colleges and Universities,1 there are over 250 institutions of higher learning offering such courses. This is a far cry from the turn of the century, when only two institutionsHarvard and Columbia-offered courses dealing with Jews and Judaism after the Biblical period.2 Of the number of public high schools in America which have introduced Jewish studies in the past few years there is still no accurate count, but it would be safe to say that they probably number in the hundreds and exist in practically every one of our fifty states.3 How times have changed from my own high school days in a prestigious Brooklyn high school from 1920-1924! In all those four years I never heard an American-Jewish author mentioned by any of my English teachers (two of whom were Jewish), and we certainly studied no selections or read as supplementary books any works by such authors. Of the classics we had our full dose: The Odyssey, Stevenson's Treasure Island, George Eliot's Silas Marner, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth, Polgrave's Golden Treasury (who knew that his grandfather was a Jew named Meyer Cohen?) and a collection of Long's American Poems that had not a single poem by an American Jew. Was this so because there was no literature by American Jews by 1920? Hardly! Emma Lazarus in her Songs of a Semite (1882) had won the praise of major American critics, as she had won the praise for her earlier books from Ralph Waldo Emerson for her Admetus and Other Poems (1871). This she had dedicated to My friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson! Her engaging contemporary, Adah Isaacs Menken, friend of Dickens, Swinburne, Dumas fils, and one of the outstanding actresses on both the American and British stages of the mid-nineteenth century, in her Infelicia (1868) expressed her indignation at the indignities of the treatment of Jews in the notorious Mortara affair in Italy in 1858 as well as her kinship with fellow Jews in several other poems .4 By 1912 Mary Antin had written her Promised Land, one of the most touching evocations of the gratitude of having escaped from the Russian Pole of Settlement and being reborn in the new world. Abraham Cohen, who had already written two works of fiction in English at the end of the nineteenth century, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) and The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto Joseph Mersand teaches at York College of The City University of New York. He is also a Past President of NCTE.