Reviewed by: Confessions of a Secular Jew: A Memoir Daniel Morris Confessions of a Secular Jew: A Memoir, by Eugene Goodheart. New York: Overlook Press, 200. 224 pp. $27.95. I must admit that I read Eugene Goodheart’s excellent memoir, Confessions of a Secular Jew, with special interest because, although I never studied with him, Goodheart was a key figure in the Brandeis English Department in the late 80s and early 90s, when I did my doctoral work there. After reading his book, I continue to admire what he would call his “skeptical” but not “radically skeptical” disposition, or his unwillingness to believe that any ideology or conviction should be held on to with absolute certainty as to its authority, including his own skepticism. Although he wielded a degree of power, or seemed to, from the perspective of a graduate student, in that he was perhaps the best known figure in the department at the time and held its chair at some points in my career there, I felt even then Goodheart’s aversion to wielding power for its own sake, and how this anxiety about exerting control over other lives fueled his desire for fairness when dealing with students as well as his desire to be liked. In his memoir, Goodheart relates a scene from his graduate days at Columbia in the 1950s when an oral exam had turned into a chance for a professor to verbally torture a student for having forgotten what happens in Book One of The Faerie Queene. Goodheart has treated such an incident as a negative example, and learned that professorial kindness is at least one balm for a graduate student, whose life is otherwise filled with anxiety, poverty, and uncertainty about the future. He seemed to me then, and seems to me now that I have read his memoir, to have represented the voice of modesty and the sound judgment of the individual who wanted to argue from the evidence of specific texts or specific instances of injustice, rather than to speak about oppression in the context of colonialism, imperialism, or any other large-scale form of domination. His emphasis on the facts of a specific case have led him to be something of a lone voice in the wilderness of literature departments that are ruled by proponents of “high theory” and “political correctness” in which it could sometimes seem as if individual texts and individual cases were beside the point of the application of a theoretical perspective to a reading that seemed to become authoritative and true by virtue of its association with an ideology—especially when coupled with the tag of a famous theorist’s name. Goodheart reports that one of his more vexing moral dilemmas involved whether or not to sign a petition denouncing someone or something about which he did not feel that he knew all the facts, but which many of his friends felt it was correct to sign. As much as I would like to believe that I have learned something of the subtleties of how to think and the complexities of how to write from reading his work over the last 15 years, I was also struck in reading his memoir by how different my conception of academic life is from the world he draws in these pages. The main difference between my sense of my career as an English professor, which began in the 90s, and Goodheart’s, which began in the 60s, is that there seemed to have been a gravitas to the [End Page 137] things that Goodheart wrote or thought or protested or taught, a sense that it really mattered in the world outside the academy what side you were on in the hot-button political and cultural debates that shaped his experience in the 50s, 60s, and beyond. Almost in spite of himself, Goodheart represents himself as involved in a minor and yet direct way with some of the most profound and disturbing incidents in American political and social history, ranging from the McCarthyism of the 50s, to the student campus protests and anti-war movement of the 60s, to the culture wars of more contemporary American academic life. He...