The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier Rachel Rubinstein Benjamin Schreier. The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 224 pp. Benjamin Schreier's The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature announces its ambitions with a book cover modeled on that of Philip Roth's iconic Portnoy's Complaint. Determinedly provocative, polemical, and pugilistic, Schreier's manifesto continues his efforts in 2015's The Impossible Jew to unsettle the fundamental dependence of Jewish American literary study on "the representational capacities of the word 'Jewish'" (7). Schreier, Yiddish for "screamer," is the longtime editor of the superb journal Studies in American Jewish Literature (for which, full disclosure, I serve as the book review editor); there is no one better positioned than he to diagnose and comment upon the current state of our field. Schreier's introduction and first chapter lay out his metacritical approach to Jewish American literary study: that identity should be understood as an epistemological rather than ontological category; that Jewish American literary study needs to release itself from the expectation that it reflect Jewish American historical reality and indeed declare "independence from history"; that Jewish studies is the analysis "not of Jews, but about how we know about Jews"; and that the organization of the "new" Jewish studies around terms like "identity," "ethnicity," and "culture" has in fact resulted in the field's isolation and exceptionalist "insiderism." The book's central chapters lay out the postwar literary "breakthrough" narrative that has fundamentally shaped the sense of Jewish American literary history, focusing on its point of origin with Irving Howe's use of Yiddish in his literary anthologies, and then on its "fall," or at least a limit case of Jewish textuality: Cynthia Ozick's critique of John Updike's Bech stories in the 1990s as inauthentic "passing" narratives. Schreier writes that the Roth, Bellow, and Malamud "emergence" narrative is "perversely restaged" over and over again as the "formation scene" of the Jewish American literary field, as scholars repeatedly attempt "to prove the field's proper institutional place and professional legitimacy" (40). But the provocation of Rise and Fall inheres less in Schreier's assertions than in his style. Commingling high theory with an aggressive, jocular familiarity, what was described by one reviewer as scabrous and funny in The Impossible Jew feels more bitter, competitive, and personal here. Portnoy's Complaint provides more than just the cover design; unwittingly Schreier seems to re-enact the gendered, familial psychodrama of the novel. Ruth Wisse and Cynthia Ozick, for whom Schreier reserves his most acrid invective, take turns as the vilified Sophie Portnoy; a number of female colleagues are the book's Hannah Portnoys, the overlooked sister Alex both depends upon and condescends to; and finally Alana Newhouse serves as the abused Monkey. (Or perhaps Newhouse is Brenda Patimkin, imported from another fiction, since Schreier devotes a two-page footnote to a scorching denunciation of Newhouse for her inability to adequately theorize her own nose job—or maybe for having had a nose job and not feeling [End Page 209] bad about it.) Finally, Michael Kramer, to whom the book is dedicated and who, in his acknowledgements, Schreier frets will not "endorse" it, is clearly his Dr. Spielvogel. I will confess that I am one of those scholars—mostly women—mentioned by Schreier as doing Jewish American literary studies wrong. While I am in the company of scholars I admire, I find myself gazing sadly across a mystifying chasm of methodological purity at a much smaller cohort of scholars I admire equally and who, according to Schreier, are getting it right. It is not just that Schreier praises a handful of only male scholars, and singles out primarily women for doing the kind of identitarian, "biologistic," or nationalist literary work he despises (which he identifies even in the work of scholars who critically interrogate such terms) or that when he does insult men he does so in considerably gentler terms than he does women. It is that his blind spots end up limiting his...