The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity 0812252578, 9780812252576

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The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania Series Editors: Shaul Magid, Francesca Trivellato, Steven Weitzman A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity

Benjamin Schreier

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Schreier, Benjamin, author. Title: The rise and fall of Jewish American literature : ethnic studies and the challenge of identity / Benjamin Schreier. Other titles: Jewish culture and contexts. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Series: Jewish culture and contexts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020004257 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5257-6 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: American literature—Jewish authors—History and criticism. | Jewish literature—United States—History and criticism. | Jews—Identity. Classification: LCC PS153.J4 S373 2020 | DDC 810.9/8924073—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004257

To Michael P. Kramer

Contents

Introduction. What’s the “History” in “Jewish American Literary History” the History Of? Chapter 1. The History of Jewish American Literary History: “Breakthrough” and the Institutional Rhetoric of Identity Chapter 2. Before Jewish American Literature Chapter 3. After Jewish American Literature Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

Introduction What’s the “History” in “Jewish American Literary History” the History Of?

We must free ourselves from the sacrilization [sic] of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and in human relations as thought.… Criticism is a matter of … show[ing] that things are not as selfevident as one believed … see[ing] that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. —Michel Foucault

Nothing testifies to the etiolation of the field of Jewish American literary study—my field— so much as the fact that so few people ever fight about anything. There are no big methodological or theoretical disputes, no open rivalries between competing theories or methodologies. One could be excused for having the impression that nothing is at stake—or at least the impression that few intellectuals operating in the field believe there’s anything at stake. Sometimes I wonder if an alternative title for this book could have been “Jews and Truth.” Michel Foucault is so important for this project because he helps us understand the effects of thinking about power rather than about representation. The main function of the shift to power was to replace the self-evidence of a system of dominant representations with questions about, indeed a field of analysis of, the procedures and techniques by which power relations and the knowledge practices they organize and enable are actually effectuated. Representation tends to presume something represented, and begins and ends there, with its object of scholarly desire. But it’s the job of critical thinking to not start with the end. Anyway, now vee may perhaps to begin.… Ask anyone, or at least anyone who cares: the dominant event of Jewish American literary history is “emergence” or “breakthrough”—the irruption in the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley into the heart of the American cultural scene. In fact, or maybe (more cautiously) more to the point, the “fact” of breakthrough is the primal scene of the Jewish American literary field: the more or less formalized or academically disciplined study of Jewish American literature grew up around the consolidating self-evidence of the breakthrough narrative, and the field’s legibility and condition of possibility have from the start been articulated with it. The prevailing accounts of Jewish literature in the United States inevitably orbit, even if only implicitly or inconspicuously or once or twice removed, in the gravitational field of this central event, which also establishes an assimilationist—if also pluralist or multiculturalist—temporality that’s exceedingly easy to take for granted as culturally and socially self-evident, a before and

an after of Jewish American confidence, security, and success.1 Though Jewish American literary study, unlike its sibling U.S. ethnic literary formations (which have for at least a generation been trying to denaturalize the link between identity and body), has mostly resisted the urge to explicitly theorize itself and its practices—a refusal that’s intimate with Jewish studies’ more general difficulty or discomfort with understanding itself (that is, as an institutional entity, or even just an academic program) as “political” or “resistant” in the same way that, say, African American studies understands and is comfortable with itself (it would be interesting to see how many teach-ins about Charlottesville, for example, were held by African American studies units vs. by Jewish studies units; and it’s in any case notable that the Association for Jewish Studies has as of this writing refused to follow the lead of other professional academic organizations in denouncing Trump’s December 2019 executive order “clarifying” the meaning of antisemitism, with its express curbs on academic freedom)—the narrative of breakthrough has operated as a deputized proxy for the only real theory, however sporadically and insufficiently acknowledged, of Jewish American literature that has ever been able to carry any currency—either professionally, in the academy, or publicly, among lay readers of Jewish American writing: namely, immigration.2 Thus, if Jewish American writing before World War II can mostly be characterized by a parochial or provincial angst, and can often easily fit into such stalwart U.S. literary historical compartments as “immigrant writing” or “regionalism” or “urban fiction,” categories as durable as the dependability with which they consign their constituents to a decidedly second-tier prestige—so this foundational paradigm goes—then within two or three decades of the war’s end it had rapidly shed these marginalizing limitations and come to represent American literature at its most central and innovative and ascendant, the Jewish American standing as the representative modern figure and the Jewish American writer the spokesperson for the modern condition in toto. Accordingly, as Jewish American literary study has tended, certainly in some of its recent formations, to become more diverse in focus and more sophisticated in scope, it often draws its warrant for these critical investments from—and it reproduces an image of its own intellectual responsibility in the name of—the increasing diversity, sophistication, and independence of Jews in America. Jewish American literary study persists in imagining itself as part of the enduring historical reality of breakthrough. Significantly, in this narrative of sociocultural movement from margin to center and rear guard to leading edge, Jewish American literature dependably tracks the career of Jewish America: the breakthrough narrative of Jewish American literature normalizes itself as a straightforward—I use this term ironically, of course, informed by Antonio Gramsci’s critical keyword commonsense—and largely politically innocent reflection of or representational lens on Jewish Americans conceptualized as a population, as a mode of representational access that suppresses critical theorization in the name of instrumental or productivist—which is to say self-evident—ethnological history, leveraging its hegemony on the assumption that literary history is itself neither theoretical nor historical. This book begins in a critical suspicion about the way in which professional academic formations, including both English department–based literary study and Jewish studies–based interdisciplinarity, have taken

Jewish American literature for granted—and about the way in which Jewish American literary history has itself reflected these predispositions, taking for granted its own literary historical warrant. My critical targets are the disciplinary and intellectual modes in which the Jewish American literary field’s exceptionalist estrangement from the mainstream of humanistic critical self-regard have been carried out. By historicizing the practice of Jewish American literary study and destabilizing the assumption that Jewish American literary history operates under the ethnological authority of an inquiry into the lives and times of Jews in America, I hope to make it easier for humanists to imagine and act on a critically self-aware intellectual practice. Breakthrough needs to be approached primarily as an event in Jewish American historiography, not Jewish American history. I certainly don’t pretend that there was no institutionally housed study of writing by Jews in America before the 1950s, or that the literary intellectuals of the breakthrough invented the idea of thinking about what we now easily call Jewish American writing. To be sure, before World War II there was fiction and belles lettres being written by Jews in the United States, there were scholarly works written that took as their object the representation of Jews in English and American literature, and there was of course the persuasive tradition of nineteenth-century German-Jewish Wissenschaft des Judentums premised on the culturalnationalist logic of a transhistorical unity of Jewish cultural expression, a tradition that, in Michael P. Kramer’s description, “shifted the locus of Jewish selfdefinition from Judaism as a revealed religion to Jewishness as national character” and imported and legitimized “the Romantic notion of literature as the expression and repository of the spirit or genius of a people, of its Volksgeist … as the primary justification for the study, cultivation, and dissemination of Jewish literature.”3 But before the discursive innovation of breakthrough, scholarship could not yet take for granted the field unity of a canon of literature organized, defined, and essentially interpretable by the Jewish American identity of its authors; this was a postwar development and it has a history that itself cannot be extracted from the gravitational pull of the “breakthrough” narrative. The innovation of breakthrough was not simply to link, inevitably and unimpeachably, the Jewish authors and Jewish texts of Jewish American literature but to reorient thinking about literary texts written by Jews in America around authors as representatives of Jewish American people, experience, and culture; Jewish American literary study would professionalize over the following decades as scholarly focus shifted from the object of literary representation to its subject, from Jews as a community written about to Jews as a population writing. This was an epistemological transformation likely encouraged (if not enabled) by the concept of Jewish “peoplehood,” the revisionary, 1930s-era American crossing, particularly in the writings of people like Stephen Wise and Mordecai Kaplan, of, on the one hand, Wissenschaft’s cultural nationalist investment in the Volksgeist of the Jews and, on the other, the rise of Zionism as a full-fledged political, intellectual, and nation-building movement. As Noam Pianko has argued, “The language of peoplehood translates some of Zionism’s fundamental assumptions into a vocabulary that serves as a kind of code word for nationhood, internalizing those assumptions while erasing the term nation from the

conceptual vocabulary of American Jewish collectivity.” The concept of Jewish peoplehood established “Jewish nationalism” as the central “framework for defining Jewish collectivity” in America by contrasting itself to explicitly state-oriented Zionism even as it relied on much of Zionism’s deeper conceptual foundation. “It enabled Zionism’s conception of Jewish groupness to move from the margins to the mainstream of American Jewish life and thought.”4 Pianko’s focus on the importance of Zionism in the history of the term demonstrates that the concept of Jewish peoplehood, which was designed to evade some of the restrictive implications of a strictly religious or theological concept of Jewish identity through a more secular and expansive concept of civilization, has a fundamentally nationalistic pedigree; but at the same time, answering the anxieties of a community already wary of charges of dual loyalty, the ideology of peoplehood tended to suppress explicit mention of—and focus on—nationalism and Zionism. Thus, just as Zionism tended (and tends) to suppress attention to alternative or divergent histories of links between land and identity, so the concept of Jewish peoplehood incited a more or less unitary concern with a coherently Jewish narrative. More pointedly, therefore, the elaboration of breakthrough was often framed in triumphalist terms (colored at times by a touch of the “tragic”) by critics for whom the narrative of emergence was also crucially and fundamentally bound up with a reflexive structure of self-recognition in a persistent scholarly affect Kramer has helpfully identified as “critical narcissism.” For Kramer (as for many others) Jewish literary study should be seen in the context of the academic “recovery” of ethnic literature in the second half of the twentieth century, and this political history had important consequences—what I might call subcognitive consequences—for the professional study of Jewish literature: “the profound sense of cultural affinity that drew African Americans to African American literature, Asian Americans to Asian American literature, and American Jews to Jewish American literature also tended to suggest strict protocols about the study of ethnic texts—about who is authorized to interpret texts and what sorts of interpretations are acceptable. That is to say, it produced a tendency toward critical narcissism.”5 As Leslie Fiedler, one of the leading breakthrough intellectuals, put it in a late-career reflection on his writing about Jewish American literature, “It was not, I realize now, a disinterested venture, since I thought of myself at the beginning of my writing career as part of the movement that had carried such children of immigrant Jews from eastern Europe from the periphery to the center of American literary culture—making their experience, our experience, a part of the communal dream stuff, the myth that makes all Americans one, whatever their ethnic origin.” More generally, he admits that over his professional life, whatever the topic, he “continued to write, willy-nilly, from a Jewish point of view, as a Jew.”6 The frequency with which first person pronouns like “us” and “our” appear in the writings on Jewish American literature of Fiedler and his fellow breakthrough literary intellectuals is notable, and the repeated investment in constructions like “our language” and “our culture” as pervasive shibboleths is impossible (and would be foolish) to miss. For the vast majority of the breakthrough literary intellectuals, that is, the critical study of Jewish American representativity was fundamentally

autocritique. I am less interested in the ways in which Jewish American literary study enforces protocols for the positive representation of Jews than Kramer hopes his term “critical narcissism” describes, but I do think the term helps illuminate how the exceptionalist insiderism that breakthrough inherited from the Wissenschaft tradition and Kaplan’s revisionary speculation on Jewish “peoplehood” matured in postwar thinking about Jewish American literature, constituting as well a legacy for the consolidation of professional Jewish studies.7 The field of Jewish American literary study ignores this history at its peril—or at least at the risk of its irrelevance. The ethnic literary formations we often associate with the emergence of multiculturalism and ethnic studies arose from and as institutional deputies of active political movements; and they still often identify themselves as part of this struggle. In its institutional interdependence with the narrative of breakthrough, however, Jewish American literary study in a sense emerged as part of a perception that a political struggle was in fact over. And as a result, to the extent that it continues to constitute itself as a technology for interpreting the history of what Jews do, say, and write,8 and to the extent that it instantiates itself in the assumption that Jews are always recognizable and always somehow continuous with all other Jews wherever or whenever they might be found, Jewish American literary study reproduces the grounds of its own redundancy, if not in fact its own obsolescence. If thought is to be something other than an ethnologically descriptive instrument in the toolbox of demographic accountancy—and, perhaps more important for some potential readers of this book, if Jewish American literary study is to approach prestige parity with its sibling academic formations within the literary, ethnic, and Jewish studies complexes—then scholars cannot take for granted the representational capacities of the word “Jewish”—not in the study of Jewish literature, and not in Jewish studies more generally. Rather, we have to approach such use—critically interrogating it even as we unavoidably reproduce its modes and applications—as a productive act of theorizing and analysis far more significantly than as an ultimately deterministic act of reference or reflection. My polemical goal—my struggle, if you will—is to make legible a nonethnological concept of Jewish identity, one that can liberate a critically minded literary practice from vassalage to a restrictively conceived Jewish studies–based, Wissenschaft-derived, and nationalisminformed—in a word, Zionist, as I’d like to expansively and critically use that term— orthodoxy that takes history for granted as the fundamental scholarly discipline. Eve Sedgwick opens her book Epistemology of the Closet by enumerating the “Axioms” or theoretical principles that orient her work; it is an attempt, as she puts it, “to articulate some of the otherwise implicit methodological, definitional, and axiomatic groundings of the book’s project.”9 Given the degree to which exceptionalist resistance to criticism of first principles (or indeed to any sustained theoretical self-awareness) largely governs the way academics and other thinkers have often been able to (or indeed have cared to) imagine the field of Jewish American literary study and the intellectual labor it organizes and authorizes, I take Sedgwick’s approach as a kind of model here in my own Introduction. My hope is that

in laying out the postulates or analytical starting points from which I launch my critique of the field I can make clear the polemical stakes of my project in this book and, more significantly, make it a little more difficult to dismiss, disregard, creatively overlook, or otherwise ignore that critique.10 A note for the perplexed (and perhaps for the impatient): I admit I’m being a bit playful here, but I hope nonetheless to make obvious that I straddle the line here in my axioms between the descriptive and the normative.

1. We need to put more effort into trying to think about identity under the banner of epistemology rather than ontology. Please. The countless occasions on which I have been misunderstood in talking about identity suggest that I need to be exceedingly careful and clear about how I’m using the term. By identity I mean to indicate not some kind of stuff, an ontological attribute in those whom we identify, but an epistemological or interpretive frame that allows us to do that identifying. The “stuff” side of the ledger is obviously important, but the other, “frame,” side has been woefully underexamined in Jewish American literary study. I’m not using identity as a way of naming the historical object inhering in Jews that grounds our practices of categorizing them—as an alternative to, but largely commensurate with, such historical objects as race, religion, ethnicity, culture, and so on, concepts that end up grounding what are inevitably essentialist projects under guise of another name (and concepts as well that Michael P. Kramer has helped us think critically about under the banner of “metonymic ethnicity”11). Rather, I’m focused on identity more as way of naming the form of thought, the discursive machine, the conceptual apparatus that, precisely by spectrally producing the presence of such an object, grounds our professional practices of categorizing Jews. Which is to say that my interest in the concept of identity is entirely theoretical and a priori (and therefore has nothing necessarily to do with Jews): my point is simply that we cannot talk about Jews, we cannot engage in “Jewish studies” (just as we cannot engage in any kind of ethnic studies, or queer studies, or American studies, or American literary studies, or modernist studies, etc.), without a concept of identity. I used to think this is pretty obvious, but I guess I was wrong.

2. Jewish American literary study is unduly—stubbornly—burdened by the assumption of representativity, by an expectation that it offers, fundamentally, a reflection of Jewish American historical reality. Why does so much Jewish American literary scholarship approach its field as if its task were at some basic level ethnographic? That’s not exactly a rhetorical question, but I certainly consider the asking of it more critically productive than a possible answer might be; and indeed, on the one hand I don’t really have such an answer, at least so long as we emphasize the “Why” that begins the question, but on the other hand in this book I endeavor to narrate the institutional and intellectual paths taken to get us to this situation, with emphasis on an implied “how.” If someone were to tell you that the most important thing—

indeed, the fundamental, the primary, thing—that scholarship on Moby Dick can do is to tell us about whaling or whalers, you’d call that person a lunatic. Laughable, yes, but the truth is that the Jewish American literary field is overshadowed by an often unquestioned assumption that the primary value of its literary archive is its ancillary function supplementing the historical record of Jews in America, an assumption taking form in practices ranging from the widespread habit of anchoring Jewish American literary criticism with historical claims about Jews in America to such maddening customs as taking for granted the scholarly value of assaying how easily (Jewish) scholars can identify with characters in Jewish American literary texts or blithely claiming that Nathan Zuckerman is the “alter ego” of Philip Roth, z”l. To be sure, these and many more allied practices do not characterize the entirety of the field’s work. But it behooves us to ask what the Jewish American literary field would look like were it to discipline itself as something other than a repurposed ethnographic—or autoethnographic—history oriented by a set of questions about how Jews are represented (or represent themselves) in and by cultural texts. Any responses to such an inquiry would likely have to route themselves through questions about what Jewish American literary study would look like were it to ask critical questions about how knowledge practices have produced Jews as objects and subjects of discourse. Granted, most identity-based “studies” fields are burdened by at least some kind of expectation of representativity (often refracted through Kramer’s “cultural affinity”)—the particular recognizable case reveals what a subjectified “they” or objectified “we” are like—but I think this problem is exacerbated in Jewish American literary studies to the extent that the field has mostly refused a sustained project of critical self-theorization. In 1845, in his eleventh and final thesis on Feuerbach, Karl Marx famously wrote that idealist philosophy up to that point had assumed that its task was merely to “interpret” the world “in various ways”; Marx’s point was that thought in fact can (and indeed does) exert force in and “change” the world. I have written this book in the hope that we’re at a point in the field-history of Jewish American literary study at which this difference is becoming urgent; certainly the ongoing debate about the role of Zionism and Israel in the politics and practices of Jewish identification in the United States, both in the American Jewish community and in American politics more generally, and especially the unequivocal fact that —at least as a problem strictly of biomass if not biopolitics—Zionism is far more pressingly significant as a lever of identification in the United States as a white Christian issue than as a Jewish issue (indeed, long before Zionism became a “Jewish” political movement in the late nineteenth century, the “restoration” of Jews to Palestine had been an established evangelical Protestant project), suggests at the very least that the links and relays between Jewishness and representation—links that are now taken for granted at so many levels—are neither selfevident nor secure. To be sure, strong institutional influences enforce the conservatism of intellectual habits and scholarly practices premised on the assumption of a reflection theory of literature, culture, and indeed thought, but I’m beginning to think that if they are still dominant, they may no longer be hegemonic.

3. Jewish studies is the analysis not of Jews, but of discourses about Jews; or, alternatively, Jewish studies is not about Jews, but about how we know about Jews. This is not a book primarily about Jews. To be honest, and also more to the point, the book isn’t even really about Jewish American literature, strictly speaking, either, at least insofar as it doesn’t comprise a series of readings of texts already taken to be representative of—contained in and typical or characteristic of—the set Jewish American literature. It’s about, rather, Jewish American literature’s aboutness. It analyzes the professionalization of an institutionally situated way of talking about Jewish American literature, and is therefore about the historical development of a discursive link between Jews and what would become knowable as the Jewish American texts they write: it’s about the investment of literature by and about Jews in America as a culturally capitalized object of cultural knowledge—a coordination and an investment logically informed by a larger project to know about and manage populations that is characteristic of a postwar regime of knowing. This coordination between discourses oriented around the investment of Jews as an object of knowledge established itself so quickly and so unequivocally during just a couple of decades after World War II that within a generation it had become hegemonic—to the point that it is still almost entirely taken for granted that the study of Jewish American literature (like Jewish literature more generally) is, primarily, a privileged site providing knowledge of Jews. In other words, this book is about how Jewish American literature came to be regarded as being a privileged record of Jewish life in America via the epistemological medium of its identifiably Jewish authors. But to the extent that Jewish American literary study—and indeed Jewish studies more generally—takes its current formations and practices for granted, forgetting its own history and declining to investigate or even acknowledge the discursive logic in which those formations and practices are grounded, its pursuit of field mastery will continually reenact and reproduce a blindness to its own instrumentality. Kandice Chuh has admitted an “irritation” with aboutness, specifically with the “regularity and normativity of the practices and questions organized by and around it,” which is to say with a process of normalization that, as she points out, “plays out in such ordinary academic activities as the creation of doctoral exam lists, course titling, and departmental hiring practices, all of which still largely follow the dogmatism of mastery-of-field ideology.” Bracketing for now the fact that very few hiring committees in the last decade or so have presided over searches for specialists in Jewish American literature, such activities unfold in an institutional context that posits fields and “knowledge formations” as “external to each other,” and with the former dependent on—and about—the independent latter. By directing our “attention to how aboutness functions as an assessment of relevance,” Chuh argues that questions about what a given field or canon is about—some canon of literature marked by (almost always as the expression of) some ethnically identifiable group—or what is ethnically identifiable about a given text are “intellectually impoverished” and fuel a “complacency” that insulates fields from each other and ignores the “historicities of

knowledge work,” the inevitable result being that we come to think of fields as more or less self-evident.12 With Chuh’s critique in mind, we need to remember that neither the literary-historically recognizable categories “Jewish American literature” (or its immediate-predecessor formations, like “American Jewish novel” or “American Jewish writing” or “JewishAmerican writing”) or “Jewish American writer” nor the ethnographic historicist culturalism of our current mode of ethnic literary study is self-evident, and that they have histories. Specifically, in this book I chart the appearance of a discourse that articulated an emergently legible field of literary production to a newly conspicuous ethnic population—ethnicity itself a term that was undergoing change and elaboration during precisely the same period—in a national context in which the post–civil rights movement and nascently multiculturalist United States was revising how it understood groups and the population-bound cultures through which they are recognized as unified. So I might revise my opening claim: this is not a book about Jews as a subject of history, but about Jews as an object of knowledge, specifically in literary and cultural studies, and this has everything to do with what “we”—by which I mean intellectuals with some professional investment in thinking about Jewish identity and knowing about Jews and what they do—want out of a concept of Jewishness. Julian Levinson has written that “in retrospect,” Emma Lazarus “heralds the beginning of what we can properly call Jewish American literature—especially if we mean by this a tradition of writers in America of Jewish descent who have grappled explicitly with the meaning of Jewishness.”13 This is as good a definition of Jewish American literature as any— from a certain angle, it’s slightly more restrictive, and therefore satisfying, than Michael Kramer’s disarmingly provocative claim that “Jewish literature is simply literature written by Jews”14—but it is good only so long as we take for granted that Jewish American literary history itself has no history. In a note to this claim, Levinson admits (of course) that any attempt to fix the beginning of the tradition of Jewish American literature is necessarily going to be “inexact,” and that he’s “wary” (of course) of using as his primary categorical criterion “not only” the parentage of authors but texts that “explicitly allocate to Jewishness or Judaism some specific and often positive set of associations.”15 It’s true that the “in retrospect” with which Levinson introduces his claim is vitally important, but its function is precisely to displace the possibility of attending deliberately to the fact that the scholarly ability and willingness to professionally attend to this coordination between an author’s Jewish heritage and a text’s Jewish content has itself an institutional history. We need to revise and complicate Levinson’s easy claim: I’ll be the first to concede that a definition of Jewish American literature inheres in some perceived sense of feedback between the recognizable Jewishness of an author and the recognizable Jewishness of a text, but ignoring the history of the structures and practices of this feedback necessarily results in taking for granted that the field of Jewish American literary study operates as a historicist ethnography. In pursuing this history, my book proposes a critical displacement of the field. Which is to say that a Jewish or Jewish American literary tradition is a dubious enough concept—such a tradition certainly isn’t self-evident, and it certainly doesn’t exist in itself—that criticism

might consider the full range of implications of not using it.

4. Humanities-based scholars—whether operating under the institutional auspices and authority of Jewish studies programs, English departments, or anywhere else—don’t have to, and indeed should not, assume that Jewish literary study pursues the history of the Jews under another name; in other words, Jewish American literary study could stand to put a little effort into maintaining disciplinary independence from history. The history I’m hoping a critical Jewish literary study would be interested in is the history of the professional vocabularies we use to talk about Jewish literature, and through it the history of our desire and ability to know about Jewish literature, not the history of the subject or object populations of Jewish literature. The significant historical development I trace in this book is how an emergent professional discourse about Jewish American literature became an institutional site in which Jewish American culture became an object of intellectual desire, a transformation we can talk about under the rubric of what Foucault has labeled the incitement to discourse. That is to say that this book is organized around an attempt to disarticulate and denormalize the constellation of tradition-canon-field. I’m hoping I’m not being too fast and loose with the word “tradition” here: I mean something like an assemblage of historical and cultural data whose unity and legibility, and also utility, is revealed under the sign of population-based identity. If there’s anything that the current state of professional Jewish studies formations bears out, it’s that an effective means of legitimizing an identity-based field and authorizing interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry within it is to construct a chronological narrative, grounded in a canon of texts as the manifest representation of that embodied identity; and indeed, the academic field of Jewish literary study presents itself as organized—necessarily if not self-evidently, but in any case obviously —around a literary and cultural canon of texts that itself draws its coherence and authority— metonymically if not representationally, but in any case presumably—from the historical self-evidence of a tradition, a term Jewish studies ultimately cannot disengage from a concept of population. In other words, given that (1) canonicity is not an inherent quality in texts and (2) the desire to categorize texts is one of the key forces that defines the literary field, Jewish literary study needs to pay some serious and explicit attention to the problem of how to understand the epistemological implications of the former while still acknowledging the professional protocols of the latter; if canonicity does not inhere in a text as an essential or genetic quality, why does so much literary history proceed from the assumption that literature offers a genetic representation of the identity category that centers a canon? Accordingly, this book aligns itself with a critical Jewish studies for which intellectual responsibility takes the form of elaborating the history of the Wissenschaft-inherited institutional practices through which a literary canon draws its institutional authority from its claim to stand as representative of, and therefore essentially linked to, a historically recognizable cultural tradition. The work of this book is to pursue a critical history that

makes it more difficult to take for granted that the Jewish American literary field is organized around the self-evidence of Jewish American literature’s representation of Jewish American history. The book is motivated by a critical imperative to ask, if not why history has become the master disciplinary framework for work in Jewish studies, then perhaps what Jewish studies work that imagines itself otherwise than as organized and administered fundamentally by the history of populations might look like—or perhaps at the very least what work looked like that tried to contest its inevitable fall into the gravitational field of the self-evidentiary enticements of the history of populations. As literary critics it behooves us to be sensitive to the fact that language is rarely ever simply used, but almost always also stages its own use, employing and rendering conspicuous technologies of normalization. Otherwise, just get a historian to do it.

5. The Jewish-American-literary-study-as-shadow-ethnography paradigm has played itself out, resulting necessarily in an impasse. The concept of identity organizing the field of Jewish literary study is a product of disciplinary practices authorized by the Jewish studies complex more generally; the assumption that it is naturally occurring in the texts the field comprises is an example of magical thinking that is ultimately unsustainable. Consider as a starting point the methodological gap between Hana Wirth-Nesher’s two magisterial editing projects, 1994’s What Is Jewish Literature? and 2016’s The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature. The first is an anxious collection, setting itself a relatively narrowly constrained (if unequivocally intensive) critical task to define the scholarly category of Jewish literature, while the second is rapturous and almost promiscuous, taking for granted a wide purview for its relatively unrestrained exploration of a capacious tradition of literary and cultural production already understood as Jewish and American; the latter volume exchanges the former volume’s critical-theoretical speculations about how to recognize an archive for expansive discursive elaboration of an archive.16 The productivist investing of a field of analysis displaces the restrictivist obligation to define the field. The distance between these two modes of scholarly labor—between the possibility of examining a critical problematic and the incitements to produce discourse around key structuring problems or questions—illuminates the problem of the material recognizability of the text that lies at the heart of Jewish literary study. Anita Norich exposes, albeit symptomatically, an ethnographic impasse that’s rooted in the machinery of this displacement. Reminding us that “scholars of Jewish literature have devoted considerable attention to questions of identity, nomenclature, boundaries, and intersections, seeking a definitive identity for the texts they study or simply a working definition of their subject,” Norich argues that “despite Hana Wirth-Nesher’s excellent analysis of the topic” in What Is Jewish Literature?, “despite the vocabulary and conceptualization of ethnic literatures in America that Werner Sollors has been instrumental

in giving us” in volumes like Beyond Ethnicity, and “despite the controversy generated by Michael Kramer’s straightforward assertion that Jewish literature is literature written by Jews” in his essential essay “Race, Literary History, and the ‘Jewish’ Question,” “the issue is no closer to resolution than it has ever been.”17 The “issue” in Norich’s assertion that “the issue is no closer to resolution than it has ever been” is presumably the “definitive identity for the texts” that scholars of Jewish literature study, or “simply a working definition of their subject,” articulations that she goes on to gloss as “the question of what constitutes Jewish literature” and “concerns about how to identify, characterize, analyze modern Jewish literature” (776). But it is also worth pausing over the semantic reticence in Norich’s formulation, an ever-so-slightly-detectable hesitation, one suspects, to be too precise: if Jewish literary scholarship has so far failed to come up with an incontrovertible definition that can functionally police the category of Jewish literature, Norich seems both shrewdly aware of the problem and unwilling to fully commit to bringing it into the light. As Norich helpfully notes, the problem of the identity of Jewish literature is instead resinscribed in a series of what end up being unsatisfying questions and antinomies through which Jewish literary study too often conducts itself—to wit: “tensions between Jewish and non-Jewish languages, diglossia and heteroglossia, exile and homeland, the cosmopolis and the shtetl, diaspora and Zion, derivation and influence. Is English now a Jewish language? Are Jews most creative when they are at home or when they are outsiders critical of or yearning for home? Did urbanization or modernization make Jewish identity too diffuse and indistinguishable from others? Is there a distinctly Jewish sense of humor, a Jewish aesthetic, a Jewish voice? What is a Jewish book?” (776). Norich worries that these questions effectively try to police the category but with a bad conscience, proceeding “primarily” by “asking who is within and who is outside some border” that they in fact refuse to name, and thus “underscor[ing] a profound anxiety about gatekeeping and permeability,” about, essentially, policing. The strength of Norich’s account is her diagnosis of this “mask[ing]” operation and her attention to “the literary” as the register in which its analysis should take place: “The worry about just what Jewish literature is in the modern era is an academic version of the equally problematic question ‘Who is a Jew?’” But this is a question, as Norich holds, that we have not been able to easily answer “politically, sociologically, or culturally” (777). Indeed, in its dominant forms Jewish literary study takes shape in a series of questions that reinscribe the categorical question “What is Jewish literature?” precisely by displacing its critical force in the production of descriptive discourse oriented around a series of disciplinary problems. But what we might admit are Norich’s own circumlocutions betray another evasion. Norich finds scholarly practices organized around such culturalist questions to be unsatisfying to the extent that they punt on precisely what the field presumably seeks in them: “These are not, finally, productive questions, and certainly not in literary or cultural terms, partly because they ignore the specific difference of the literary, partly because they are masks for that underlying question of identity” (776). Because scholarly practices organized to police the boundaries of Jewish literature are inevitably frustrating, Norich

prefers a project to analyze how the “signs” under which Jewish literature announces itself are “established” and “contextualized” (775–776). Indeed, she suggests that “it might be more productive to question the term canon rather than the term Jewish” (778); repeating a move that’s become standard since the rise of the new Jewish cultural studies in the 1990s, Norich hopes to talk about multiple Jewish literatures with a multiplicity of representational agendas, and she explicitly shuns the expectation of a “normative Judaism” that might underlie the search for an “agreed-on canon of modern Jewish letters” (777). As she argues, “Canon implies a kind of unity, or at least community, that does not exist for Jewish culture, spread all over the world and in scores of languages” (778). But Norich’s concept of canon reveals precisely the problem with the hegemonic force of the ethnological paradigm in Jewish literary study. For Norich, “there is no modern Jewish literary canon because until recently there have been none of the Jewish institutions of power required for canon formation”: though categorically secure formations like a Jewish nation, Jewish schools, and a Jewish press have existed sporadically throughout Jewish history, Norich points out that they have not existed continuously, and so have not exercised the normalizing and unifying force that they might otherwise effect and that would be necessary to guarantee the cogency and intelligibility of a canon (778). In assuming that canons aren’t appropriate for a population as geographically and historically diverse as the Jews, however, she discounts the fact that canons are, at the end of the day, facts of scholarly discourse, not of nature. The kind of canon that matters to Jewish literary scholarship—let us say, for the sake of argument, that we’re interested in something we could call the Modern Jewish Canon —does not arise genetically and self-evidently from a culture, but is rather produced retrospectively, through mechanisms of selection, often through the agency of culture professionals. If such a canon is recognized as an expression of a Volksgeist, it’s a Volksgeist that’s recognized as such by scholars far more than by the Volk whose Geist is at issue. Norich, however, seems to expect a canon to function primarily as the signifying effect or expression of the internal coherence of a culture, and seems not to consider canon as the product of administrative forces imposed externally by institutionally situated practices of reading. In calling out the constellation of literary-historical questions that inscribe a border around Jewish literature by displacing the problem of the definition of the field, but by simultaneously reproducing the ethnographic paradigm by taking for granted that the field’s coherence can be rooted only in the determining coherence of Jewish populations, Norich’s discomfort with the ideological project supporting efforts at literary gatekeeping is symptomatic. Despite her gestural critique of normative canonization, she assumes throughout the categorical security of “Jewish literature,” similarly to how Wirth-Nesher’s Cambridge History does—precisely as a cultural substrate for the differences she wants to mark: Jewish “literatures” may be plural across time and space, but their Jewishness, like that of the coherent field that it anchors, is for her everywhere recognizable as such. In order to liberate modern Jewish literary scholarship from the compulsion to secure boundaries, Norich in fact renormalizes Jewish literary scholarship as a demographic operation organized under a regnant concept of representation. A Jewish studies–based reader can hardly blame

her: Norich wants to criticize her categorical Jewishness and have it, too. Identity-based literary history grounded in these essentially ethnological assumptions cannot escape the impasse of this discomfort.

6. Professional Jewish studies in its dominant forms has organized itself as an insiderism, but a critical Jewish studies need not take the conventionalized practices and modes of thought characteristic of this insiderism, and the modes of privilege through which it has been institutionalized, for granted. Michael Kramer has given us a powerful tool in his analysis of the “critical narcissism” arising from the dynamics of cultural affinity baked into Jewish studies practice. The institutional history of Jewish studies reveals a kind of privileged relationship between scholar and subject, often relayed through exceptionalist affects and taking form in the expectation of a “satisfying mode of ethnic self-expression” on the part of a scholar for whom “questions about the definition of the field are inextricably bound up with questions of self-definition.”18 Kramer worries that “when literary criticism becomes overly personal, when too much is at stake, when the study of culture becomes confused with statements of creed … then the field’s resistance to conceptual closure—the source of its strength and vitality—is significantly weakened. In short, if we insist on using Jewish American literature as a mirror, then we will only see images of ourselves.”19 The obligation of Jewish studies is not to imagine the possibility of a politically innocent way to escape this narcissism, but rather to critically contest its inevitability as a normative function of Jewish studies’s Wissenschaft heritage. As anyone reading this likely doesn’t need me to tell them, the foundation on which the Wissenschaft des Judentums was built was a rationalization of Jewish nationalism through institutionalization in the university, the product of which was a field of scholarship; it was, essentially, an operation in laundering thought. The modern critical study of Jews and Judaism, sometimes known in English simply, though perhaps ambiguously, as “Jewish scholarship,” Wissenschaft was predicated on the fundamental unity of all Jewish culture, and in one sense the classic Wissenschaft historians were just that, historians—practitioners of a more or less secular, scientific historical project. But Wissenschaft’s two-hundred-year history has been characterized, as Michael A. Meyer has put it, by equally fundamental questions about “the relation of scholarly Jews to their texts and traditions, their history and sociology,” and its legacy continues to be marked by tensions between an insiderism and the kind of objectivity we take for granted in modern scholarly disciplines.20 Whether the early Wissenschaftlers focused their efforts inwardly on the Jewish community and argued, like Zacharias Frankel, that Wissenschaft should function as a “lever” to bring assimilating Jews back into Judaism’s fold or turned and faced outwardly, like Leopold Zunz, to emphasize a comprehensive academic field unconcerned with its own normative role within the Jewish community, it is impossible to ignore the inherent symbiotic relation between Wissenschaft

and Jews; as Meyer points out, even Zunz spoke of “our Wissenschaft,” and later scholars like Rosenzweig and Buber would argue that Wissenschaft neglected its function if it did not serve the Jewish community.21 Gershom Scholem famously spoke of the contradiction between the repeated declarations of being a pure and objective science, which is no more than a branch of studies in general and which has no purpose outside itself—and the striking fact of the political function which this discipline was intended to fulfill, sought to fulfill, and was accepted by public opinion in order to fulfill. How strange the image of those scholars, all of whose work indicates that they sought to create an effective tool in the struggle of the Jews for equal rights, and who made constant use of this tool in their polemics; and yet nevertheless closed their eyes so as not to see this primary goal too clearly, declaring repeatedly that they seek nothing but pure knowledge for its own sake.22 Even if, when the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) was founded in 1969, the primary goal was gaining institutional respect for scholarly work on Jewish history, culture, society, and literature, with the needs of the Jewish community decidedly secondary (if avowed at all) —as Meyer puts it, “the establishment of academic respectability for Jewish scholarship within academia was the foremost consideration”23—this tension is still very much alive in contemporary Jewish studies work and institutions: it is signaled in Meyer’s vague term “Jewish scholarship,” and indeed in Scholem’s term “Jewish Studies,” which we retain today in all its normalized forgetting. I began my analysis here with Epistemology of the Closet, and I want briefly to return there. In the opening pages, Sedgwick shines critical light on the “epistemological privileging of unknowing” that underwrites male heteronormative supremacy (and we can certainly include white supremacy in this analysis, as well): “Knowledge, after all, is not itself power, although it is the magnetic field of power. Ignorance and opacity collude or compete with knowledge in mobilizing the flows of energy, desire, goods, meanings, persons.” Just as, in her (more-than-thirty-year-old) example, if Franc¸ois Mitterrand knows English and Ronald Reagan lacks French, “it is the urbane M. Mitterrand who must negotiate in an acquired tongue, the ignorant Mr. Reagan who may dilate in his native one,” so laws governing rape evince an “epistemological asymmetry” that “privileges at the same time men and their ignorance, inasmuch as it matters not at all what the raped woman perceives or wants just so long as the man raping her can claim not to have noticed.” Similarly, a June 1986 U.S. Justice Department ruling held “that an employer may freely fire persons with AIDS exactly so long as the employer can claim to be ignorant of the medical fact, quoted in the ruling, that there is no known health danger in the workplace from the disease.”24 While I do not aim in this book to compare the current state of Jewish American literary study with male privilege, rape culture, or murderous homophobic discrimination, I do think Jewish American literary study, precisely in its tenuous relationship with establishmentarian Jewish studies formations, needs to confront the practices of its own privileging of ignorance: ignorance of its own institutional and disciplinary history, of its relationships with other academic formations, of

its investments in Jewish identity and Jewish community. But this confrontation—which is absolutely political—can also be a gift for Jewish studies establishments. Just as Jewish American literary study should no longer be allowed—nor indeed allow itself—to operate in isolation from the main critical currents of academic literary studies and Jewish studies, Jewish studies itself needs to confront how it organizes the coherence of its interdisciplinary labors, and it should not assume anything about the ideal concept of Jewish culture on which it depends. In other words, Scholem’s opposition between “pure knowledge for its own sake” and the “political function” of scholarly knowledge is no longer a tenable binary, if indeed it ever was—which obviously it wasn’t. The AJS-sponsored Jewish studies project at its most pure and elemental, premised on the integrated unity of Jewish history—an ideological unity that it is above all engaged in producing—is the very quintessence of a political project, which manifests in its repeated reproduction of a fundamental, if not always explicit, attitude of self-relation. This dominant structure became more or less inevitable when the most powerful agent of institutional professionalization in academic Jewish studies, the Association for Jewish Studies, embraced what is now recognizable as historicist cultural studies when it was founded in 1969. Jonathan Boyarin has spoken of the “troubled romance between the master discipline of Jewish history” and “the wayward, unpredictable, ‘undisciplined’ hybrid known as cultural studies” in contemporary Jewish studies.25 Boyarin’s case in favor of cultural studies is grounded in an argument that cultural studies has some built-in safeguards against the danger of falling back on “rhetorics of cultural wholes when doing cultural history,”26 as cultural studies embraces the fact of its own agency in reading history itself as text. The picture he paints of critical responsibility is one in which the scholarly enterprise recognizes that, insofar as it never stands separate from the historical narratives it objectivizes and charts, those historical narratives do not maintain a self-evidence or truth apart from its own knowledge practices: “Continued interrogation of our own pedagogy, our own research, our own writing remains in order, whether or not we still have any hopes or pretensions of ‘liberating’ ourselves or others thereby. Cultural studies, among other things, is about the idea that just as a text is never a second, more ideal order of reality, so too we are never ‘above’ what we’re studying, teaching, discussing, writing. Rather than fixing on a supposedly delimited time and space as the guarantor of the purest approach to truth, let us be aware that we are constantly tacking between two formations of identity,” one in which we recognize ourselves and which we understand to be continually shaped by the other, which is the past and its relics, and that we “attend to our work as not simply the knowing, but rather the active making or performance of history.”27 I’m not as sanguine about the prospects for cultural studies, I think, as Boyarin is; it’s also this implication that underlies at once a utopianism and an insiderism, a double articulation that seems to be inevitable for contemporary Jewish studies. As Boyarin put it (with his brother) a decade earlier, cultural studies responds to a “crisis” in the academy, to the biopolitical reinvestment of knowledge production oriented around human life,28 and directs itself to “discovering ways to make history, literature, and other cultural practices

‘work’ better for the enhancement of human lives.” And because “Jews and Jewish culture are obviously in their own state of crisis,” the Boyarins continue, “there is room for a Jewish cultural studies, one that will function in two ways: first by seeking to discover ways to make Jewish literature, culture, and history work better to enhance Jewish possibilities for living richly; and second by uncovering the contributions that Jewish culture still has to make to tikkun olam, the ‘repair of the world.’ The question that Jewish cultural studies raises might be said to be this: Is Jewishness up to the challenge?”29 Thus if in its early history Wissenschaft responds to the intensifications of nationalism inherent in the developing protocols of scholarly responsibility with what may be seen as a kind of bad conscience— with, in a manner of speaking, an expressed tension between the “Jewish” and the “scholarship” of “Jewish scholarship”—then “Jewish cultural studies” names the academic formation in which this bad conscience can be embraced as the instrumental mode of critical Jewish selfunderstanding, with a truly “Jewish” form of “studies.” It’s hard not to notice another kind of tension, in the sign “culture,” that emerges in this messianic forward-thinking image the Boyarins paint—between on the one hand the “cultural practices,” like “literature” and “history,” that have historically been the object matter of the academy and that cultural studies has an opportunity to put to “work” for “the enhancement of human lives” at the this moment of “crisis,” and on the other hand the secure identitarian coordinates of “Jews and Jewish culture,” which presumably serve as the nurturing environment in which a specifically Jewish cultural studies is, at least potentially, able to instrumentalize “Jewishness,” if it’s “up to the challenge,” to achieve critical selfconsciousness and in doing so repair the world. Another way to approach this tension and the intellectual danger it poses to critical Jewish studies is to understand how, almost immediately, many of the deconstructive insights of the new Jewish cultural studies—for example, its attention to Jewish studies’ investments in the overdetermined insider/ outsider dualism, its focus on the discursive productivity of fields of difference and on Jewish identity’s inextricability from other forms of identity, and so on—hardened into positivisms in a lot of humanistic Jewish studies scholarship, which now tends to treat them largely as historical elements of the cultural matrix that Jewish studies is about.30 Standing at the orbital center of a multilateral professional system comprising both academic and communal institutions for the production of discourse, such an open and unfixed concept of culture functions as a strategic incitement. As Jeff DiLeo has argued, “unraveling the workings of affiliation in contemporary academic life is nothing short of an exercise in demythologization: the ethics of affiliation in American academic life necessarily involve making cultural beliefs about affiliation seem as though they are the only or even natural beliefs.”31

7. Jewish studies needs to entertain the possibility that its keyword “culture” (that is, as it appears in professional terms of art like “Jewish culture”) operates less like an actual thing in the world than as a discursive lever or conceptual machine. More pointedly, Jewish studies, and Jewish American

literary study in particular, needs to adopt a stance of what Said called “secular criticism,” which has long been conventional in postcolonial studies and other ethnic studies fields, if it wants to be relevant or, for that matter, be able to face itself in the mirror. It can sometimes seem like Jewish studies has forgotten the history of the term culture. Culture signifies for critics in the humanities in at least two more or less distinct though by no means exclusive ways—indeed, they rarely operate independently of each other. First, we use it in a way that can be termed anthropological, ethnographic, sociological, or, sometimes, maybe more boldly, national; this usage—as in the sense of American or French culture, or African American culture, but also something like gay culture, or even something like a corporate culture, and also for our purposes something like Jewish culture—is linked to a concept of “identity,” and it underwrites current institutionally situated concepts of “diversity” and “multiculturalism,” for example. Second, there’s culture as a kind of training or expertise—culture as knowing about wine or cheese, or the difference between the Sex Pistols and Sibelius, or that Francis Ford Coppola and George Cukor are better than Larry Cohen (so some might argue), or that Moby Dick is supposed to be one of the highest achievements of American literature, as Shakespeare is of English; this usage can often be inflected by a consciousness of class and is operative in distinctions between high and low or elite and popular culture, or more generally in demarcating divergent regions of cultural production and circulation. We might want to specify a third, more general usage, insofar as we use the term culture to describe a kind of ideological or superstructural realm in which a social assemblage is aware of itself, as when we might think of a culture as arts and literatures and religions, for example—but it likely makes sense to think of this usage as more the abstraction of a key mechanism at work in the other two senses than as a separate usage in its own right. This exercise might be a bit too quick and dirty, but these usages can be differentiated (as I have begun to do here) by characteristic keywords or critical itineraries through which their respective instrumental authorities are manifested; the keyword of the first sense is cultural identity, the keyword of the second is cultural education (or just cultured), and the keyword of the third is cultural expression. Even if, again, these three different keywords or conceptualizations are relatives, and overlap, and maybe even converge—as “identity,” “education,” and “expression” tend to become impossible to imagine without each other—we would do well to recognize the different sorts of work they do and the different interpretive agendas they underwrite. Part of the complexity arises from the fact that, as Stuart Hall observes, what we actually have in mind when we think about culture can be one of two objects—either culture as “the sum of the available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experiences” (and I think we’re justified abstracting from Hall’s “societies” to other kinds of social assemblages more generally), a frame that emphasizes descriptions of or ideas about culture, or culture as a set of “social practices,” a frame that is “more deliberately anthropological” and that accentuates the ways and means of a culture.32 Again, however,

these two ways of understanding culture are not really contradictory or mutually exclusive, and we can easily see how they are both active in each of the three senses of the term I just distinguished. And it’s probably fair to say that this abstract difference between knowing— ideas and descriptions—and doing—practices—deconstructs, as the anthropological focus on doing doesn’t really work without a sense of knowing familiarity: rubes act like rubes because they don’t know better, and knowledgeable experts authoritatively talk the talk because they have walked the walk. After all, experience and expertise do share the same root. Like many identity-based fields, Jewish studies instantiates its authority precisely by capitalizing this insiderist ambivalence between participant and specialist: the Jewish studies expert leverages masterful training in Jewish culture in order to be able to make authoritative claims. So long as it takes as its fundamental object Jewish populations—that is, as the final guarantor of the Jewish cultural content on which it trains its interdisciplinary eye—and so long as the culturalist recognizability of those populations is circumscribed by the protocols of Kramer’s “cultural affinity,” Jewish studies inevitably normalizes this exceptionalist insiderism. In charting the purview and authority of their specifically Jewish cultural studies, the Boyarins point to Raymond Williams’s “pioneering” efforts, which were soon afterward elaborated by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the mid-1960s and in post-1968 anthropology-influenced work “especially in the United States,” to abstract Marxist critical tools from their original focus on class to a much broader field of identity relations and subjectivity and subjectification in general.33 Williams, for whom culture belongs to a group of words that don’t represent concepts so much as historical problems, shows how a normalizing, naturalizing metaphorology has administered the history of the term. In Keywords, he explains that the term’s Latin root word carried a range of meanings, including inhabit, cultivate, protect, and honor with worship (the “inhabit” sense grew into “colony,” “honor with worship” grew into “cult,” etc.), though its first English uses circulated around natural process, as in our current verb cultivate: the culture or tending of something, like crops or animals. This meaning—the tending of natural growth, linked with allied ideas of husbandry—was dominant until the early nineteenth century. Williams describes two key transformations occurring during this period: first, the metaphoric transference of this “natural” meaning to the human context, making the sense of human tending direct, and second, an extension of particular processes to a general process, which the word could abstractly carry. It is from this second sense, obviously, that our noun “culture” derives— though this independent noun, as an abstract process or the product of such a process, would not become common until the middle of the nineteenth century (Williams points out that Milton used civility at times as the nineteenth century might use culture, though by the eighteenth century cultivation and cultivated were introducing some class inflections).34 French and German usages influenced the English at this point, too, especially in association with a concept of civilization, an idea from which the development of the term culture had not been differentiated until the eighteenth century, when civilization emerged as a separate term.35

In Marxism and Literature, Williams explains that until the late eighteenth century, culture and civilization were mostly interchangeable, and carried a double sense, two meanings which, he points out, “were historically linked: an achieved state, which could be contrasted with ‘barbarism,’ but also an achieved state of development, which implied historical process and progress.” The terms diverged for a number of reasons, including a Romantic attack that “civilization” was superficial rather than “natural,” a cultivation of extraneous qualities, like luxury and politeness, rather than more inherently human qualities. This Romantic attack became the basis of a distinction between internal and external: culture became the term indicating “inner” or “spiritual,” rather than external, development, as distinct from or even opposed to civilization or society in an abstract or general sense. From here, culture as a general process or “inner” development was extended to include a descriptive sense of the means and works of such development: that is, culture as a general classification of “the arts,” religion, and “the institutions and practices of meanings and values.” By the Romantic period, therefore, culture could be the record, impulse, and resource of the human spirit, and therefore “at once the secularization and the liberalization of earlier metaphysical forms,” thus establishing the naturalized groundwork for the material historical associations it has now.36 And so in the Romantic period it also became possible— and perhaps necessary—to talk of multiple cultures. This romantic concept of culture emphasized an idea of human development alternative to that carried by our current terms civilization and progress: it was used to emphasize national and traditional cultures, including the new concept of “folk culture,” which was developing in reaction to mechanization and industrialism. Specifically, it was used both to distinguish between human and material development and to distinguish the development of different national groups.37 As a result of these transformations the term culture acquired connotations both of naturalness and of coherence or identity, and it’s also obviously as a manifestation of this shift that nationalist scholarship, including national literary projects and the Wissenschaft tradition, could emerge. Williams marvels at the “remarkable” complexity of the modern usage of the term culture. There persists of course the literal continuity of the physical process, as, in Williams’s examples, in “sugar-beet culture” and “germ culture.” But then there are three main usages. First, there’s “the independent and abstract noun which describes a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development,” which emerges in the eighteenth century. Second, there’s “the independent noun, whether used generally or specifically, which indicates a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group,” which consolidates in nineteenth-century Romanticism. Finally, there’s an “independent and abstract noun that describes the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity.” This last usage is relatively late (probably late nineteenth or early twentieth century, according to Williams), and is in fact an applied form or reification of the first usage: “the idea of a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development was applied and effectively transferred to the works and practices which represent and sustain it.” Indeed, Williams points out that in English the first and third senses are quite close; in Matthew Arnold for example, they are largely indistinguishable.38 Williams’s history of the term helps

explain how the tension Hall pointed to between practices and descriptions is a function of how “culture” came to be inextricable from the elaboration of a diversified conceptualization of identity. And it also helps us understand the insiderist or narcissistic habits of thought— intellectual and institutional practices that privilege and naturalize links between the authors and readers of culturally categorizable texts—that characterize the dominant mode in Jewish studies. The history of culture’s multifarious investment of a concept of identity is often forgotten by post-cultural-studies humanists in professional Jewish studies, for whom culture’s alliance with a concept of birthright and culture’s alliance with a concept of education tend to collapse into each other. In both cases the term corresponds to an archive or body of knowledge, with the significant difference being that in the one case that correspondence is crossed by an administrative concept of heritability—and is colored by concepts of nationality, ethnicity, or even race—and in the other case it is crossed by an administrative concept of progressive development and discrimination—and is colored by concepts of taste and perhaps class. Culture is a filiative structure into which we’re born, one that interpellates us through paternal lineaments of authority, but it’s also an affiliative system of reading, acting, and practice that we acquire, one that interpellates us through our desire and ability to identify with it. In both cases, the role of the expert in culture—one who carries cultural expertise—is validated, though with some variation: as native informant in the first case, or as a kind of trained and experienced professional in the second. But in the case of the dominant form of exceptionalist-narcissistic Jewish studies work, these two definitions of the “expert” converge.39 Culture’s naturalized variant of a concept of archive is allied to a concept of property in a double sense: we easily speak of culture both as something on or to which one has some claim, but also as something to which one belongs. Archives are discursive assemblages, but as Foucault reminds us, discourses do more than simply designate things, and “this ‘more’ … renders them irreducible to the language and to speech. It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe.”40 Which is to say that the urgent task of the critic of culture is to denaturalize this link between belonging, expertise, and cultural description on the way to disrupting the normalized link between canon-tradition-field, analyzing more than the information culture is held to contain or signify, and thereby to focus at least as intently on what Edward Said describes as the “process” whereby culture describes both something one possesses and something that possesses one, and whereby it “designates a boundary by which the concepts of what is extrinsic or intrinsic to the culture come into forceful play” and whereby it performs its “power” to “authorize, to dominate, to legitimate, demote, interdict, and validate.” Culture always involves hierarchies, separating elite from popular, good from bad, and so on, but also ours from theirs; in defining the matrix of its interior through discriminations and evaluations, culture is always also a system of exclusions defining an exterior. Culture’s “system of values” is not equally distributed through its domain of exercise, and the “canons and standards” that are the manifestation of its domination are normalized to the point of invisibility, appearing “natural,” “objective,” and “real.”41

Said’s emphasis on culture’s power to make affiliative social forms appear as naturalized filial forms, a “transition” in which “affiliation” operates as a “compensatory order” that can “reinstate vestiges of the kind of authority associated … with filiative order” (19), offers a mode of critical approach to the operational structure of Jewish studies’ insiderist—Kramer’s narcissistic—exceptionalism. While filiative order is maintained by “natural bonds and natural forms of authority—involving obedience, fear, love, respect, and instinctual conflict —affiliative relationships recast these bonds into what seem to be transpersonal forms—such as guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class, and the hegemony of a dominant culture” (20). Affiliative order surreptitiously duplicates—represents—filiative order: “Affiliation then becomes in effect a literal form of re-presentation, by which what is ours is good, and therefore deserves incorporation and inclusion” (21). This is not immaterial to how we theorize and practice work in the humanities for Said, in a paradigm with which we are all familiar by now: “When our students are taught such things as ‘the humanities’ they are almost always taught that these classic texts embody, express, represent what is best in our, that is, the only, tradition.” Even if the boundaries of what we consider “our … tradition” have greatly expanded in the last few decades since Said wrote these lines, and even if we may no longer be “taught that such fields as the humanities and such subfields as ‘literature’ exist in a relatively neutral political element,” or that they exist primarily “to be appreciated and venerated,” it is indeed still a fact that “such fields as the humanities and such subfields as ‘literature’” ground themselves in the hegemonic sense that “they define the limits of what is acceptable, appropriate, and legitimate so far as culture is concerned” (21). Insofar as this representational structure naturalizes affiliative order in its re-presentive reproduction of filial authority, it reinscribes a kind of self-evidence that at once “reinforces the known at the expense of the knowable” by normalizing “what belongs to us (as we in turn belong to the family of our languages and traditions)” and reinforces an “assumption that the principal relationships in the study of literature—those … based on representation—ought to obliterate the traces of other relationships within literary structures that are based principally upon acquisition and appropriation”—that is, the assumption that focusing on what texts represent or mean outweighs “what they are as the result of contested social and political relationships” (22–23). Said’s critique of orientalist ethnocentrism in the reproduction of the Western canon— which is not particularly my interest here—is illustrative as well of the way in which Jewish studies insiderism reproduces itself as a culturalism, as it highlights, first, the intellectual habits and ideological relays that conceptually normalize culture as a more or less legible, disciplinarily operable historical object that carries with it a certain expectation of historical knowledge production; second, the powerful attraction exerted by this naturalizing process on the scholar (both in Jewish studies and elsewhere) incentivized to speak the “truth” of culture; and third, more generally, that what as Jewish studies functionaries we mean to indicate or describe by employing the term culture we are often in fact discursively constituting as an analytical object by doing so. If the “validated nonbiological social and cultural forms” that affiliative relationships take become legible as forms “representing the

filiative processes to be found in nature” (23), Said finds two alternatives for the contemporary critic. The first is “organic complicity” with this pattern, manifested in a set of practices that naturalize and normalize affiliation’s reinscriptive displacement of filiation: “the critic enables, indeed transacts, the transfer of legitimacy from filiation to affiliation” (24). This route describes the dominant form of culturalist Jewish studies scholarship, especially (but not exclusively) in the tendency of Jewish studies scholars to operate in the compelling mode of “native informant.” Said emphasizes the ethnocentrism underlying the maneuver subtending this first possibility, in which humanistic scholarship is pursued within a general structure of “reverence” directed at once toward its objects and toward the culture it serves: “This keeps relationships within the narrow circle of what is natural, appropriate, and valid for ‘us,’” and thereafter “excludes” what is not us or ours, but also “the political dimension” in which “all texts” can be found” (24). We should not read “reverence” here too narrowly: it takes form as a kind of scholarly act of taking for granted—in a general sense— reserved for those topics and analytical objects whose status and value carry some degree of self-evidence, and the scholar in this mode engages in what Paul Bové has in other contexts called a “nihilistic ascesis,”42 operating in a narrow, instrumentalized, and politically neutralized range of knowledge production.43 But Said’s critic labors against the normalization of this representation of culture. The second alternative Said offers is for the critic “to recognize the difference” between “filiation” and “affiliation,” and “to show how affiliation sometimes reproduces filiation, sometimes makes its own forms.” This kind of “secular criticism,” as Said calls it, would therefore be capable (as the first alternative would not be) of analyzing the “ideological capture” of texts by a humanistic curriculum that reinscribes them in a naturalizing culturalism such that incentivized scholars are compellingly positioned to produce accounts of how those texts represent that culture (24). Criticism in this second mode is for Said necessarily “oppositional,” insofar as it necessarily shines critical light on the investment of both dogma and system and finds “its identity” in “its difference from other cultural activities”—its “suspicion of totalizing concepts” and “its discontent with reified objects.” Insofar as the institutions of scholarship tend toward the naturalization of their cultural objects, Said’s critic can never feel at home in those institutions and must be their uncompromising enemy: “criticism is most itself and, if the paradox can be tolerated, most unlike itself at the moment it starts turning into organized dogma” (29). A critical Jewish American literary study will oppose the field’s dominant narcissistic historicism, which reproduces Said’s “organic complicity” structure, recognizing cultural texts as representative of a naturalized culture, and largely dismissing the possibility of criticizing either scholarship’s labors of reification or the scholar’s practices themselves in their relations or affiliations with both the texts they take up and the audiences they address. Said helps us understand how Jewish studies—we should recall that Said did once (in)famously call himself “the last Jewish intellectual”44—operates by constructing the selfevidence of its cultural object field and representing its own naturalized dependence on this objective field. This mode of culturalist scholarship is “defined once and for all by its

secondariness,” by a kind of foundational posture of “having come after the texts and occasions it is supposed to be treating” (51), and its discursive investments almost always reproduce what Jonathan Boyarin calls “rhetorics of cultural wholes.” Scholarship’s secondariness in this naturalizing mode is not simply temporal: it is legible and functional precisely as representationally dependent, instrumentally reliant on the more primary, fundamental reality of the historical objects it takes up, themselves defined by their documentation of cultural presence; scholarship’s compelling truth-value rises and falls on the more primary historical truth of the textual objects about which it offers information. Crucial to the naturalizing force of this “organic complicity” is the historical naturalization of the objects of humanistic analysis. This is essentially the material work of the term ethnicity, which operates hand in hand with an insiderist model of the intellectual. What about the second, critical, alternative, however? With its focus on a dynamic engagement between critic and text, subject and object, and therefore present and past—with its insistence on the multivalent affiliations between, in his words, world, text, and critic— Said’s secular criticism carries the burden of certain questions that the first critic, who chooses “organic complicity” with a normalized historical field, chooses not to face. Rather than historiographically contained or simplified representations of self-evident cultural realities or pellucid acts of communication that exist, neutrally, to be read to reveal their cultural truths, Said encourages us to think of texts as already interpretations, interpretations that exist in a never-completable or -totalizable dynamic relation with other interpretations: “As Nietzsche had the perspicacity to see, texts are fundamentally facts of power” (45); interpretations displace interpretations, texts displace other texts.45 As Said puts it, “if we assume instead that texts make up what Foucault calls archival facts, the archive being defined as the text’s social discursive presence in the world, then criticism too is another aspect of that present. In other words, rather than being defined by the silent past, commanded by it to speak in the present, criticism, no less than any text, is the present in the course of its articulation, its struggles for definition” (51). Criticism, then, rather than an act of decoding dependent on an already-coherent historical origin, should be conceptualized as itself the active creation of a context for the text’s interpretation, always the activation of a “beginning”: what criticism does is “to begin to create the values” by which texts are judged (52) insofar as they “embody in writing those processes and actual conditions in the present” by means of which texts “bear significance” (53). Criticism does not find or uncover knowledge stabilized in and by the past; it is itself a “form of knowledge.… [I]f, as Foucault has tried to show, all knowledge is contentious, then criticism, as activity and knowledge, ought to be openly contentious, too. My interest is to reinvest critical discourse with something more than contemplative effort or an appreciative technical reading method for texts” (224). Criticism is always the contestation of a naturalized image of cultural history.

8. The keyword ethnic culture can function as an intellectual dodge, allowing critics in Jewish studies and other identity-defined fields to shirk the responsibility to theorize their practice.

The normalization of a concept of “ethnic culture” as the nationalizing anchor concept of Jewish American literary history is the machine through which literary study subordinates itself to history. I’m not going to get into the weeds of this concept right now (I’ll do that later), but the point about ethnicity that’s so important to the academic institutionalization of Jewish American literary study and to the Jewish studies–based critique of identity is that unlike the concept of population underlying Wissenschaft-based cultural studies, the specifically ethnic concept of population that became hegemonic in postwar thinking about identity merely had to be declared or proclaimed for its associated cultural history to be affectively affirmed. Whereas the Wissenschaft subject needed to be actively engaged—to diligently labor—in the continual reproduction of its cultural traditions, the American ethnic subject can lay claim to “its” culture as a naturalized function of inheritance. Even if the cultural practices and interpretations of social life that produce the experience of ethnicity are robust and active, the ethnic subject hardly encounters ethnicity as such, and has access to a diverse archive of cultural content (foodways, literary traditions, geography, etc.) merely by passive fact of heritage—that is, as a right, essentially. And what goes for the ethnic subject has tended to go as well for intellectual practices organized around this concept of ethnicity, especially in literary study. Which is to say that far more important for our purposes is the fact that for the scholarly enterprise, ethnicity operates as a historical machine that spectrally produces the coherent ground it already recognizes.

9. I’ve been questioned and counseled (for years, in fact) about devoting too much attention in my writing to reactionary cranks whom, I’m told, aren’t at the end of the day that influential or relevant; but in an identity-based field like Jewish studies—and especially a sub-field like Jewish American literary study, whose narcissistic exceptionalism continues to reproduce itself in the institutional repetition of breakthrough—mainstream liberal scholarship that imagines itself to be politically innocent can in fact be continuous with aggressively nationalistic work if it’s not careful to critically contest the logic of its own practices. Indulge me a provocative claim: the Jewish literary field, especially in its dominant liberal formations, loves Ruth Wisse. What I mean by this is that, especially after the publication of The Modern Jewish Canon in 2000, Wisse provides liberal scholars of Jewish literature an imaginative opportunity to discursively separate politics and scholarship—her literary scholarship is pretty great, but man, are her politics dreadful, so the oft-repeated gesture goes46—and therefore to enjoy the fantasy that scholarship can be politically neutral.47 The remarkably powerful institutional effect of this maneuver is that it allows liberal scholars to benefit from a recognizable literature identifiable according to all the standard nationalist protocols by which national literatures have been identifiable since the advent of the era of racialist nationalism while at the same time criticizing nationalism, often in the name (if at all) of vague terms of cultural unity like history or experience or

peoplehood that, presumably, representationally anchor a category of Jewish literature without participating in nationalism’s bad associations.48 Arguments such as Wisse’s, which assert a restrictive political orientation for the appropriately inscribed Jewish subject and the Jewish literature proper to that subject, further reproduce the irrelevance of a specific Jewish American literary study. Despite, in its claims of the politically self-evident content of Jewish literature, her program’s reactionary (by which I mean anticritical) alignment, Wisse’s Tikvah-funded insistence that there’s a great deal at political and institutional stake in how intellectuals pursue Jewish literary study in fact betrays how institutional and political inconsequence are the very essence of a Jewish literary study that is grounded in an ethnologically representational concept of Jewish identity and that therefore takes for granted that its purpose is to interpret the words and acts of a Jewish American subject of history. Frankly, I’ll concede the germ of critical intellectuality in Wisse’s attending to a text like George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda in the context of a discussion of Jewish literature, as she has done; the problem, of course, is that her attention is administered entirely by a germicidal nationalist anxiety about polity, rather in fact than by any responsibility toward a critical concept of Jewish literature. With illuminating candor, Wisse writes in The Modern Jewish Canon: “Daniel Deronda, the best Zionist novel (though not a Jewish book), foretells just how difficult it would be to uphold the idea of Jewish peoplehood in English literature”; crystalized in the brutal ideological honesty with which she differentiates “Zionist” and “Jewish” even as her book premises itself on the elision of that difference, she admits that her primary interest in it is in asking “how well the Jewish story can be told in English” rather than in any kind of critical analysis of how categorical concepts of Jewishness and literariness intersect.49 Jewish American literary study in its dominant historicist formations may carry its own obsolescence with it wherever it goes, but thanks to dynastic intellectuals like Wisse we can understand how nationalism operates as the inevitable supplement of its representational historicism.

10. Polemics are critically productive, even for people who are stylistically turned off by them. As the itinerary of a term like Jewish peoplehood through Jewish studies and Jewish community institutions testifies, professional scholarship doesn’t always operate in a state of complete autotransparency. My only real point in advocating for the polemic form is that it can sometimes offer the only opportunity to lay bare a scholarly formation’s history, intellectual genealogy, and institutional alliances, which the disciplinary practices enabled by that formation might not otherwise reveal. Its disadvantage, of course, is that those who resist such institutional transparency will find in the polemic’s form an affective opportunity to dismiss its critique. I admit that I tend to get rather animated while arguing, and we all know that such animation can be capitalized as grounds for rejection or dismissal in scenes of prestigious professional interaction. Again, my defense of the polemic form is simply that it brings this kind of reactive professional maneuver out of hiding (as it did with a reader of the manuscript that became this book, who wrote, in part: “Although Schreier preempts criticism

of his personal strident attack on Wisse by admitting that he’s been warned not to waste time repeatedly attacking an extremist voice in Jewish American literary studies, he does it again, and it is symptomatic of a shrill political agenda, exactly what he accuses Wisse of committing”). And while I’m on the subject, I will also claim a similar justification for my use of “theory” “jargon”: it ideally forces Jewish studies intellectuals to confront the fact and weight of commonsense patterns of self-evidence in their professional practices. I don’t imagine this argument will convince many people already predisposed to disagree with me, but we all make choices. One of the primary tasks I attempt in this book is to look more closely than Jewish studies is accustomed to looking at how a series of professionally powerful clichés about Jewish American literary history was established. Genealogy has to be the beginning of any remedy for normalized institutional practice. The narratives through which Jewish studies reinscribes its compelling self-evidence need to be analyzed not simply for the historical realities they claim to represent but also for the intellectual and institutional structures through which they produce these representations; in the case of “breakthrough,” an explanation of why it so quickly consolidated and became hegemonic can be found in part in its double articulation of a particular American subject and of a transnational history that categorically identifies it as Jewish. And accordingly, one of my central claims in this book is that the ethnological ground of the Jewish American literary field has deteriorated in the decades since the consolidation of the breakthrough narrative’s self-evidence, to the point that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to continue to take “Jewish American literature” for granted as a coherent thing in the world other than as a categorical lever of the Jewish studies enterprise. The structure of the book is pretty simple. Chapter 1, “The History of Jewish American Literary History: ‘Breakthrough’ and the Institutional Rhetoric of Identity,” offers a close analysis of the breakthrough narrative, examining how it came about, how it’s been reproduced, and how its persuasive epistemological, affective, and institutional investments are structured. The second chapter, “Before Jewish American Literature,” examines how breakthrough consolidated by reproducing and re-presenting Yiddishkeit as Jewish American literature’s past, its representational link to Jewish history. Finally, by way of a discussion of how this new literary-historical entity, Jewish American literature, has circulated since its mainstreaming consolidation, the third chapter, “After Jewish American Literature,” analyzes the institutional and disciplinary implications of breakthrough’s investment of the Jewish American writer as a subject of Jewish history. In the Conclusion I show how the ethnographic narrative of Jewish American literary history deconstructs. I have aimed to write this history of Jewish American literary study from the perspective of a critical elaboration of institutional labor rather than from the perspective of a historicist elaboration of ethnic fact. As Said helps us understand, this does not mean writing a history of a supposed canon or tradition of Jewish American literature in terms of the books that currently constitute the archive of that canon. Rather, it means writing a history of the discursive shifts that constituted the field in which that archive can be thought to be

representative: a critical history of the incentivized ability to think in terms of a specific identity rather than, and in fact in explicit opposition to, a history of the subject constituted in the field of that identity.

Chapter 1

The History of Jewish American Literary History “Breakthrough” and the Institutional Rhetoric of Identity

Jewish American literary study has some problems. Specifically, the field suffers from a status problem linked to a cliché problem. As a field of scholarly endeavor, Jewish American literature enjoys a perverse professional legibility. On one hand, the field is quite visible. The literature—its texts and authors—is recognized widely across academia, in the reading public more generally, and of course in Jewish community establishments; recent years have witnessed a surge of scholarship by both junior and senior scholars;1 and we’re frequently told we’re experiencing a new golden age of Jewish American writing, coming from authors associated with multicultural, postcolonial, post–Cold War, and postsecular frameworks or whose significance resolves outside the standard Ashkenazi frames.2 On the other hand, however, few academics outside the field take the literature seriously according to reigning canons of scholarly importance, scholarship produced in the field rarely has an impact in other fields (it has a hard enough time making an impact in its own field), and the field often seems unconcerned with and uninfluenced by the critical and methodological enthusiasms of its disciplinary relatives. Moreover, unlike other, often higherprestige ethnic literary fields, Jewish literary study suffers from an awkward, and almost entirely unhelpful, presumption that professional academic-scholarly discourse about the literature need not differ substantially in tone, content, format, aim, or vocabulary from nonprofessional, Jewish community–based or “popular,” discourse, a function of the insiderist exceptionalism that certainly afflicts all Jewish studies–oriented intellectual work to a certain extent, but which is particularly egregious in the case of the study of Jewish American literature. Indeed, Jewish American literary study often seems as parochial as a field can get in the humanities. These problems can be traced to Jewish American literary study’s particular history. The Jewish American literary field is isolated in literature departments—when it appears at all as such in university bulletins or on syllabi—and circumscribed in Jewish studies: it’s often dismissed or devalued by ethnic studies and English department–based multicultural literature folks, presumably because American Jews don’t count as one of the privileged ethnic identities and certainly because Jewish American literary study has mostly refused the substantive theorization of identity characteristic of so much other “studies” scholarship;3 it only rarely gets considered by Holocaust literature and trauma theory formations; and it plays decided second fiddle to Yiddish-, Hebrew-, Arabic-, and European-language literatures in academic Jewish studies contexts where, in any case, literature is customarily undertheorized and subordinated as an ancillary minoritarian historiography.4 For one example of the field’s

diminished status in relation to other Jewish literatures within the Jewish studies complex, one might look to Prooftexts, the leading scholarly journal of Jewish literary studies, which took almost three years—nine issues—after its founding in 1981 to publish an article on Jewish American literature. In fact, the field’s lack of scholarly prestige and legitimacy can be traced back to the dominant literary historical cliché of “breakthrough”: the supervisible conventional narrative of the celebrated emergence of writers like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Grace Paley in the 1950s, which marked a watershed moment, when Jewish American literature successfully crossed over, leaving behind provincial immigrant origins and entering the mainstream of American culture—indeed, arguably becoming (that is, in the terms of the breakthrough narrative) precisely the center of American culture.5 This old chestnut still administers, and burdens, our understanding of Jewish American literature. To be sure, some scholars operating in the field have addressed its troubled status, but the treatments—and complaints—are often symptomatic. In their MELUS special issue on the “Futures of Jewish American Literature,” which grew from a roundtable at the 2009 Modern Language Association (MLA) conference titled “Does the English Department Have a Jewish Problem?,” Lori Harrison-Kahan and Josh Lambert protest “that contemporary English departments and the profession at large” do not “locate Jewishness at the center of the study of modern and postmodern American literature. Only the rare department, for example, includes a scholar whose training or research specialization qualifies him or her as an expert in this subfield.”6 Celebrating “new approaches” intended to “reinvigorate and redefine the field,” Harrison-Kahan and Lambert aim to make a case for Jewish American literary study’s relevance to more legitimized domains of inquiry “within the broader fields of American and ethnic American literary studies” and cultural studies—including Yiddish studies; comics studies; cross-cultural, multilingual, and transnational approaches; and comparative literature.7 It’s telling that they expect to make this case precisely in the terms established by “breakthrough,” by entertaining the assumption that “Jewishness” indeed should stand “at the center of the study of modern and postmodern American literature.” But more significantly, by taking for granted the current structure and predicament and political investments of the English department’s Jewish problem, or maybe Jewish American literary study’s legitimacy problem, the anxiety staged by this revisionary move, which articulates Jewish American literary history with a vocabulary and ethics of marginalization, repeats the formative history of the professional field. The cliché of Jewish American literary breakthrough was always a surrogate for an albeit ambivalent foundational history of Jewish American acceptance: indexed initially to a narrative of immigration and assimilation, in the wake of multiculturalism’s ascendancy it eventually became as well a proleptic agent for the largely successful neoconservative effort to leverage a claim of Jewish American whiteness, laboring to set Jews apart from other ethnic groups and destabilize their position vis-à-vis post-Vietnam academic thinking about ethnic identity. Recall, for example, this effort’s premier (and much-cited) quip: Milton Himmelfarb’s frustrated observation that though Jews earn like Episcopalians they vote like

Puerto Ricans.8 But from the moment of its institutionalization, the breakthrough narrative was threatened by a paradox of Jewish legibility: if Jewish literature became American literature as Jews became Americans, how was the legitimacy of the category of Jewish literature to be maintained, especially after the advent of the period of multicultural discourse’s consolidating hegemony?9 And this problem grows more conspicuous still in the cultural politics in relation to which our current North American Jewish literary renaissance is being staged, with such writers as David Bezmozgis, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Boris Fishman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rivka Galchen, Allegra Goodman, Nicole Krauss, Tova Mirvis, Gary Shteyngart, and Anya Ulinich—bestselling authors for whom multiculturalism is a matter of course, in whose writing the relationship between Jewishness and non-Jewish Gentile North Americanness is an ambivalent, dynamic, and nonself-evident productive force, and for whom the conventional, often binary, formulas no longer carry much water10—and also for whom “breakthrough” is a received narrative, and conspicuous as such. This is the field’s contradictory inheritance from the breakthrough cliché. In fact, as attested by the MELUS special issue and indeed by much of what the field is producing now, Jewish American literary study continues to perversely restage the emergence thesis, trying to prove the field’s proper institutional place and professional legitimacy (and this book can obviously be read into that lineage too, though I hope only as a critical repetition with difference of that narrative’s performative power). This prevailing ahistorical blindness, like its symptomatic anxiety, persists in part because the field has failed to critically interrogate its own development. This is not primarily a story about Jewish American marginalization, literary or otherwise; or rather, I don’t write from the standpoint of the self-evident or established fact of marginalization; instead, I chart how a field of study developed as changing concepts of population and changing concepts of literary history intersected. My aim here is not to rehash debates about whether multiculturalism was good for the Jews or whether whatever has succeeded it is any better—I am not of the opinion that such ethnological forms of intellectuality are particularly valuable—but rather to understand how shifting vocabularies of Jewishness, culture, and ethnicity mapped the emergence scene of a professional discourse about Jewish American literature and the Jews who wrote it. This book attempts to denormalize a confident representational historicism, posing in counterhegemonic opposition to an ethnographic concept of identity that proclaims itself the stable name for a specific kind of body and population a critical concept of identity as an analytical framework for talking about how bodies can be recognized and put to epistemological use. Jewish American literary history is not self-evident, and itself has a history—one that can become a resource for a scholarly practice that positions Jewishness as an agent of critique rather than simply an object of representation. I may not be a historian, but nonetheless I’d like to begin with some dates. The first is 1975, which marks the inauguration of the journal Studies in American Jewish Literature (SAJL). Drawing attention at once to a rich Jewish American literary archive and to a predominating

scholarly neglect of that archive, the note with which founding editor Daniel Walden opens that first issue suggests the establishment of a professional scholarly field. The second date is 1978—which attentive readers may note is only three years later—when Michael Krasny published an essay in MELUS called “The Death of the American Jewish Novel,”11 a eulogy following only one year after Irving Howe’s famous 1977 declaration, in what has become another of the field’s leading clichés, that “American Jewish writing has probably moved past its high point.”12 Backing up a bit, a fourth date is 1974, which saw the very first issue of the journal MELUS, which explicitly adopted a pluralist-multiculturalist stance in seeking to “expand the definition of new, more broadly conceived U.S. literature through the study and teaching of Latino, Native American, African American, Asian and Pacific American, and ethnically specific Euro-American literary works, their authors, and their cultural contexts,” as the website of the Society for the Study of the Multi-ethnic Literature of the United States puts it.13 Only slightly more amorphously, we can locate the mid-1970s as the liftoff point for scholarship on Jewish American literature, at least in terms of the number of papers presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (Figure 1).14 And of course this is all taking place barely a generation after the much-heralded Jewish American literary breakthrough of the late 1950s, probably the single most visible event in Jewish American literary history, when, we are told, Jewish American writers left behind a provincial immigrant context and made it into the American literary mainstream—a narrative of emergence that does double duty, operating at once in hegemonic exceptionalist narratives of Jewish American achievement and of U.S. cultural and political liberalism. I’m drawn to the conspicuous formation scene of the Jewish American literary field, which reveals so many seeming contradictions and divergent itineraries: the inauguration of an academic subfield organized around a literature that is simultaneously being declared moribund,15 the concurrent elaboration of a narrative of literary emergence and a professional literary historical field of study, and the convergence of celebratory rhetorics of assimilation and of diversity—all taking place in the context of a newly available capacity, organized under the minoritarian rubric of “ethnicity” and indexed to terms like oppression and exclusion, to articulate the cultural coherence and political efficacy of populations. If the professional field of Jewish American literary study coalesced in the Vietnam-era university coincidentally with ethnic studies and multicultural literary studies, a distinct, and paradoxical, set of forces accounted for its development. Why, if it was founded as Jewish American writers broke out of a societal ghetto, does Jewish American literary study now so often find itself consigned to a scholarly ghetto?

Figure 1. Papers with “Jewish American” Focus Presented at MLA Conference by Year This same period also saw intensive consolidation in the Jewish studies field. Jewish studies as a professional assemblage almost always confidently understands itself as an essentially historiographic enterprise. In the form of its emblematic institution, the Association for Jewish Studies, as represented by the annual conference and scholarly journal, AJS Review, it sponsors, Jewish studies is less a single identifiable subject area than an institutional framework enabling scholarship and its circulation.16 An interdisciplinary endeavor, it lacks a distinct, disciplinarily specific orientation; its persuasive power, as with other academic “studies” formations, derives from aggregating the strengths, techniques, and domains of exercise of an array of humanities and social science disciplines, including history, anthropology, philology, religious studies (itself an interdisciplinary assemblage), literary history, linguistics, and demography, among others. But lacking one proper methodology, this diversified professional endeavor relies instead on a concept of identity, obviously, for its field-unity: Jewish studies coheres in the precognitive orientation of all these different disciplinary inquiries around a single anchoring desire for Jewish identity. It makes sense that a “Jewish studies” social scientist might attend a conference panel peopled by “Jewish studies” literary historians, for example, not for the literary methodologies of the speakers (God forbid!), but because she shares with the panelists the professional ability, desire, and incentive to understand her scholarly labor as focused more or less on Jewish populations and Jewish identity more generally. But this unifying identity around which Jewish studies coheres is an identity concept that

cannot currently be imagined absent a structuring concept of population as its substrate in the last instance. And to be clear, by “last instance” I do not mean “first instance”: populations become imaginable as populations, obviously, through a variety of operations, both hereditary and nonhereditary, and the cultural assemblages historically associated with populations are obviously not genetically coded or determined like eye color is, but once we start thinking about groups as “populations” it’s awfully hard to think about that categorical unity outside the gravitational field of a biological concept of heritability—though I prefer the word “biologistic” to “biological,” not because it sounds better (!), but because it aims to mark the fact that this meaning is biological, to again resort to Friedrich Engels’s formulation, only “in the last instance.” This is why I argue that in our current regime of identity knowledge, concepts of ethnic culture are not coherent without being secured by a necessarily biologistic mode of thinking. And to be even more, double-plus clear, in emphasizing in my endless disclaimers the word concept, I’m talking quite deliberately (and exclusively) about how we understand ideas like “population,” “culture,” and “ethnicity”— not about these ideas as dinge-an-sich; like any modern guy who’s read his Kant, I know better than to presume immediacy. All this said, however, though an identity concept necessarily anchors the Jewish studies field’s interdisciplinarity, there’s rarely a sustained reciprocal effort—interdisciplinary or not —to theorize the enabling concept of identity. In fact, historicist Jewish studies mostly tolerates only a very narrow range of thinking about identity, a tolerance restricted to a fundamentally representationalist and historicist concept. The institutional presumption of this regime is powerfully simple (if potentially circular), and it takes for granted the professionalized ability to recognize what’s Jewish: scholarly work qualifies as Jewish studies work because it fundamentally aims at elaborating the histories and examining the legibility of what’s already recognizably Jewish. Jewish studies work always begins with the categorical fact of Jewish legibility, even as the historical Jewish object matter varies widely, and it legitimizes itself to the extent that it produces and refines knowledge about Jews and Jewishness, or, maybe more generally, Jewish-y-ness, traceable back in the last instance to actually existing Jewish populations—precisely through their historical diversity, multiplicity, and transformations. This fundamental historiographic field-logic almost always takes shape in confident historicist methodologies, whatever the discipline. And again, it pays to emphasize that this culturalist knowledge is traced back to populations in the last instance. A tired example, perhaps: but the point isn’t (obviously) that we can’t abide the phenomenon of Gentiles speaking Yiddish, but that we imagine Yiddish is proper to Jews and in a way that it isn’t to Gentiles, as something like a birthright belonging to people “who” “are” “originally” Jewish and from eastern Europe. That’s the work done by the concept of heritage: we ultimately cannot deracinate our understanding of ethnic culture from its naturalized association with a concept of population. Our thinking about ethnic culture is thus biologistic—even when we believe our culturalism evades essentialism or determinism. “Ethnicity” is the conceptual lever by which history is biologized as the property of populations, and “culture” conceptually launders this essentialism into something more

intellectually palatable than crude “racism.” This expansive culturalist historicism is consistently avowed. An AJS-commissioned history of the organization prepared in celebration of its fortieth year, for example, approvingly cites earlier reports that characterized Jewish studies as “studies in the life, thought, and culture of Jews, past and present,” with “a religio-historico-cultural focus that involves every one of the social sciences and humanities.”17 Judith R. Baskin, president of the AJS from 2004 to 2006, begins a decreasingly recent state-of-the-field essay by writing, what I imagine is meant to be taken self-evidently, that “Academic Jewish Studies refers to the systematic and analytical study of the Jewish experience using modern research tools and methodologies”; and she returns a number of times to the theme, mostly in arguing how professionalizing forces within the AJS during its formative years operated to distinguish the field from the kinds of identity work characteristic of Jewish community organizations, such as when she favorably cites Rabbi Alfred Jospe, who wrote in his 1973 essay “Academic Jewish Studies: Objectivity or Advocacy” that “the purpose of Jewish Studies in the university is the study of Judaism and the Jewish people and not the Judaization of young Jews, the stimulation of their Jewish commitment, or the strengthening of their Jewish identification.”18 James Young, editor-in-chief of Yale University Press’s ten-volume Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, describes the (ongoing) multivolume effort as gathering in “a single, usable collection all that the current generation of scholars agrees best represents Jewish culture and civilization in their historical and global entirety” and establishing “an inclusive and pluralistic definition of Jewish culture and civilization in all of their rich diversity,” even—precisely—as he repeatedly describes this “amalgam” as a “national culture” rather than a “nationalist culture.”19 Deborah Dash Moore and Nurith Gertz, editors of volume 10 of the Posen Library (covering the period 1973–2005), articulate this culturalist position quite simply: “Jews make culture and make it Jewish in various ways: through language, production, references, reception, uses, debates, and performances.”20 This is the magical thinking—and historiographic power—of the professional Jewish studies field. Jews can make culture Jewish through language, reference, reception, performance, or whatever else, obviously, only if that use confers some Jewish essence, a quidditas Iudaeitatis—the spectral projection of the dynastic field-logic itself—already selfevident in the subject, to the cultural object. As an institutional formation Jewish studies thrives off the diversity of its objects, but its foundational anthropological historicism takes for granted the epistemological security and unity of “Jewish” as a representational category. This is not to say that Jewish studies formations necessarily assume the self-evidence of the “Jewish” objects they take up, but it does mean that the self-evidence of the epistemological category ends up enforcing a de facto elevation of the professional compensations of positivistic knowledge over the negative powers of any real critical consideration of the frameworks supporting such knowledge. Jewish studies’ foundational culturalism necessarily reads identity in terms of ethnic positivities to be transcribed (if not some historical or ontological essence), precluding its analysis as a form of thought; Jewish studies as a professional formation functions by reinscriptively displacing the discursive investment of

the objects of this machine of Jewish recognition onto a spectral historiographic subject.21 In the inaugural 1975 “From the Editor” note with which he dedicated his new journal and, arguably, an autonomous professional field of Jewish American literary study, Dan Walden wrote, “This is the first issue of a new journal devoted to the American Jewish writer and the American Jewish experience. In view of the way that some sectors of academia have ignored American Jewish materials in the thought that only the classical Jewish past was worth studying, it seemed necessary to a number of people in the field to provide a medium of communication. These pages then will serve to provide a forum where the finest studies in literature and comparative literature, poetry, prose and fiction will be found.”22 To be sure, historical study of Jewish American writers predated this moment. As Michael P. Kramer reminds us, long before the postwar “breakthrough” and subsequent golden age of Jewish American writing, Jewish literary historiography through World War II had already been legitimized by an anthropologistic project, which, logically oriented around twinned principles of scientific history and nationalism, aimed to bring the study of Jewish culture— and through it, as representationally deputized by, the Jews—into parity with that of other European cultures. Before the breakthrough period, “Jewish literary historiography in the Anglo-American world was a Wissenschaft-style affair, a promiscuous, inclusionary, transnational enterprise that culminated at the turn of the twentieth century in the Jewish Encyclopedia [among other works].… Its purpose … was to document and celebrate in broadest terms the creativity of the Jewish people as a whole over the entire course of their history, to affirm by sheer numbers and variety, to Jews and non-Jews alike, the place of the Jews in the whole expanse of universal art and culture. Plenitude was the central theme of their scholarly work.”23 Literary writing produced by Jews in America was in no uncertain terms part of this project, but it was at the same time considered “marginal to the broader story of Jewish history.”24 And more significant by far for the emerging field Walden was aiming to chart, the greater Wissenschaft project did not seem particularly interested in, and had certainly not developed any, specifically literary disciplinary methods. If the field Walden would help create proved fertile ground in which such disciplinarily specific methods could blossom, it also remained largely dependent on Wissenschaft’s expansive nationalist mission, a recuperative historical project that would also provide the intellectual foundation, though not the immediate context, for the postwar growth and persistent institutional identity of academic Jewish studies (and one, obviously, that is deliberately reproduced in Young’s Posen Library). Without really breaking with this tradition, Walden’s journal relocates that study into the rapidly professionalizing context of the multiculturalist Vietnam-era U.S. literary academy, refocusing Jewish American literary study from the depicted objects of Jewish American literary representation to its writer-subjects. With his editorial note, Walden plants his journal in the same historiographic ground in which the AJS, founded just a handful of years previously, in 1969, germinated, despite his deliberate challenge to the classical predispositions of the early AJS. And it is the same ground also in which MELUS had been planted and would soon flourish. All three projects —SAJL, AJS, and MELUS—draw on multiculturalism’s pluralist logic, which indexes

rhetorics of cultural difference to a minoritarian historiography in the interest of a political project to address (and redress) exclusion and oppression, and which during this same period was providing the justification for intensifying ethnic rights and identity movements across the United States. But the three have very different institutional origin stories. If MELUS manifested a purer expression of this multiculturalist program, unencumbered by any divergent principles or transverse histories, the AJS developed by recoding and recontextualizing the Wissenschaft tradition in terms enabled by the new multiculturalist logic, making for a more or less insular enterprise, albeit one that was willing to justify itself in an institutional context enthusiastic for multicultural ideas about cultural diversity.25 The situation with Studies in American Jewish Literature, however, evinces paradox. Walden and his fellow critics could celebrate the mainstreaming breakthrough of Jewish American literature26—surely an integrationist or assimilatory achievement at odds with the separatist energies focused by some of the more avowedly nationalist programs pursued by, say, the African American and Chicano literature formations that were more unequivocally part of multiculturalism’s constituency—and yet Walden’s editorial note explicitly justifies the practice of Jewish American literary study in multiculturalist terms. The breakthrough narrative itself and the birth of the academic field of Jewish American literary study were mutually articulated effects of a legitimizing shift, if not in fact a fullblown crisis: as it professionalized over the course of the midcentury, Jewish American literary study could never productively resolve the tension between two largely irreconcilable —certainly discordant—narratives of its own justification and authority, one inherited from the Wissenschaft tradition and emphasizing, as it enabled, a principle of intellectual and cultural autonomy, and one grounded in a dominant American liberal tradition and emphasizing, as it incentivized, a principle of intellectual and cultural heteronomy, but which was rapidly ceding place to an emergently hegemonic multiculturalist project reproducing an ideology of pluralist diversity. Dedicated at once to a triumphalist historical narrative of acceptance by the mainstream and to a maturing professional discourse of ethnic diversity, the breakthrough critics and intellectuals who established the academic field of Jewish American literary study became increasingly marginalized during the period of literary criticism’s hyperprofessionalization in the 1970s and 1980s, when, ironically, the margin, increasingly articulated as nonwhite, was everything; but they were instrumental, if unwitting, accomplices in the formation of a hegemonic biologistic discourse in the humanities—a discourse that consolidated precisely in postmulticulturalist ethnic studies’ deliberate move away from biological essentialism—that subordinates knowledge production about an archive of specific cultural practices to the categorical recognition of a heritable, but ultimately abstract, political identity.27 The key dates and texts associated with the cliché of Jewish American literary breakthrough are familiar, even totemic: Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March and Seize the Day appeared in 1953 and 1956, respectively, Malamud published The Assistant in 1957, and Roth published Goodbye, Columbus in 1959; in the intervening years Malamud, Roth, and

Paley published the short stories that would come out in the landmark collections of the late fifties, including The Magic Barrel in 1958 and The Little Disturbances of Man in 1959.28 In addition, we need to include Bellow’s translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” appearing in the May 1953 issue Partisan Review, in this list of “breakthrough” works —with the added understanding that this translation was a signal event in the postwar Americanization of Yiddish.29 To count the premier literary prizes won by these four writers —one Nobel (two if we count Singer’s!), seven National Book Awards, and an impressive collection of Pulitzers, Guggenheims, National Book Critics Circle Awards, PEN awards, and so on—is to recognize them as among the most significant American writers of the twentieth century, regardless of yichus; indeed, that’s the point. But it pays to look closely at the history of this narrative’s consolidation. Though the literary historical emergence narrative instituted itself quickly, tracking an increasingly dominant sociological-historical narrative of postwar Jewish American social success, it does not seem to have been fully available yet in the late fifties. Writing in 1957, for example, Leslie Fiedler, as significant as any single critic in elaborating Jewish American literature’s field-legibility (even as he relished the role of field bad boy), helped put the breakthrough thesis into circulation in an essay on Saul Bellow, but in it he still has some trouble locating Bellow’s rupturing, breakout novels of the mid-’50s. At this point, Fiedler’s Jewish American canon is neither diachronically organized in a narrative of emergence of a historical subject nor, frankly, does it even appear fully coherent, instead seeming a loose assemblage of generations or groups whose difference from one another is not primarily chronological or progressive. Initially, Fiedler writes, “we think of the whole line of JewishAmerican novelists, so like him [Bellow] in origin and aspiration, of Daniel Fuchs and Henry Roth and Nathanael West, those poets and annalists of the thirties who did not survive their age.”30 Or, he goes on, “we think of Bellow’s own contemporaries, the Partisan Review group, urban Jews growing up under the threat of failure and terror, the Depression and Spain and the hopelessly foreseen coming of war. We remember, perhaps, Isaac Rosenfeld or H. J. Kaplan or Oscar Tarcov or Delmore Schwartz or even Lionel Trilling” (57). Or yet again, Fiedler continues, “There is a sense in which he [Bellow] fulfills the often frustrated attempt to possess the American imagination and to enter the American cultural scene of a line of Jewish fictionists which goes back beyond the postwar generation through Ben Hecht and Ludwig Lewisohn to Abe Cahan” (57). Even as he insists that Bellow “emerges at the moment when the Jews for the first time move into the center of American culture, and he must be seen in the larger context” (57), and that Bellow was “the first Jewish-American novelist to stand at the center of American literature” (58), Fiedler nonetheless registers difficulty in coordinating this literary achievement with other expressions of Jewish American literary achievement and can’t quite account for Bellow outside a relatively limited parochial frame. A year later, Fiedler is accentuating the term “breakthrough,” and the narrative of a Jewish American literary tradition oriented around and organized as the representational expression of a Jewish American subject—a discursive shift that would be crucial to the

professional Jewish American literary field’s bid for multicultural legitimacy—is taking on a diachronic coherence, but this narrative does not yet seem to have developed fully into the hegemonic form it would soon take. In “The Breakthrough: The American Jewish Novelist and the Fictional Image of the Jew,” an essay appearing in Midstream in 1958, Fiedler argues that though the 1930s mark the first time that American Jewish novelists “play a critical role in the total development of American literature,” the achievements of the prominent Jewish American writers of that era were “limited,” and indeed these key figures of the ’30s, like Henry Roth and Daniel Fuchs, “do not last long enough to see any major triumphs.”31 Though after the “mass entry of the Jewish writers into American fiction” in the 1930s “Jewish material” moves “from the periphery to the center” and Jews in the United States “have felt themselves and have been felt by the general public as more than pioneers and interlopers, more than exotics and eccentrics,” and in fact “staples of the American novel,” it was not really until the 1940s that the Jewish writer could write “as a Jew.”32 As Fiedler describes it here, in the 1930s Jewish writers’ entry into American fiction was housed almost entirely within the genre of the proletarian novel, which did not permit, or possibly could not permit, a pour-soi expression of Jewish identity; indeed, Fiedler points out that a recent (for him, that is) survey of the genre found “only one Proletarian Novel which dealt specifically with anti-Semitism.”33 In fact, the specifically Jewish critique of antisemitism seems to be Fiedler’s sole, or at least chief, criterion at this point (in 1958) for a categorically Jewish writing, and this critique wouldn’t be fully available until the 1940s as Fiedler sees it, with the dominant middlebrow liberalism that emerged out of the Popular Front (which, a few years later, would be supercharged in the aftermath of World War II). For Fiedler, the Jewish Novel, a category representationally indexed to a concept of the Jewish American writer, had to differentiate itself from the proletarian novel. Fiedler charts a pretty interesting history in describing how the Jewish novel is able to emerge with the transition from the proletarian novel to the liberal novel in the ’40s. As the Popular Front sought to defang the overt political antagonism of interwar culture, the fiction it advocated stressed a “pious” rather than “apocalyptic” approach, and “sentimentality” replaced “terror”: “No longer was intransigence the keynote, but cooperation; no longer were the ‘workers’ the subject, but ‘the little people.’” But particularly significant is Fiedler’s pointing out that it was an intensifying investment of an ideal of entertainment over and above “the exhaustion of the messianic spirit” that prepared the way for the Jewish novel: “Most crucial of all, the American Left, which had traditionally associated itself with the avant-garde in literature, turned away toward Hollywood and Broadway and nightclub folksingers from the Village.”34 Conspicuously, Fiedler ends this essay with a consideration of Bellow’s Augie March, whom he focuses on in the interest of surveying “the place the Jew occupies” in the “imagination” of “our age.”35 At this point “breakthrough” is doing equivocal work, vacillating in its reference to prewar and immediately postwar periods, and still too much focused on the Jewish American characters depicted in literature and not enough on the writers, as the fully realized breakthrough thesis will demand. Within just a few more years, however, the breakthrough or emergence narrative would

firmly establish itself. Irving Malin and Irwin Stark edited a defining collection in 1964 entitled Breakthrough: A Treasury of Contemporary American-Jewish Literature.36 The next year, Malin on his own published Jews and Americans, in which he discusses seven Jewish American writers—Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz, Isaac Rosenfeld, Fiedler, Bellow, Malamud, and Roth—in the interest of “demontrat[ing] that there is an American-Jewish context, a ‘community of feeling’ which transcends individual style and different genres”; he opens assertively, quoting Fiedler that “in recent years Jewishness has become ‘an eminently marketable commodity.’”37 A year later, in his 1966 Commentary essay “The Jew as American Writer,” Alfred Kazin wrote famously, “Definitely, it was now the thing to be Jewish”—a vogue all the more significant given how not that long before the Jew represented “alienness” to American literature, in the works of canonized figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams, and Henry James.38 In 1971 Allen Guttmann asserted that “the twenty-five years that followed World War II” have been a period of “breakthrough,” elaborating how “the assimilation of the Jewish writers has reached the point where Bellow, Mailer, and Roth can now find a national rather than the largely ethnic audience that Abraham Cahan, Ludwig Lewisohn, and Meyer were forced to settle for.”39 And in 1973, Sheldon Grebstein (who like Guttmann and Fiedler was a founding editorial board member of Studies in American Jewish Literature, and who would go on to serve as the president of SUNY-Purchase in the ’80s) wrote that “everybody now recognizes a Jewish movement in contemporary American writing,” insisting that while we’ve certainly had Jewish writers and writing before—even Jewish writers who wrote about Jews—until these first decades after World War II there was nothing that could be categorized a “movement.”40 This strikes me as a significant term; it’s one thing to mark a literary fashion, but the term movement combines this sense of cultural trend with that of a sociological—in this case ethnological— phenomenon. Once established, this cliché of breakthrough never really fell out of circulation. One finds it, for example, rehearsed a generation later. We see it in two frequently cited 1987 works, by leading figures of two successive generations of critics: Louis Harap’s In the Mainstream: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-Century American Literature, 1950s–1980s and Mark Shechner’s After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish American Imagination. Fiedler goes so far as to capitalize the term “Breakthrough”—it had become a proper noun!—in the preface to his 1991 volume Fiedler on the Roof.41 And another generation later there’s Joshua Lambert’s 2015 entry in the establishmentarian online Oxford Bibliographies series on “American Jewish Literature,” which describes the “Postwar” period: “Often called the ‘breakthrough’ moment for American Jewish literature, the period from the late 1940s to the early 1970s was one in which Jews became dominant voices in American literature. While American Jews, in general, were prospering financially and in a number of industries, so too in literature, as critics and fiction writers, Jews achieved extraordinary critical and commercial success.”42 In a 1998 rearguard action against Philip Roth—mostly a retread of the self-hatred libels that greeted Roth’s initial fifteen years on the literary scene, dusted off for Clinton-era neocon resentment that Jews still vote

Democratic—Norman Podhoretz recirculates the emergence narrative in discussing Goodbye, Columbus’s publication in 1959: “Since the appearance six years earlier of Bellow’s own The Adventures of Augie March (his third novel) there had been much talk of the flowering of a new school of American-Jewish fiction, and Bellow himself had come to be regarded as its major representative. In this capacity he was in effect giving Roth the same kind of imprimatur that had a little earlier been accorded to Bernard Malamud.”43 Podhoretz helps us understand how the breakthrough thesis reinforces itself through an explanation of why the Jewish American literary emergence did not take place a generation earlier, with such writers as Henry Roth, whose Call It Sleep “was largely ignored upon its publication in 1934” but acclaimed a “masterpiece” when it was rediscovered in the ’60s, when America was ready for it, “in the wake of the cultural change Bellow and the others helped bring about.” Leading Jewish writers of the Depression era, like Henry Roth, Daniel Fuchs, Arthur Miller, and Lillian Hellman, had to wait.44 This was in fact familiar argumentative territory, as it had been mapped at the very outset of breakthrough, forty years before Podhoretz, when Fiedler had not quite been able to chronologize this shift in 1957 and 1958. But Fiedler was able to make this same point in 1959’s The Jew in the American Novel, published by the Herzl Press and according to Kramer “the first monograph on the subject” of Jewish American literature:45 explaining that it “reverses the fatal trend toward longwinded chronicle, which had at once inflated and dimmed the portrayal of Jewish immigrant society from Abe Cahan’s lifelong study of David Levinsky to Ludwig Lewisohn’s ‘saga’ of four generations,” and that in it “the clichés of the form are redeemed to poetry,” Fiedler celebrated Call It Sleep in terms coordinated by the emergence narrative, calling it, more forcefully than he was able to just the year before, “a specifically Jewish book, the best single book by a Jew about Jewishness written by an American” (96).46 Kazin in 1966 likewise uses the breakthrough narrative to explain why the Depression-era writers were denied the standing of the later writers: “the social realists of the 30’s were often boxed in, mentally, by the poverty and hopelessness of their upbringing and the bitterness, deprivations, and antiSemitism of depression America,” a restriction attested by the “extraordinary brevity of so many literary careers” of the era.47 Teleologically juxtaposed against the preceding generation of Jewish writers, the literary generation of Bellow, Philip Roth, Paley, and Malamud evinces for Fiedler and Kazin, as for Podhoretz, Harap, Shechner, and Lambert, a narrative of emergence from the ethnic closet into an America able and now willing to accept ethnic difference. Before the war, according to the breakthrough narrative, Jewish American literature was a narrow and parochial affair, a lot of local color–type tales of the ghetto and up-fromimmigration Americanization stories, characterized by provincial anxiety. Sanford Pinsker, another founding editorial board member of SAJL, called Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky the “prototype” of this type of fiction.48 In 1958 Fiedler could write “we are through with the traditional ‘up from the ghetto’ kind of Jewish fiction as a living form. In such books as Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, Isaac Rosenfeld’s Passage from Home, or An End to Dying by the very young writer Sam Astrachan, one sees attempts to redeem the old pattern;

but such attempts seem finally nostalgic and vestigial—echoes of yesterday’s concerns.”49 Emergence critics’ emphasis on the “failure” of earlier generations of Jewish American writers reinforces this parochialism claim: the failures were, whatever else, always failures of relevance or cosmopolitan breadth. By the emergence narrative, this earlier literature, like the American Jews it represents, was preoccupied with proving its Americanness or constrained by literary norms. But then, after World War II, things changed with Bellow, Malamud, Roth, and Paley—with their performance of having nothing to prove. In Breakthrough, Malin and Stark wrote that “for the first time in history … a large and impressively gifted group of serious American-Jewish writers has broken through the psychic barriers of the past to become an important, possibly a major reformative influence in American life and letters.”50 By the late sixties, Fiedler was already looking back at a period when Jewish “outsiders” “became assigned classroom reading, respectable topics for the popular press,” what he called in one of the essays collected in To the Gentiles “the age of the Jew as winner … after the National Book Award and best-sellerdom” (186). That emergence-era Jewish American literary history organized itself around a normalizing understanding of Jewish Americans (as represented by Jewish American authors) mainstreaming their way into American culture and society was institutionally transformative; pre-breakthrough Jewish American literary history—sometimes as written by the same critics who would later articulate the breakthrough narrative—rarely saw this coordination as self-evident. Kazin’s 1942 study of modern American literature, On Native Grounds, barely mentions Jewish writers as such, and a keynote of Howe’s famous 1949 Commentary essay, “The Stranger and the Victim: The Two Jewish Stereotypes of American Fiction,” is that Jews simply aren’t present in American literature in any collective force, a major theme as well of many of the contributions to the Contemporary Jewish Record’s 1944 “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews.” Indeed, through the period of the emergence narrative’s establishment, Jewish American literary history wasn’t even consistently about Jewish writers; Howe’s “The Stranger and the Victim,” Fiedler’s The Jew in the American Novel, Sol Liptzin’s The Jew in American Literature (1966), and Louis Harap’s The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration (1974), for example, devote much, and in some cases all, of their efforts to talking about the portrayal of Jews in texts written often by Gentiles—evincing an entirely different theory and methodology of literary history than would underlie the multiculturalist approach of, say, MELUS or SAJL, which were concerned with redressing social exclusion through projects of representative canon formation.51 At the same time we might also want to credit the parallel emergence of the field we now know as contemporary literature studies, taking institutional form in the 1950s and early 1960s, for helping to lay some of the groundwork for the institutional embrace of the narrative of Jewish literary breakthrough. Many of the pioneering works in this field, such as Ihab Hassan’s Radical Innocence: The Contemporary American Novel (1961) and Marcus Klein’s After Alienation: American Novels in Midcentury (1964), actively worked against a dominant, mostly New Critical paradigm that judged works primarily for their formal

properties, and drew attention to the importance of subcultures, including (but not limited to) ethnic subcultures, as fertile literary ground in the United States—in addition to dealing explicitly and at length with writers like Bellow, Malamud, Norman Mailer, and J. D. Salinger. In bringing this up I’m not really trying to make an argument for any kind of substantive causality, but rather for structural homology, two analogous institutional manifestations of a significant shift in critical focus.52 The breakthrough narrative’s author-based pluralism is part of the history of multiculturalism, whereby cultural difference is leveraged in an expansive Americanism, anticipating the major institutional shifts of the late 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, an archaeological trace of breakthrough’s Americanist multicultural rupture is the shift in field nomenclature during the period of its establishment—from “American Jewish,” as in the subtitle of Malin and Stark’s book or the name of the field’s primary journal, Studies in American Jewish Literature, to the “Jewish American,” as in the title of Howe’s 1977 collection, by which we now characteristically label the field.53 But at the same time, emergence’s Jewish exceptionalism—its partial, not always articulated alliances with narratives of American representativity and Jewish whiteness—made its relationship with multiculturalism unstable. Grebstein argued that the new “Jewish style” represents “the first time in our literary history” that “a voice that conveys ethnic characteristics, a special sort of sensibility, and the quality of a foreign language” can remain “familiar and eloquent to nonJews.”54 The claim of the developing appeal of Jewish American literature is central to the persuasive power of the emergence thesis. As Fiedler would argue in 1959 in The Jew in the American Novel, the standard by which Jewish American literature had to be judged should be its relevance to “the main lines of development of fiction in the United States” (66). But this pluralism is not consistently maintained; at the same time, Fiedler also suggests in both the 1957 piece on Bellow and this 1959 essay that Jewish American writers made it into the mainstream of U.S. literature just as the Jew was being identified across all levels of U.S. culture as the “representative American” (58)55—“mythicized” as a “public symbol” is the Bellow essay’s formulation—and that the increasing vogue of Jewish writers was a “manifestation of the hunger of American readers for occasions to identify with Jewish life” (112).56 Fiedler had further sharpened this point by the 1990s, when he would write that the “growing alienation and rapid urbanization” that characterized the United States during the breakthrough period made “Jews, experts on exile and the indignities of city life, appropriate spokesmen for everyone.”57 Malin and Stark suggest that the Jewish American literary “breakthrough” was more a function of U.S. literature coming to the Jews than the reverse: “It is not so much that the Jew has caught up with America. America has at long last caught up with the Jew. His search for identity is its search. Its quest for spiritual meaning is his quest.”58 Thus just as it consolidated into its hegemonic form, breakthrough reveals a Jewish exceptionalism that often rubbed the wrong way against an emergent multiculturalist Americanism’s egalitarian representational pluralism. Midcentury American literary history reads like a symptomology of Jewish breakthrough.

There were of course the antisemitic Gentiles who feared displacement. Writing in 1965, Katherine Anne Porter, proclaiming “I am an old North American. My people came to Virginia in 1648,” worries about the new literature’s effects on American language and civilization. Fearing “a plague of filth in words and in acts, almost unbelievable abominations, a love of foulness for its own sake,” she intimates conspiracy: “There is a stylish sort of mob promoting these writers, a clique apparently determined to have an Establishment,” a “crowd with headquarters in New York” that is “very hostile to the West and, above all, to the South,” the regions, Porter asserts, that “have made and are making American literature. We are in the direct, legitimate line; we are people based in English as our mother tongue, and we do not abuse it or misuse it, and when we speak a word, we know what it means.” Porter the linguistic nativist worries about America’s vampyric newcomers: “These others have fallen into a curious kind of argot, more or less originating in New York, a deadly mixture of academic, guttersnipe, gangster, fake-Yiddish, and dull old wornout dirty words—an appalling bankruptcy in language, as if they hate English and are trying to destroy it along with all other living things they touch.”59 Truman Capote, like Porter, evinces ethnic paranoia, famously complaining in a 1968 Playboy interview about a “Jewish Mafia in American letters” that maintains a “strangle hold on American criticism,” a “clique of New York–oriented writers and critics who control much of the literary scene through the influence of quarterlies and intellectual magazines. All these publications are Jewish-dominated and this particular coterie employs them to make or break writers by advancing or withholding attention.”60 Less vituperatively, Gore Vidal worried in 1980 about Jewish predations upon an American literature that does not properly include them: “Jewish writers,” as represented by Bellow, Malamud, and Roth, “comprise a new, not quite American class, more closely connected with ideological, argumentative Europe (and Talmudic studies) than with those of us whose ancestors killed Indians, [or] pursued the white whale.” In fact, Vidal pursues this line in the context of talking about the novel of ideas and Mary McCarthy, whom he quotes as backup: “she also notes that ‘in the USA, a special license has always been granted to the Jewish novel, which is free to juggle ideas in full public; Bellow, Malamud, Philip Roth still avail themselves of the right, which is never conceded to us goys.’”61 No less resentfully, but perhaps more playfully, John Updike, at about the same time Capote was panicking, seems to have figured that, as Josh Lambert has put it, if you can’t beat ’em, you might as well join ’em, and wrote his own Jewish writer in Henry Bech.62 More amiably (and perhaps even appreciatively), Robert Lowell, in describing to his friend and fellow poet Elizabeth Bishop a November 1963 Dissent event “presided over by Irving Howe” on Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann book, notes in particular the language of the antagonistic meeting of New York Intellectuals: “One was suddenly in a pure Jewish or Arabic world, people hardly speaking English, declaiming, confessing, orating, in New Yorkese, in Yiddish, booing and clapping.” He says of the evening, “Well, it was alive, but very rash, cheap, declamatory etc. a sort of mixture of say Irish nationalists and an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with contending sides.” Describing a few lines later a party the next night which evinced none of the acrimony of the first night, Lowell concludes,

“There’s nothing like the New York Jews. Odd that this is so, and that other American groups are so speechless and dead.”63 But the breakthrough-emergence narrative undercuts itself, as the repressed stigma of the provincial—putatively emerged from or escaped—returns, reinscribed. Most conspicuously, the big breakthrough writers themselves tried to evade, and often aggressively resisted, this category, “Jewish American writer,” that arose in large part to describe them. Roth notoriously insisted in 1963, “I am not a Jewish writer, I am a writer who is a Jew”;64 in 1969 Bellow memorably remarked that “the tendency to turn Malamud, Roth, and me into the Hart, Schaffner & Marx of literature is ridiculous,”65 and in 1988 he more muscularly declared, “If the WASP aristocrats wanted to think of me as a Jewish poacher on their precious cultural estates then let them;”66 and Malamud suggested, more moderately, “I’m a Jew, and I write for all men. A novelist has to, or he’s built himself a cage.…I was born in America and respond, in American life, to more than Jewish experience.”67 Active in all of these complaints is a vocabulary of ethnic anxiety. Cynthia Ozick, in a New York Times Book Review essay in 2014 on the Library of America Bernard Malamud edition, agreed: the paradox of the Cold War Jewish American writer is that a writer couldn’t be both—at least not simply. The dangers of the “parochial” seemed more insistent for Roth, Bellow, and Malamud in the late ’50s and early ’60s than they ever could have been, in Ozick’s example, for Willa Cather’s prairie, Updike’s Brewster, or William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, American regionalisms that were never threatened by provincializing difference as Roth, Bellow, and Malamud worried—often rightly—that the ethnic Jewish American was.68 What’s so bitingly notable, of course, is that Ozick’s mapping ironically recuperates Porter’s claim about the wellsprings of American literature and illuminates also Capote’s and Vidal’s complaints, and for that matter Henry Adams’s antisemitism before them: what should be parochial is corrupting and usurping what should be dominant. And it wasn’t just the Jewish American fiction writers; the critics who made it— narcissistically, to use Kramer’s term—their business to read them were also attuned to the almost immediate petrification of the cliché. In 1969 Robert Alter validated the emergence narrative in claiming that “the sudden new ascendency” and “rise to prominence in American literature during the 50’s and 60’s of writers of Jewish origin” had been “interpreted as a turning point both in the development of American culture and in the general cultural relationship of Jews to Western societies,” suggesting that “the WASP cultural hegemony in America is over”; but at the same time he saw the “vogue of Jewish writing…quickly exhausting its artistic possibilities,” already “falling into a declining phase of unwitting selfparody.”69 Allen Guttmann could claim as early as 1965 that “the renaissance of Jewish writers had very nearly run its course” because “a stiffnecked, intractable, irreverent, attractive generation” of writers “no longer chooses to be chosen,” and he complained about Jewish American literature’s devitalizing American normalization and “decline in literary importance”: the popularity of writers like Herman Wouk suggested that “the Jewish Book Club of the future will have fifty Edna Ferbers to choose from.”70 Israel Shenker opened a 1969 New York Magazine article on the sensation of Portnoy’s

Complaint by pointing out that “there have been suggestions recently that, given the success of Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth, all the other authors of Jewish novels should turn in their typewriters.”71 In suggesting the possibility that “the Jewish movement” had played itself out, that is, Shenker wondered publicly whether the implicit integration of literary style and sociological trend heralded in the term movement had broken down. This is also how Irving Howe saw it in 1977, in the introduction to his Jewish-American Stories collection, where he polemicized that Jewish American literature as a distinct entity—compare Shenker’s conspicuous term “Jewish novels” and Fiedler’s even more categorical “the Jewish Novel”—had “already passed its peak of achievement and influence” and would soon come to an end: drawing primarily from the immigrant experience, and given the remarkable economic and social success of Jewish Americans, Jewish American literature “must suffer a depletion of resources, a thinning out of materials and memories,” and will “grow weaker, necessarily, with the passing of years.”72 In 1967 Fiedler wondered aloud about an exhausted tradition: “There is an odd sense these days in the still-flourishing community of JewishAmerican writers that a certain vein of material is nearing exhaustion, that the mother lode which it once seemed would last forever is at the point of being used up” (To the Gentiles 151). In 1991 Fiedler admitted worrying that “the very success of Jewish-American writers in thus becoming mouthpieces for all America meant their disappearance as Jews.… By the late sixties, though many of them continued to write and would for the next couple of decades, Jewish-American writers had ceased to seem central.”73 And yet: the conceit of Shenker’s article has him query a bunch of Jewish writers about their professional future, and unsurprisingly, no one seems to agree that there’s reason to turn in one’s Jewish typewriter. Michael Krasny, like Shenker, draws a bead on this historicist problem in 1978 when he mischievously begins his polemically titled essay “The Death of the American Jewish Novel” by announcing that “the American Jewish novel isn’t really dead.” What is actually dead is “American Jewish writing as we have known it”: now, since “the Jewish renaissance of the Sixties is over,” and with “Jewish writers … assimilated into America like bagels,” the sociologically or ethnologically defined literature suspended “between a ghetto culture and the so-called mainstream” is done. Not surprisingly, it is Portnoy’s Complaint to which he points as—wait for it—the “seminal novel” in this transformation: though Roth is obviously “connected to Yiddishkeit,” his novel announces a new era in which “Jewish artists have increasingly less and less to do with Jewishness.”74 These critics illuminate the final turn of breakthrough’s historicist screw, and they reveal the intellectual danger of understanding—and legitimizing—Jewish American literary history primarily as a normative, nationalistically organized ethnographic methodology that represents a recognizable population by way of its historical archive. With American Jews less any single, distinguishable and differentiated population, and accessing a dominant (white) Americanness or leveraging “diversity” as a deconstruction of Jewish categoricalness, how, any longer, is Jewish American literature to remain decisively legible as Jewish? Like so many Jewish American literary professionals since, Fiedler seems most comfortable when thinking about the Jewish American literary field in minoritarian terms,

and in 1967 he worries over the fact that “for the first time in modern memory the Jews find themselves not in the traditional position of the exploited, but in the comfortable new position of the exploiter” (To the Gentiles 154).75 More grist for the mill: university courses in Jewish American literature only started popping up in the 1970s,76 just in time for the explosion of scholarly activity registered in MLA paper and panel presentations and after Jewish American writers found available to them a position from which to reject the category “Jewish American writer,” a role that had not even been generally available to them just a generation earlier. The anxiety of emergence-era critics like Fiedler, Howe, Shenker, Guttmann, and Krasny is the flip side of the literary success of Jewish American writers and, indeed, the social success of Jewish Americans: perversely echoing anti-Semites like Capote and Porter, critics like Fiedler, Howe, and the others suggest that it’s as Jews made it in U.S. literature and its establishment that their works seem to be losing their accustomed categorical force—they are no longer compellingly Jewish. As soon as it’s periodized into legitimacy, as American as Cather or Faulkner or any other American survey stalwart, Jewish American literature as a category is threatened by delegitimation to the extent that it loses its distinguishing subcultural content, insofar as it is no longer necessarily about anything ethnologically specific. We need to think of periodizing frames like “breakthrough,” like the literature they putatively describe, as productive and dynamic critical tools rather than simply as self-evident or passive representational lenses. The periodizing structure of the breakthrough narrative drew on its articulation with an increasingly persuasive multiculturalist concept of population-based ethnic identity; but this relationship remained perverse if not in fact paradoxical. Eric Hayot has written that “all periods are concepts, even when they merely exclude other times, since the periodizing gesture only makes sense as a loose amalgamation of culture and historical similarity, a similarity reinforced every time someone says something like ‘the twentieth century’—about which we all agree, roughly, what it means.” Period concepts are built on “more or less untheorized and inherited notions of totality.”77 The breakthrough narrative ostensibly defines the period of Jewish American literature’s emergence into the American mainstream, but the period of its articulation is also the period of multiculturalism’s consolidation, which offered its own totalizing imagination of U.S. history, one with which a solidifying narrative of Jewish American social and cultural achievement was inevitably in vexed interconnection. The periodization of Jewish American literature discloses a project to produce and refine knowledge about what it hoped was, took for granted as, an already legitimized historical subject—American Jews—but the vocabulary of this imagined legibility was unstable and from the start contested. The breakthrough thesis came together and strengthened as critics took to looking at an increasingly fraught American literary landscape as a kind of battlefield between culturally legible groups of identifiable ethnic writers; and the period of the narrative’s own emergence marks the establishment of a biologistic professional thinking about identity that would underwrite the labor of subsequent generations of critics—an increasingly persuasive multiculturalist concept of population-based ethnic identification. The normative historicism

shared by critics as diverse as Fiedler, Howe, Walden, Guttmann, Porter, Capote, and Vidal, to say nothing of many scholars currently operating in the field, anchors literary historical value in presumed demographic fact. But if the breakthrough narrative to an extent celebrated assimilation—the emergence of Jewish writers into American literature is in fact the convergence of Jew with America—it more fundamentally functions as the displacement of an anxiety about recognition: the emergence critics, from Fiedler in the late ’50s to Krasny in the late ’70s, via Kazin, Shenker, Howe, Walden, and others, are faced with the problem of how to hold on to a recognizable Jewish difference on which to ground their categorical labor. Some, like Howe in the frequently cited introduction to his Jewish-American Stories collection, fatalistically foresee the end of the genre, while others, like Krasny, are more glib, but they all more or less register the predicament. The periodizing structure of breakthrough’s exceptionalist narrative—unlike the legitimating origin stories that MELUS and other ethnic literary studies projects could tell about themselves—could paradoxically confer legitimacy only by doubling down on a biologistic (and largely essentialist) identity category that it could decreasingly populate with definitive cultural content even when ethnic studies started moving away from multiculturalist essentialism. In fact, the history of Jewish American literary history critically—if awkwardly and obliquely—illuminates how a humanities-based identity concept became hegemonic by performatively evacuating itself of deterministic substance. The critical and historical value of the emergence thesis is to be found not in the tired repetition of its cliché, but in the fact that it names the displacement of Jewish literature’s erstwhile historical legibility onto a new form of biologistic population-based self-evidence whose inheritable logical coherence no longer depends on specific sociological content. The spectral labor of scholarship invested in Jewish identity accounts for Jewish American literature’s continued, but perverse, field-legibility, through which the meaning and narrative of breakthrough is so well known as to be largely impervious to critical thinking. In an adjacent context, Kenneth Warren has argued that what we now know as “African American literature” was a postemancipation phenomenon, taking shape in the context of a “challenge to the enforcement and justification of racial subordination and exploitation represented by Jim Crow,” and that its “coherence,” since “the legal demise of Jim Crow,” has “eroded.” The unwillingness or inability to abandon the category of African American literature “coalesce[s] in a concern that the baby of racial unity is in danger of being thrown out with the bathwater of segregation just at that moment when such unity is presumed to be as necessary as ever.” In Warren’s view, we should not allow this professionalized nostalgia to deflect us from the critical insight that “African American literature is not a transhistorical entity within which … [historical changes] have occurred but that African American literature itself constitutes a representational and rhetorical strategy within the domain of a literary practice responsive to conditions that, by and large, no longer obtain.” That is, African American literature’s “public, both black and white,” was “defined by the assumptions and practices of the segregation era. Whether African American writers …

acquiesced in or kicked against the label, they knew what was at stake in accepting or contesting their identification as Negro writers”—which is to say, the coherence of a concept of African American identity, a concept that operates as a historical designation, a period label.78 By transposing Warren’s argument that the African American literature field incites biologistic talk of African American identity onto the historical fact that Jewish American literary study emerged as a professional field coincident with its apparent delegitimation— right around the multicultural moment when it became epistemologically possible, culturally cool, and sometimes institutionally or socially necessary to proclaim ethnic identity—we can examine how, through its foundational articulation of historical subject and cultural archive, the Jewish American literary field functions as a professional tool that produces Jews as a legible population rather than a frame for representing a transhistorical population of Jews; and more pointedly, it’s a tool emancipated from service to a simple, self-evident historical narrative of immigration and assimilation. To use Warren’s term, therefore, what we might call breakthrough’s inevitable legitimation crisis suggests that the ethnological coherence of Jewish American literature has “eroded” in the decades since the breakthrough narrative became self-evident. But rather than a nihilistic dead end for scholarship, we might take this critical knowledge as an invitation to imagine an alternative future for a Jewish studies liberated from the reactionary restrictions of ethnologic. Responding in 1974 to the “runaway expansion of the field” of academic Jewish studies in North America, with too many jobs chasing too few sufficiently rigorous candidates (we recall that this is five years after the founding of the AJS, amid powerful professionalizing forces within the Jewish studies field), Robert Alter, in a Commentary essay titled “What Jewish Studies Can Do,” lamented the field’s inconsistent “definition and maintenance of standards,” with too many influences encouraging “confirmation-class amateurism dignified with university credits.” Rehearsing many of the contradictions of the history of the Jewish American literary field, not least of which is the conspicuous crossing of appeals to Jewish exceptionalism and appeals to normalized Americanness, Alter argues that Jewish studies should be kept separate from ethnic studies (as he sees that emergent formation): while it is “temptingly easy to link” the growth and impetus behind Jewish studies with “the student agitation for ethnic studies,” Alter counters that with its Wissenschaft origins “the steady expansion of Judaica antedated the new campus ethnicity” (“by a century,” no less), and the community engagement “model of ethnic studies”—which organizes itself around the reinforcement of ethnic pride–based “group solidarity” via “what the new political jargon calls ‘consciousness raising’”—“is basically inappropriate to Judaica.”79 If Alter concedes that many establishment Jewish community interests have latched on to university-based Jewish studies formations in a bid to administer and instrumentalize them, he predictably avers that “the inculcation of group identity is simply not the business of the university,” and “group survival” cannot be an academic concern. Professional Jewish studies “can no longer be a matter of confessional concern or ethnic loyalty; by entering the academy, Judaica entered the public domain.” We should not be surprised that these claims anticipate much of

what was said around its fortieth anniversary about the AJS’s continued labor of selfjustification. The normative rather than descriptive line of Alter’s exceptionalist claims—he simply doesn’t entertain the possibility that ethnic studies might make the very same argument about “confessional concern,” “ethnic loyalty,” and “the public domain” that he takes to be the special privilege of Jewish studies—helps us place him and his arguments in a genealogy of the current state of professional Jewish American literary study. Alter wisely wants to say that regardless of students’ reasons for taking Jewish studies courses—whether or not they feel compelled by their rabbis or parents—“the inculcation of group identity is simply not the business of the university” and “group survival” cannot be an academic concern. Yet when he finally gets around to explaining (as his title promises) what Jewish studies in fact “can do” as a humanistic endeavor, we learn that its primary task is to subject the object-matter of Jewish studies—Jewish texts, culture, and history—to a “disciplined intellectual concern” and “ventilate the tradition … [to] keep alive its ongoing claims on our most finely attentive faculties of understanding and tradition.”80 It’s pretty difficult—damn near impossible—to ignore the rhetorical and ideological power of that word our. Where’s the difference between what Alter dismisses elsewhere in his essay as “illusory expectations”81 about engagement or “group solidarity” and his own desire to keep the “tradition” “alive” to make “claims” on “our” “understanding”? If “the inculcation of group identity” is not the chief business of Jewish studies, Alter powerfully recuperates such tribalism and clannishness in and through the disciplining practices of academic institutions structured around the professional expectation, in Young’s later words, of a “national culture” that is specifically—precisely— not a “nationalist culture”: anxiety about “group survival” is displaced by anxiety about categorical legibility and persistence—which in turn organizes the historicist project the Jewish studies complex is today. Alter seems at least as keen to lash out at ethnic, women’s, and black studies, which he deems not quite legitimate, as he is to theorize Jewish studies practice; indeed, in a startlingly clear performance of Jewish studies exceptionalism, the former desire seems a key component of the latter project. Like pre-breakthrough Gentile literary figures like Porter and Capote concerned to protect American culture (which looks awfully white) from Jews, and like breakthrough writers themselves anxious to prove their American bona fides (which look awfully white), Alter never seems particularly interested in criticizing what legitimacy means—or how it means. Alter’s version of the paradox of breakthrough—he wants Jewish difference, but also Jewish American normality (and whiteness)—further highlights a critique of Jewish literary study’s exceptionalist imagination of identity. The October 1974 issue of Commentary in which Alter’s essay appeared also featured Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan’s “Why Ethnicity?,” which would become the introduction to their collection Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, published the next year. In it, Glazer and Moynihan want to make the case for ethnicity as an important category of social analysis, insofar as the concept describes a “new reality” that ends up being a more effective means than class of articulating and defending social advantages and interests in the

postwar welfare state. Glazer and Moynihan speak of the “strategic efficacy of ethnicity in making claims on the resources of the modern state”: ethnicity is so effective at “mobilizing” and “organizing” interests because it combines those interests with heritable (and necessary) affective ties. Ethnicity is useful because it’s a form of population-based knowledge, ultimately secured by biology, tying cultural information to concepts of heritage and heritability; it is a biopolitical technology for administering information about certain kinds of historically and socially legible groups. While Glazer and Moynihan admit that their observation of “the persistence and salience of ethnic-based forms of social identification and conflict”—indeed that “ethnic identity has become more salient, ethnic self-assertion stronger”—“scarcely amounts to a theory,”82 their essay, so conveniently associated with Alter’s on the increasingly neoconservative pages of Podhoretz’s Commentary, shines critical light on the “persistence and salience” of ethnically based patterns of thinking and institutional organization both within the academy and beyond its walls. If the generation of sociologists like Glazer and Moynihan pioneered empirical methods for the collection of data about the experiences and structures of feeling of ethnic Americans, the humanities were caught off guard and without much in the disciplinary quiver when ethnic groups began making institutional demands, and so often reproduced a mostly empiricist ethnology in their own humanistic historicist practices.83 Commentary, of course, was a prominent staging ground for a rising cohort of rightist Jewish intellectuals to launch a broad, decades-long attack against multiculturalism, even as it sought to protect a mode of identity-based thinking in embracing a normalized image of First World Zionist Jewishness consonant with a hegemonic American imperial identity. Alter’s liberal concern about the “Balkaniz[ing]” effects of minoritarian, ethnic studieshoused and –allied solidarity projects would consolidate and merge in the following decade with a persuasive Reaganaut position against multiculturalism in the culture wars—much as its precursor formulations had informed the neoconservative emergence in the ’50s and ’60s (in no small part via the agency of such cultural organs as Commentary magazine). But the neoconservative gambit was to hold on to the ethnic category “Jewish” by redefining it in the context of this attack on multiculturalism, evacuating it of all the old ethnic clichés that had historically characterized the category, but also, perversely, leveraging multiculturalism’s response to oppression and exclusion as a concern with right, redress, grievance, and, paradoxically, identity politics. Indeed, in its anxious articulation of Jewish whiteness as a racialist political position, the neoconservative realignment helps us understand how a developing discourse of ethnicity functioned in part through the biologized transcription of culture. If for the rightist critics of multiculturalism ethnicity became a lever for an activist administrative mode of social knowledge production, for culturalist ethnic studies, including Jewish studies, “ethnicity” (including also such current revisionary modes as “postethnicity”), as the name of a hegemonic process of categorical recognition—even, maybe especially, since academic ethnic studies’ migration toward various antiessentialisms since the breakdown of multiculturalist orthodoxy beginning in the late 1990s—becomes the rubric under which the professionalized deployment of a self-evident biologistic identity

category displaces affective experience of its spectral cultural archive. In the introduction to Jewish-American Stories, Howe writes that Jewish American writers have assumed they have in their possession (though, he jokes with insiderist privilege, they may not have in “their grasp”) “a body of inherited traditions, values, and attitudes that we call ‘Jewishness,’” which “signify in both their lives and their work.”84 Critics like Howe, Krasny, Fiedler, and Guttmann believed that Jewish American literature was waning because it could no longer be about a recognizable and unitary archive of “Jewish” historical information; they couldn’t imagine a mode of identity thinking disconnected from a descriptive project organized around a self-evident population and history. The splicing of culture, history, and inheritance underlying this position is, thanks in part to intellectuals like Glazer and Moynihan, what we now take for granted as ethnicity. And as the founding of journals like SAJL and MELUS, within a year of Alter’s and Glazer and Moynihan’s Commentary essays, attests, literary history now understands ethnicity as a biologistic history machine, a way of generating and telling population-based narratives about culture, showcasing the desire for a kind of epistemological security in (at least partially) genetic ideas of heritability. Walden’s journal and the field it announced in many ways became an ethnological project to invest and flesh out the Jewish-y-ness of what were now Jewish texts largely (sometimes solely) by virtue of their Jewish authors. Contrary to Howe’s anxious expectation (as so many critics since have delighted in pointing out), Jewish American literature remains quite lively—at least so long as we define it primarily by the identity we recognize in its authors, and only by taking for granted the categorical identity that worried Howe. And yet, if we try to define it otherwise, and look at it from another, critical, standpoint, its categorical recognizability is increasingly invested in its own reflexive awareness of itself as such. It’s ironic: in throwing Howe—along with his inability to imagine Jewish American literary study as anything other than a descriptive historical project —under the bus of professional knowledge production, contemporary Jewish American literary scholarship perversely exposes its inability to theorize its own practice. Literary history no longer needs an already-legible cultural history to resolve the category of identity; it takes that history for granted as underwriting the recognizability of the texts constituting its archive. This is the lesson of the history of Jewish American literary history and the breakthrough narrative: compelled to define a literary archive that no longer had to be about anything specific, the breakthrough critics illuminate in ethnicity a critical concept of identity no longer representationally tethered to an indexical referent. The history of Jewish American literary history compels counterhegemonic analysis of how identity has come to function as a heritable, population-oriented form of certainty—and an infrastructure for making a certain kind of normative historicist statement. Scholars interested in Jewish American literature, Jewish studies, postwar American literature, and ethnicity—and in identity more generally—could do worse than to criticize the normalization of the overdetermined relationship between evolving vocabularies of Jewishness, whiteness, and ethnicity in our ongoing efforts to analyze the field-imaginary and institutional positions that frame our work. In the breakthrough cliché and its ongoing institutional repetition an

anxiety to disclaim a categorical literary historical concept of Jewishness and an anxiety to retain a critical criterion of Jewish recognizability cross. The emergent Jewish American literary field’s turn toward multiculturalism and the disciplined practices of literary study alienated it from a consolidating Jewish studies establishment unwilling to abandon its exceptionalist Wissenschaft epistemology even as its own share in this Jewish studies exceptionalism alienated it from an ascendant English department–based, ethnic studies– aligned critique of identity. Jewish American literary history will remain ghettoized—and indeed irrelevant to the vital currents of Jewish studies and English department–based scholarship—so long as we continue to ignore this paradox and its history and persist in taking the field for granted as a historicist tool without a history for representing a categorically self-evident population. Jewish American literature is such a difficult categorical term to jettison because it is one of the ways by which we now know how to know about Jews. If this sounds like a tautology, we should blame historicism’s ultimately instrumental relationship to its field of exercise, its inability to criticize its own agency. Critical humanist methodologies have a necessary part to play in supplementing the hegemonic historicist protocols—whose ally, analog, and institutional beard will always be the social-scientific study of already-legible populations—of any identity-based interdisciplinary field like Jewish studies.

Chapter 2

Before Jewish American Literature

We were all in the hands of Yiddish. —Philip Roth, 1997

The Literary Value of Yiddish as a Jewish Problem; or, The Polemical Stakes In 1977, Irving Howe published a collection of Jewish American short stories titled, of all things, Jewish-American Stories. This book is pretty well known now by academics in the field in large part for the introduction, where Howe laments that, in the wake of rapid postwar Jewish American social success, Jewish American literature as a coherent and identifiable subcanon is probably coming to an end—that, in effect, assimilation and acculturation are ultimately ending the genre that had formed in the historical crucible of, institutionally consolidated itself as a representational window on, and was professionalized as a means of documentary access to the Jewish immigrant experience in America. It’s a premortem that remains notable because, though Howe’s prestige as a literary intellectual is due in part to the role he played in helping lay the foundations of the professional field of Jewish American literary study, his prediction was so strikingly inaccurate. Indeed, a kind of confidence, or maybe it’s an insufficiently critical complacency, has led many Jewish American literature scholars in the years since to quote Howe’s eulogy manque in a spirit of irony (if not snark), as it is obviously contradicted by the explosion of Jewish American literary production that would follow in its wake—not only by already-established authors like Philip Roth, whose most significant work1 would come out only in the years following Howe’s premature declaration (and whom, after Howe pronounced him suffering from a “thin personal culture” in 1972 and “cut off from any Jewish tradition” in 1976, Howe likely would never forget after the 1983 publication of The Anatomy Lesson),2 but also by all the great writers of younger generations who made names for themselves in subsequent decades, and especially since the turn of the millennium, including the wave of immigrant and secondgeneration writers from the former Soviet Union, off-the-derech writers raised in reclusive orthodox environments, and writers who trace their heritage to non-European contexts and who challenge the Ashke-normative framing of previously dominant narratives of Jewish American literary history. This ceremony of literary canonization is alive and well; in 2008 Julian Levinson wrote that “it has almost become a ritual of recent Jewish American criticism to argue that Howe has been proven wrong.”3 But this is not my theme here. I should say that I mean that positively and actively, not negatively and passively: it’s important for the field of Jewish American literary scholarship —if indeed there is going to be a field of Jewish American literary scholarship—to actively

labor against treading that well-worn path. The authors collected in Howe’s book are not particularly surprising—if some of us don’t recognize some of the names any more, such unfamiliarity is nothing we can’t chalk up to the changing attentions of an evolving profession—and time need not be spent rehearsing the selection. But I do want to pause over one of the authors: it’s Sholem Aleichem, whose “On Account of a Hat” in fact leads off Howe’s collection. That’s a conspicuous choice, if only because it’s hard to ignore the geographic facts of Sholem Aleichem’s life, to say nothing of Solomon Rabinovich’s. Why and how does Howe categorize Sholem Aleichem as American? In 1977, Sholem Aleichem’s claim to being the most popular Yiddish writer in the United States—certainly after the success, or rather phenomenon, of Fiddler on the Roof, which premiered thirteen years before Howe’s collection, and which Howe had complained about in the pages of Commentary less than two months after that premiere—was arguably challenged by only one other writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose Nobel Prize was still a year away at the time of Howe’s book’s publication, but then again Singer would become something more, or at least other, than simply a Yiddish writer after 1978.4 But Sholem Aleichem’s American legibility should not be so self-evident as to keep us from asking how a Ukrainian-Yiddish writer5—who, admittedly, had moved to the United States for the second time the year this particular story was published, but who only lived in the States for a total of three or four years by the time he died in 1916—managed to make his way into a collection dedicated to a disciplinary category we now take for granted as Jewish American literature, indeed, a collection that played a significant part in capitalizing the recognizability of that literature as a canon in the first place. Even if Howe’s claim is only that Sholem Aleichem (and Isaac Babel, the author of the equally curiously included second story in Howe’s collection) form part of the tradition constituting the prehistory of Jewish American literature, Howe’s ability to make this suggestion is precisely the point. And, to further sharpen that point, we should note that this ideological maneuver continues to be reaffirmed and reproduced in high-prestige academic scholarship to this day: in the 2016 Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher, Anita Norich claims that though Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Babel “could not reasonably be considered American,” it’s important to recognize that “they were, however, significant to an American sense of Jewish literature.” Though Norich makes this argument from the safe space of a note, it’s unclear what “an American sense of Jewish literature” is actually supposed to mean, and in any case she offers little support or discussion, which is to say that she seems to expect to stand on whatever wished-for selfevidence underlay Howe’s gesture in including the two European Yiddish writers in his collection in the first place.6 Howe also included Sholem Aleichem’s story—less conspicuously from our perspective, to be sure—in a collection he had edited a generation earlier, in 1954, with poet and “Yiddish Public Relations Man” Eliezer Greenberg—the at-least-equally famous A Treasury of Yiddish Stories.7 In this previous book “On Account of a Hat” kept company with a half dozen more of Solomon Rabinovich’s literary creations, and notably it appeared in the anthology’s first part, titled “Fathers,” which included one characteristic story each by Sholem

Abramovich/Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz, the three standing for Howe and Greenberg as the triumvirate of modern Yiddish literary progenitors. “Fathers” was a categorical concept that for Howe carried the special significance not only of the origin of a cultural tradition but also of that tradition’s representatives or “spokesm[e]n.”8 But David Roskies has pointed out that there’s a lot more to Howe’s concept of “Fathers,” as it “would later signify the entire usable past of American Jewry”;9 as one of at least two keywords in the title of his 1976 bestseller World of Our Fathers (“our” is arguably a third, as I argue throughout this book), it was Howe’s metonym for the culture of the eastern European Yiddish-speaking Jews who would immigrate to the United States in such large numbers beginning in the 1880s, and who, as “by far the largest component and thus most influential” of Jewish immigrants, were also Howe’s de facto synecdoche for American Jewry in general.10 Thus the metaphorics of “Treasury” suggests a concept of tradition aligned with, even ultimately incoherent absent, a concept of population—itself a concept whose culturalist hegemony in the American imagination of identity would be firmly consolidated in the form of “ethnicity” by the mid-1970s when World of Our Fathers and Jewish-American Stories were published, but which was only emergent as such at the time of the Treasury’s appearance (and indeed operated in a different signifying universe back then). When Roskies (in an early special issue of Prooftexts in 1983 dedicated to translation) places Howe and Greenberg’s Treasury in an international line with early twentieth-century literary manifestoes and collections that characteristically practice a “tactic of recycling the past to fertilize the present” (“a recurrent phenomenon in Jewish literary history”) and writes that in the Treasury “Howe’s task was to rescue the very best of a culture that had just been dealt its death blow and to make the saving remnant palatable to a cosmopolitan crowd not much prone to tradition or ethnicity,”11 it’s hard not to read an implication, which is really an assumption, that both the American “crowd” that’s now “cosmopolitan” and the “culture” to which it should be more attentive are in fact Jewish, the link between “crowd” and “culture” instantiated by a population-based, biologized concept of “tradition,” which is to say buttressed by a framing structure of “ethnicity.” One might wish to say that in such a formulation, Yiddish culture always already operates as synecdochic shorthand for Yiddishspeaking people. Recoursing to a similar mechanism of address, a handful of years later Anita Norich would argue that Yiddish scholarship is exceptional in the larger arena of modern literary studies insofar as it is inevitably understood as “an act of recuperation” and “dedicated implicitly or explicitly to a violently destroyed audience.” She writes, “It is nearly impossible to simply acknowledge new literary or scholarly texts in this field as in every other. Unlike other modern literatures we may consider, the study of Yiddish is accompanied by a clear view not only of a point of origin but also of a terrible end.”12 If the contents of ethnic culture aren’t necessarily inherited—this is the problem focused by Roskies’s term “cosmopolitan”—the work of his term “ethnicity,” like Norich’s “destroyed audience” to a slightly lesser extent, is to carry a normative force, and to suggest that the Yiddish culture of eastern Europe is indeed the heritable birthright of American Jews. Levinson writes that Howe and Greenberg’s Treasury was an anthology that fast became “a

classic in its own right, providing many American readers with their first, and often only, contact with Yiddish literature.”13 Roskies went further, writing in 2001 that the book “became a fundamental text of postwar American Jewish culture.”14 So, rather than Howe’s simply being wrong in 1977, the theme I pursue in this chapter is the translation from Levinson’s “Yiddish” to Roskies’s “American Jewish”; more specifically, I show how the difference between the respective ideological projects charted by Howe’s two collections15 illuminates a concept of Jewish ethnicity persuasive enough that by the waning decades of the twentieth century “Yiddish” had become the foundation for, and indeed was also in fact, “American Jewish.” In the decades following World War II, the Yiddish literary past was repurposed by an emergent concept of ethnicity as that manifestation of Jewish cultural heritage that could become a nostalgic object of identification for American Jews, the consumption and capitalization of which promised the affective reproduction of Jewish American identity. In a 1952 essay reviewing a new translation of Sholem Aleichem’s novel Wandering Star, Howe had lamented as unjustified the diminished status of Yiddish in the United States: “Neither Sholem Aleichem nor any other Yiddish writer has really entered the consciousness of literary America”; indeed, “if modern literary men cared about tradition as much they claim, Sholem Aleichem would be avidly discussed in the literary journals and as many dissertations would be written about him as are about Faulkner.”16 For Howe the problem is one of both literary prestige and Jewish heritage: if we are to “deplore the neglect of Yiddish literature in American literary circles,” he wonders what we are to make of “its neglect in the Jewish world.”17 And he ends by warning that time is short: “either the Yiddish literary heritage will soon be made available in translation or it will not, in any significant sense, be available at all.” Well, he answered that call just a couple of years later with the Treasury. And as Roskies points out, by the 1970s the Jewish American literary scene was comfortable with Yiddish, and it was Sholem Aleichem who by then had been installed as the representative figure: indeed, hearing Bellow’s Augie March speak is like hearing what “Tevye’s son” would sound like if he “had attended the University of Chicago,” and Malamud’s Jewbird’s speech “is Tevye talking.”18 Thirty-five years after the Treasury and twelve years after Howe’s Jewish-American collection, Cynthia Ozick, speaking for an orthodoxy by then well established and still mostly current, freighting Yiddish scholarship then and now with all sorts of inherited clichés about high and low culture, singles out Sholem Aleichem for having essentially single-handedly overturned a “contemptuous view” of Yiddish, replacing the opprobrious sense of a dismissed, depreciated, and disrespected folk zhargo´n with an understanding of “Yiddish as a literary vehicle” that “was at last to be welcomed, respected, celebrated”; she calls Sholem Aleichem “revolutionary.”19 A pattern (indicative of breakthrough) is discernible across Howe and Ozick; what’s true of Jews in America as an ethnically particular case is as true of literary criticism more generally. What happened in those twenty-plus years between the Treasury and Jewish-American Stories? How did Yiddish go from a marker of difference to be neglected, if not in fact condemned

and shunned, to the very spirit of Jewish American literature—and indeed of the Jewish American tradition? Beginning with Howe and Greenberg’s deployment of the “father” topos, Sholem Aleichem has circulated as a signal representative of a modern and prestigious Yiddish literature in the American literary imaginary. Eleven years after Ozick, and nearly a half century after the Treasury, Ruth R. Wisse argues in her polemical magnum opus The Modern Jewish Canon that Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye is the “first hero of modern Jewish literature.”20 Wisse’s “hero” seems a close relative of Howe’s “spokesman,” glossed by her brother Roskies as the representative of a “usable past.” But Wisse’s reiteration of the gesture characteristically amplifies the nationalistic implications of Ozick’s term “literary vehicle,” of Roskies’s focus on making Yiddish “palatable” to a now “cosmopolitan” Jewish America, and of course of Howe’s term “Fathers”: Tevye occupies a text that, by bridging the disparities of lived Jewish experience, could enforce “the communal discipline of the Jews.”21 In Tevye Sholem Aleichem had created “a performer whose skill actually depended on a Jewish audience”; if he “realized that he had discovered in Tevye the Jew through whom he could tell the story of his time,” for Wisse the reason is that he had produced a work whose “moral authority” was strong enough to compel a “commitment to group survival.”22 Wisse in fact takes her fetish of a nationalist Sholem Aleichem yet further, articulating an explicit Zionism at the heart of his most famous work: the “virtual island of discourse inhabited by Tevye and Sholem Aleichem is the first genuinely autonomous territory to appear in modern Yiddish literature,” and, brooking as little difference as possible between literal and metaphoric significations of the concept of “territory,” Wisse seeks to root her elaboration of discursive nationalism in the contemporary rise of Zionism as a “mass movement.”23 Or, to put a sharp point on it, “the concept of modern Jewish literature would have no value whatsoever if one were not prepared to respect the autonomy of Jewishness, and respect for that autonomy would have to be implicit in any work of Jewish literature.”24 I’m of course being polemical myself here, but I’m trying to draw attention to a historically specific process by which Yiddish was established as a serious literature—that is, worthy of serious, scholarly attention—representing Jewish history for a reading public newly receptive to imagining itself as Jewish American and as connected to the preHolocaust European Jewish past. In disciplined close readings of a canon institutionalized in the United States at least in part by Howe, literary intellectuals like Roskies, Ozick, and Wisse enact Yiddish’s representation and protection of—its being true to—a Jewish subject categorically secured by a historicist concept of the Jewish people; whether these disciplining procedures proceed under the premise that the scholarly apparatus is all that’s left of Yiddish culture and its Jewish speakers, as can likely be said of Yiddishists like Norich and Roskies, or whether scholarship needs to be regulated or governed by the possibility and needs of an autonomous Jewish polity, as a Yiddishist like Wisse might argue, it’s a legitimation project that results inevitably from an axiomatic belief about the categorical integrity of a definition of Jewish literature that inheres, circularly, at once in the ability to take for granted a population-dependent concept of “Jewishness” and the ability to make communal claims on

Jewish readers. As an illustration, we might look to a roughly contemporaneous expression of the same sentiment. In a celebration she wrote for Prooftext’s twentieth anniversary issue, Wisse argued that the importance of the decision made by David Roskies and Alan Mintz, Prooftext’s founding editors, to define the journal as one of “Jewish literary history” cannot be underestimated: “The editors have very subtly, intelligently, and effectively nudged us toward seeing Jewish literature as one remarkable development that is organically whole, coherent, and worth knowing in its entirety.” And she ends the short commemorative essay by insisting that Jewish literary history would be impossible without indexing its practice to Jewish “history and experience”25—that the “organic” and “coherent” “whole” of Jewish literature constitutes the dependent representation of a legible and likely “coherent” narrative of Jewish history, which itself tracks the “experience” of identifiably Jewish populations. It’s probably worth carving out some space to admit that what for her is the “subtl[e],” “intelligent,” and “effective” fruit of Roskies and Mintz’s act of persuasion is a conclusion that I imagine a great many scholars of Yiddish (and indeed many scholars of the many other identity-based literary fields) would hold as axiomatic, which is to say the identity and totality—limned by terms like “organically whole,” “coherent,” and “worth knowing in its entirety”—of the literature that the literary field defines by its identity and totality. But then it’s probably also worth carving out some space to admit what many Jewish literary scholars might not want to claim as axiomatic: that the brutalist nationalism of Wisse’s scholarship— when expressed in biopolitical terms of population, culture’s “moral authority” to compel “commitment to group survival” has rarely not been brutal—simply renders explicit the inextricability in Jewish literary study in its currently dominant historicist formation, precisely in its close reading practices, of the prestigious narrative of a Jewish literary tradition and, through shibboleths like “experience” and “history,” the Jewishness of actually existing Jewish populations. That the “autonomy” of Wisse’s Jewishness and the coherence with which it is more often than not articulated are more the coordinates of a scholarly interpretive desire than they constitute any kind of cultural reality (however that would be measured)—after all, even she admits it was Roskies and Mintz’s choice to proceed as they did—is precisely the point. All this is to say that it’s hard to see how one gets the prestigious tradition that validates the close reading practices and the archival project that houses them without at the same time depending (however implicitly) on the nationalism. I’d like to propose that a fairly broad array of scholars of Jewish literature, even many of those who wouldn’t dream of admitting it or who might otherwise doggedly disavow her unsavory politics, could stand to think about how a culturalist concept of Yiddish is abstractly and often quietly, but also inevitably, complicit with Wissean nationalism. This is why it’s crucial to analyze the ways by which this inescapably nationalist literary formation, along with its colonization of an eastern European Yiddish literary past for an American Jewish future, came to be. Suffice it to say that I’m not entirely confident about my term colonization here, but the issue is that I’m not confident about any of the ready alternatives, either. The only other real contender I could come up with was capture, a term that might have going for it Said’s stamp of approval, as

when we read him talking about “ideological capture” in the Introduction. What I like about colonization is that in the wake of postcolonial theory it emphasizes the epistemological labor and violence of reinscription, of producing the terms in which an object of knowledge is made meaningful and instrumentalized for a cultural project. Thus, to return to Howe, the salient question is how one of the “Fathers” of modern Yiddish literature became over the course of thirty postwar years a writer of “Jewish-American stories” (at least one of them)— if perhaps he could never in fact be what was by the 1970s a new appellation on the literary scene, a “Jewish American writer.” The answer lies in a genealogical reading of what now appears as a coherent Jewish literary history for the discontinuous development of specific patterns of, and expectations about, literary representation—both “politically” as the representative of Jewish history, and “aesthetically” as the portrayal of Jewish history. Instead of “On Account of a Hat” or its author—about which, let’s be honest, I know precious little—I will focus more obliquely (though I’d like to make a case for “more fundamentally”) on Sholem Aleichem in particular, and Yiddish more generally, not in themselves, but in how they circulated, which is to say as symbols and as levers and as machines, in the development of a professional discourse, at once in and adjacent to the academy, about Jewish, and specifically Jewish American, literature.26 My interest in what happened between Howe’s two collections is therefore really an interest in Sholem Aleichem’s circulation through an emerging professional discourse, leveraged by a rising multicultural logic, about Jewish American literature that was able to consolidate in part by appropriating an image of Yiddish as the signifier of American Jewry’s past, a symbol through which postwar American Jews could access and represent Jewish history.

The History of Yiddish’s History The emergent field of Jewish American literary study leveraged a postwar Americanization of Yiddish, a term I mean to indicate a discursive appropriation through which Americanism capitalizes Yiddish’s excess signification as part of a larger, multilateral project pursued to recuperate the literary seriousness of Yiddish. These are, I admit, some dicey terms. By excess, first of all, I mean what’s over and beyond Yiddish’s lexical functionality, its presumed normative role as the self-evident vernacular of “the” eastern European Jews, a signification that was becoming more cogent and powerful in the postwar U.S. context. But of course the fiction of such a normative origin is itself contested ground, and I certainly don’t want to be misunderstood as taking for granted some kind of coherent and organic national whole as origin. Rather, I’m trying to focus on an ideological image of Yiddish supported by nationalizing forces that were increasingly persuasive starting in the nineteenth century, and specifically on how the surplus value produced by such an ideological image could be—and was—leveraged in postwar American thinking about Jewish identity. Dan Miron, for example, has explained how the “unhistorical” image of the shtetl as a naturally and organically Jewish space was in fact the generic construction of a tradition of Jewish literature, which “radically Judaized” the shtetl, and this “fictional status of the literary shtetl” has since been taken for granted as historical reality, thereby preparing the shtetl for

its role as an object of longing and nostalgia, in addition to satire:27 “by the turn of the twentieth century, the metaphorical shtetl of Abramovich and Sholem Aleichem had crystallized into a normative literary tradition.”28 Thus it might be useful to imagine that this normative image and its excess were the coincident products of a double articulation.29 And second of all, when I use this term Americanization of Yiddish, I mean to describe a particular epistemological intensification rather than make a historicist claim, and I do not want to be misunderstood as arguing for an experientially coherent fact. Over the course of the many decades of Jewish migration from eastern Europe, and especially following the Holocaust and the large-scale destruction of the Yiddish-based Jewish society of eastern Europe, Yiddish in fact became many things other than, simply, the vernacular language of eastern European Jews, not that it was ever simply or naturally or self-evidently that: it became shtick, it became the language of choice of many Haredi and Hasidic Jews, it became Broadway and Hollywood cliché, it became a marker of Ashkenazi authenticity, it became a signifier of Diasporic resistance to Zionism; and its centers of usage multiplied, too, moving to America, the former Soviet Union, and Israel. This self-reflexivity and multivalence—this excess—is in part what people mean when they speak of Yiddish’s postvernacularity, the term made famous by Jeffrey Shandler.30 Yiddish did indeed become American after the war, but it didn’t exclusively become American, as it became lots of other things, too.31 And we should also recall in this context one of the most superbly conspicuous coincidences of Yiddish scholarship, at least for my purposes: that the year 1973—right in the middle of the period on which this book focuses—marks the publication of both the last great scholarly accomplishment—in Yiddish—by a prewar Yiddish intellectual, Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language, and the first great accomplishment of postwar Yiddish scholarship in English, Dan Miron’s A Traveler Disguised. This transformation forms the motive subtext of Howe’s post-Treasury writings on what we now call Jewish American literature, like World of Our Fathers, where he characterizes what he more typically called (there and elsewhere) “American Jewish writing” this way: “written in English but often with Yiddish tonalities unconsciously preserved or deliberately imported, these writings mirrored the yearnings of nostalgia, the tyrannies of memory, the powerful measures of loss”; in this literature, “Yiddish asserted itself not merely as a language but as a token of a way of life…. Yiddish signifies here not merely a language but a whole era in cultural history, first in eastern Europe and then, for a few decades in the United States.”32 It’s not simply that when in the introduction to Jewish-American Stories Howe argues that Jewish American literature “cannot finally be understood” without understanding the “Jewish origins” of its writers he means the Yiddish-speaking “streets and tenements of immigrant Jewish neighborhoods or the ‘better’ neighborhoods to which the children of immigrants have moved.”33 More fundamentally, Howe argues in World of Our Fathers that Yiddish bears Jewish history in Jewish American writing, providing not simply “imaginative sustenance” but a kind of access for those informed readers and scholars who care to find it there: “Even in its fading the Yiddish past asserted a claim to power.”34 Yiddish is the endangered agency of transmission of the Jewish past in his introduction to Jewish-American

Stories, where Howe suggests that Yiddish amounts to a signifier of historical tradition and continuity that’s not entirely visible but nonetheless a determining force in Jewish American literature, a kind of not entirely recoverable archive of the historical Jewish subject existing quite apart from the intentions or desires of the writers themselves: “Most American Jewish writers have had only an enfeebled relationship—indeed, a torn and deprived relationship— with the Jewish tradition in its fullness. Insofar as their work bears a relationship to the Jewish past, it is mainly through the historical phase of Yiddish,” that is, the period of its normalized use as a vernacular in Europe, mostly, but also for a relatively brief period in “the immigrant quarters of America.”35 This is a remarkable claim: Howe is making an argument not about mastery of Yiddish or even about anything intentional or deliberate on the part of Jewish American writers, but rather an argument about the function of Yiddish as providing a determining cultural matrix, the anchoring foundation for a realist literary history of Jewish American writing. Here’s a man who understood the power of ideology. Even if “the relationship of the American Jewish writers to the culture of Yiddish, source and root though it may be of their early experience, is often marked by rupture, break, dissociation,” and even if “the line of Jewish sensibility which can still be found in the work of these writers” amounts to “historical fragments, bits and pieces of memory,” Howe insists that “even a lapsed tradition, even portions of the past that have been brushed aside, even cultural associations that float about in the atmosphere, all have a way of infiltrating the work of the American Jewish writers.” Even endangered, even cut off and threatened with oblivion, Yiddish “infiltrates” Jewish American writing and exerts “power” on its authors: “Tradition broken and crippled still displays enormous power,” he insists, even “over those most ready to shake it off,” and even when “seemingly discarded,” the Jewish “tradition” of these writers “can survive underground for a generation and then, through channels hard to locate, surface in the work of writers who may not even be aware of what is affecting their consciousness.”36 We should not overlook the scale of this transformation in Yiddish’s relation to American Jewish identity, its “relevance” as our students might say: if in the 1970s Howe could call it the dynamic, living agent linking contemporary American Jews to a transnational Jewish history, in 1943, just a decade before breakthrough would gather its compelling coherence, Isaac Bashevis Singer was indicting it as increasingly corrupted and anachronistic in modern America, and unable “to convey a large portion of our reality.”37 A wide current of scholarship has since largely ratified and redeployed Howe’s colonization of Yiddish as part of the apparatus of Jewish American identity. In 1990 Anita Norich wrote that “Yiddish is widely understood as the medium through which the past of most American Jews can be examined,” especially in its functioning as a metonymy for the victims of the Holocaust and their culture; and she notes with scholarly delight how, despite U.S. census figures showing a 45 percent decrease in native Yiddish speakers between 1940 and 1960, 42 percent more people in 1980 than in 1960 claimed Yiddish as their “mother tongue,” statistics that “must be seen as a reflection of the eagerness to acknowledge ethnic identity rather than absolute numbers of speakers,” and which “can only be understood within the context of rising ethnic

consciousness during the ’sixties.”38 David Suchoff finds Cold War symptomology in the Treasury’s canonizing efforts, but he understands Howe’s motives as yet another rehearsal of the ordeal of civility:39 looking to retain his legitimacy as a “critic of American culture” but afraid of the 1930s stigma of “dangerous, leftist Jews,” Suchoff’s Howe makes “Yiddish into a form of high culture” as a way to inoculate himself against the taint of radical leftism during the first decades of the Cold War. Revaluing Yiddish through professionalizing institutions of literary criticism as a form of “high cultural modernism” was “Howe’s way of representing a safe kind of ‘subversion,’ a kind of popular writing which could signal ethnic identity, while keeping Jewishness safely separate from the ‘mass’ connotations which American political demonology since the 1950s had produced.”40 Howe constructed an image of Yiddish that represented a “modernist” and “aesthetic” form of Jewishness couched in terms of “cosmopolitan” value:41 “By transforming Yiddish into high culture, Howe could turn an overly radical and Jewish identity into a culturally valued form of modernism, and thus allow Yiddish to serve as a defused form [of] ethnic identification.” This Cold War Howe canonizes Yiddish as “an ethnic literature” that did “not challenge” hegemonic Cold War ideas about U.S. culture.42 Suchoff’s Howe uses Yiddish as the fulcrum on which modernism leverages Jewishness for high scholarly culture. More interested in articulating Howe’s value in terms enabled by multiculturalist orthodoxy, Hana Wirth-Nesher also sees an activist construction of Yiddish as a marker of Jewish American identity and history, an effort that became more urgent as increasing Jewish assimilation coincided with increasing interest in ethnicity movements. More than was the case with other immigrant groups, who could more or less point to a single specific origin in the Old World, Jews “needed to create a homogeneous monolingual home, a mother tongue, and this was achieved in part by the reconstruction of a Yiddish shtetl past” in such “cultural work” as Howe’s World of Our Fathers.43 But this discursive intensification did not circulate an image of a real home to which the Jews could return, nor was Yiddish imagined as a living language; rather, as Wirth-Nesher sees it, Yiddish carries the Jewish past by embodying “some linguistic sign of difference” that “infiltrates”—there’s Howe’s word again—the otherwise English-language texts of Jewish American writers.44 If for Suchoff Howe’s canonization of Yiddish as part of an international culture of modernism functioned to insulate Jews from what would become the excesses of multiculturalism, and if for Norich and Wirth-Nesher Howe and other intellectuals used Yiddish as a way of conferring emergent multicultural legitimacy on Jews, these scholars together evince the ways in which Yiddish as a marker of Jewish history was deployed in Cold War discursive projects of Jewish identification. Howe and Greenberg’s Treasury is important for reproducing a linked series of literary historical narratives that provide a foundation for Yiddish’s role as bearer of the Jewish American literary past. Sholem Aleichem, of course, was as deliberately engaged with the dynamics of literary fame (specifically his own) as any writer; Dan Miron has written that “Sholem Aleichem was the first Yiddish writer who felt a strong need to regard his literary

activity as a part of a historical entity.…His thirst for literary status, for precedent, tradition, and good order was extremely pressing, and so he set out quite consciously to create them.” A number of his writings through the late 1880s “conveyed” the sense of “a well-established literary tradition and of a lively literary milieu.…Writers are treated in them not only as if they were known and accepted as grand public figures but also as if their places in a literary hierarchy had been long recognized and agreed upon.”45 Miron continues, “Sholem Aleichem introduced the idea of an ‘establishment’ to Yiddish literature and for the first time forced readers and writers alike to make value judgments in terms of hierarchical groupings. These terms were so readily absorbed, that in a short time the groupings he created and the values he recommended seemed to be part of the reality of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature, whereas … almost nothing of the sort had really existed before him.”46 Thus, it’s worth recalling that the discourse of Yiddish literary ancestry, heritage, and tradition that Howe and Greenberg’s Treasury participates in is not natural or self-evident at all, and was one that Rabinovich himself labored to establish and push into circulation as a mechanism of literary historical valuation—in the last decade of the nineteenth century, notably when he designated Mendele Mocher Sforim his literary grandfather (despite Abramovich being only twentythree years older),47 though it probably only hardened into literary historical “fact” with the end of World War I, after Howe’s three “fathers” (the klasiker, as they began to be called during the interwar period) all died within two years of each other—Peretz in 1915, Sholem Aleichem in 1916, and Abramovich in 1917. If Sholem Aleichem indeed figures prominently in their book (only Peretz is represented by more stories, but Rabinovich commands a marginally greater number of pages than Peretz), in positioning Sholem Aleichem as one of three classical Yiddish literary “fathers” Howe and Greenberg reproduce a hegemonic account.48 And Howe and Greenberg’s confidence about the tradition moreover puts Sholem Aleichem’s celebratory narrative to work. After the introductory “Fathers” section comes “Portrait of a World,” which constitutes the book’s longest section by far, then “Jewish Children,” “Breakup,” and then “New Worlds”; finally, the book ends with a section—the book’s shortest—devoted to “Folk Tales.” Explicit in the book’s organization is a narrative of literary tradition that on one level seems contained or closed—from the fathers who created a representational world to the children who populated and lived it, then to the breakdown of that world at the hands of modernization and then genocide; Levinson argues, not without justification, that the Treasury is structured according to a “narrative of historical decline.”49 But at the same time it is possible to find the book’s narrative structure ambiguously open: do we come to the end thinking of the future and Yiddish’s “new worlds” after the destruction of its erstwhile eastern European home, or are we pulled nostalgically back into the ahistorical past of Yiddish literature’s folk origins? Is the Yiddish cultural complex a thing to be celebrated and commemorated but ultimately really mourned? Or does the language, with its literature, still have legs, is it still a live and dynamic cultural force in new postwar homes, geographical or cultural (however potential at the time of the Treasury’s publication)? Interested in recuperating those aspects of Yiddish that can be leveraged by a literary

tradition marked by modernist seriousness at the expense of sentimentalism, Howe leaves us facing simultaneously a question about the categorization of a text and a question about the narratives underlying literary traditions. Beyond acknowledging a question about the legitimacy of identifying Sholem Aleichem or his “On Account of a Hat” as either American or Jewish, therefore, we need also to attend to the history of the ability to canonize him. Howe and Greenberg’s Treasury was published at a significant moment. On the one hand, in 1954 Yiddish as a professional scholarly field was becoming established though it was admittedly young. The Yiddish language has likely not been around for more than one thousand years, and the earliest examples of what we might expansively call Yiddish literature—beyond religious translations and commentaries— are probably not even half that old. What people are mostly comfortable calling modern Yiddish literature can in turn likely be traced really only to the nineteenth century, after maskilim began writing in Yiddish rather than the accustomed Hebrew, on the authority of what we might be safe calling a logic of popular audience.50 But “Yiddish” as a field of research—that is, the disciplined scholarly study of Yiddish culture, including language and literature—was really only professionalized in the twentieth century, on foundations laid in the late nineteenth century by the efforts of Abramovich, Rabinovich, and Peretz to make a modern literary tradition visible, and in a process probably inextricable from projects to formalize, normalize, and nationalize Yiddish, with such events as the Czernowitz Conference (1908), which sought deliberately to make Yiddish a “national” language on par with the other national languages that organized professional institutional scholarship, and, a bit later, in the interwar period, with the founding of a significant institution, YIVO (which, we should remember, was only about thirty years old at the time of the Treasury’s publication).51 Avraham Novershtern argues that it was only in the late 1950s (after Howe and Greenberg’s Treasury, it might be pointed out) that there were “indications” that “Yiddish would be given academic status” in the United States, precisely as the “decline” of Yiddish as a spoken vernacular was becoming obvious. As postwar university-based scholarship on Yiddish gained an albeit small foothold in the United States, it centered on the insiderist question of transmission and, more precisely, institutional translation of what was increasingly being cast as a “folk”-based vernacular: “How can one maintain the treasures of the spoken language and pass on its flavor, nuances, and subtleties to a generation which no longer speaks it?”52 For Novershtern, scholars of Yiddish after the Holocaust—he notes specifically the appointment of Uriel Weinreich to the newly established Atran Chair of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Columbia in 1953, in addition to that of Dov Sadan to head the new Yiddish Department at Hebrew University in 1951 (where, we need to recall because Novershtern doesn’t point it out, Hebrew was mandated as the language of instruction)—dedicated themselves to “serving as a real link between the two periods and the two totally different cultural milieux, prewar Eastern Europe and postwar America.”53 So if the immediate postwar decades presaged the decline of Yiddish as a vernacular, they also witnessed the investment of a desire imagining Yiddish as normative, articulated along with a kind of compensatory professionalization of scholarship that suggested the translation of the

vernacular European past into a postvernacular, academic, American future—all tied together by the implicit assumption that the field of Yiddish studies existed primarily for Jews.54 On the other hand, if by the mid-1950s Yiddish studies was capable of assessing its first institutional beachheads, what we now think of as the professional scholarly field of Jewish American literary study (that is, as something disciplinarily distinct from Wissenschaftinspired Jewish cultural history) was barely a blip on the radar. This was the very beginning of the Jewish American literary “breakthrough,” and Howe’s first Yiddish collection and his 1977 Jewish American collection—and specifically his repeated decision to include Sholem Aleichem’s story—span pretty exactly the roughly twenty-year period in which what we now take for granted as Jewish American literary study took shape; in fact, by 1977 the field was so well established and could be taken for granted to such a degree that the literature had become in many scholars’ eyes a cliché, with warnings of its imminent demise like Howe’s circulating widely.55 Jewish American literature was professionalized along with an institutional certainty about what it was, what it represented, and what it meant. Howe’s anthologies demand some historical context. Wendy Zierler has argued that by the 1930s it was no longer really possible to ignore U.S.-based Jewish belletristic writing, but, while popular prewar Wissenschaft-inspired Jewish literature anthologies like Leo Schwartz’s The Jewish Caravan from 1935 and its sequel, 1937’s A Golden Treasure of Jewish Literature, aimed to legitimize U.S.-based Jewish writing by establishing a kind of continuum which would “clearly link the American Jewish literary present with its international Jewish past,” at least insofar as the collections provided a “forum” in which this U.S.-based writing could be “valued and treasured” in the context of the broad sweep of Jewish cultural history, they nonetheless give the “impression” of “American Jewish literature as a fledgling enterprise that could not yet stand alone.”56 But the Holocaust’s role in establishing a kind of easy historical wrapper around the Yiddish literary tradition (or at least in laying down a series of more or less recognizable historical surveying stakes around it), in conjunction with the postwar combination of Howe and Greenberg’s Treasury and Howe’s later Jewish-American Stories, goes further, making Jewish American literature a privileged site through which to access the now “all-but-closed canon” of Yiddish literature, as Jeffery Shandler has put it,57 and through it the historical foundation of American Jewish culture. Indeed, Shandler points out that anthologies of Yiddish literature translated into English served not only non-Jews and non-Ashkenazim, but, more importantly, “the growing number of descendants of Yiddish speakers who no longer speak or read Yiddish and who have a very different sense of Jewish linguistic and cultural vernacularly than did their recent forbears.…These collections are of interest not only as literary works of translation and canonization, but also as agents of cultural transmission.”58 Howe and Greenberg’s anthology “virtually reanimated” the Yiddish world destroyed by the Holocaust, “reconfigur[ing] an audience for Yiddish literature” that wasn’t merely “the folk” and “forging a new conceptualization of Yiddish vernacularity in the American post–Holocaust milieu, in which fluency in Yiddish language and the cultural literacy of prewar Yiddish-speaking Jews are no longer central.” If the works collected in the Treasury can no longer “stand on their own,” as

Howe and Greenberg suggest they had been able to do before the Holocaust rent the normative vernacular link between Jewish people and Yiddish language, Shandler argues that “readers now require supporting material,” and “an overarching metanarrative”; Howe and Greenberg’s anthology “situates” the Yiddish stories it collects “not so much in some kind of experiential context as in a historical and cultural intertextuality with each other.”59 As anthologized in these postwar, U.S.-based collections, Yiddish literature doesn’t offer a historical lens on a self-evident past so much as it actively and creatively—and postvernacularly—reproduces the history of a Jewish American present. Through the intervention of a kind of textual and intertextual prosthesis that’s necessary after the Holocaust, Howe’s anthologies offer American Jews access to an eastern European Yiddishbased past that was constructed during the postwar years as properly theirs. Thus, though scholarship on Yiddish literature and scholarship on Jewish American literature now often exist in institutional and professional separation from each other (if not indeed downright antagonism), Howe’s iterated deployment of Sholem Aleichem in fact suggests that our initial questions about Howe’s anthologization of “On Account of a Hat” reveal a more fundamental discursive instrumentalization of Yiddish in the development of the Jewish American literary field, an instrumentalization that would have been impossible without Yiddish becoming over the course of the Cold War part of the professional signifying apparatus of Jewish American identity. The Treasury participated in a process of legitimizing Yiddish for American readers, and then Jewish-American Stories helped authorize Yiddish as the bearer of American Jewish writers’—and through them an emergently institutionalized canon of American Jewish literature’s—affective relationship to the Jewish past. And this was taking place precisely as that relationship was being represented as imperiled through the double-whammy of genocide and assimilation. So while World of Our Fathers declared the Yiddish world dead, combined with Jewish-American Stories it simultaneously provided the means for an emerging class of Jewish American literary professionals—in the name of Jewish American readers—to access that past through a professionalized canon of literature. Indeed, we might also note, finally, two historical contingencies: Howe’s Treasury coeditor Greenberg died, coincidentally, just a month after the Jewish-American Stories collection came out, and Philip Roth used one of the Yiddish proverbs from the last part of the Treasury as the epigraph for his breakthrough work, Goodbye, Columbus;60 I’d be a fool to make any claims for their probative value, but these two events suggest a critical itinerary: the imagination of Yiddish as a self-sufficient tradition or empirical historical formation cedes place to the imagination of Yiddish as an instrument of Jewish American literature. While Yiddish emerged as an object of disciplinary study (however contested) at least a generation or two earlier than did Jewish American literature, the Jewish American literary field would domesticate an image of Yiddish in establishing itself in the decades following the Holocaust. The discursive fact of Yiddish literary history, whose own birth, Dan Miron reminds us, was accompanied by debates about its legitimacy, was instrumentalized in the emergence of a professional discourse of Jewish American literature, through a leveraging of a newly biologistic concept

of Jewish cultural history, in the first decades after the Holocaust—right around the time that Jewish American literature was emerging as a legible category.

The Yiddish History of the Jewish American Future 1: Jewish Studies and Americanization In Philip Roth’s 1986 book The Counterlife, not particularly Zionist narrator Nathan Zuckerman finds himself in Israel a handful of years after the Yom Kippur War, marveling at a whole country wondering, “What the hell is this business of being a Jew?…What is a Jew in the first place? It’s a question that’s always had to be answered: the sound Jew was not made like a rock in the world—some human voice once said ‘Djoo,’ pointed to somebody, and that was the beginning of what hasn’t stopped since.”61 Well, neither Yiddish nor Jewish American literature—that is, specifically and crucially, as objects of disciplinary interest and knowledge production—was “made like a rock in the world” either: both fields—and our abilities to talk about them and produce knowledge in and about them—are products of human rather than natural history. Accordingly, to analyze the role played by Yiddish in the invention of Jewish American Literature is to put “Yiddish” to use not in order to take it for granted as a self-evident thing “like a rock in the world,” as simply and coherently a language, literature, or culture, and certainly not as the representation of a historical subject, but to aim at a discursive anchor, the disciplinary center of an analytical vocabulary and set of questions and techniques, the focal point around which a field of thinking is organized—a discourse that incites talk and intellectual production about Yiddish language, literature, and culture certainly, but which is not reducible to them. Such genealogical attention resists presumptions of historical continuity or natural links between “Yiddish” and Jewish American literary or cultural production as successive expressions or normalized representations of a transhistorical subject. I hope to render visible a series of historical conjunctions that articulated a set of professional practices organized around emerging patterns of legibility.62 The emergence of Jewish American literary study was an intellectual and disciplinary event that depended on a number of discursive transformations: not only the professionalization of Jewish studies within the postwar U.S. university and an emerging focus within the humanities on ethnicity and identity and on the writer as a representative figure but also what we could call, alternatively, a Jewish studies-based Americanism or an Americanization of Jewish studies, a transformation aligned with a recognition that after the Holocaust America had emerged as, essentially, the center of world Jewry, a relocation and a dominance that, if challenged to a degree by the existence of Israel after 1948 and certainly since 1967, nonetheless survive in a series of institutional prerogatives, not least in the predominance of U.S.-based institutions and donors in Jewish scholarship, philanthropy, and fund-raising, but also in such dominant late- and postCold War intellectual formations as the discourses of the “Americanization of the Jews” and the “Americanization of the Holocaust.” To speak of an Americanism in or of Jewish studies is therefore not simply to rehearse the well-circulated narrative of the “Americanization of the Jews,” a historical narrative that,

while gaining a lot of traction during—and as a way of describing—the Cold War period, experiencing its heyday in the late 1980s and early 1990s,63 dates back at least to the 1920s.64 The post-Holocaust Americanization of Yiddish should be understood in conjunction with this larger discursive inflection of the Jewish studies field, with its generalized goal of producing historical knowledge of Jews, the cultures through which they understood themselves, and the economic, political, and scholarly discourses that made them their objects. Thus, the circulation of Sholem Aleichem through Howe’s two anthologies cannot be taken in isolation, or at all self-evidently, as the exclusive provenance of Yiddish. Rather, the process that allowed Sholem Aleichem to become a Jewish American writer of Jewish American stories was part of a larger realignment that, inciting talk both of the Americanization of the Jews and Jewish American literature, enabled also an American reclamation and redemption of Yiddish, a recuperation of Jewish history for a disciplinary project to produce knowledge about Jewish American writing indexed to a Jewish subject of history. With this history in mind, we cannot be so quick to reproduce the Americanist exceptionalism of the breakthrough narrative. Michael P. Kramer has shown that the immediate postwar period that recognized “breakthrough” was also the period in which Jewish scholarship more generally turned seriously to America. In the wake of the destruction of European Jewish culture and with Israel, as Kramer puts it, still in its “swaddling clothes,” Jewish American culture and history could be elevated as more than a “marginal” sideshow of global Jewish history—as, in fact, “the center of world Jewry.”65 Postwar scholars responded to new geocultural realities with a “groundswell of professional activity” organized around the documentation of a newly compelling three-hundred-year-old, specifically American Jewish cultural history. “Whatever the ideological and historiographical differences among these historians,” Kramer assrts, “the stories they told collectively gave coherence and continuity to Jewish American history, made a single, progressive narrative of its discrete cultural components…combining like tributaries into a progressively widening and intensifying Jewish American stream”; and “the narrative assumed and confirmed Jewish communal integrity: there was a Jewish American community, a longstanding Jewish American community, ripe for its new role, ready for its story to be told—despite differences in geographic location, economic status, political beliefs, and denominational affiliations.”66 Or as Robert M. Seltzer put it in 1995, in the 1950s “American Jewish history came into its own as a distinct area of scholarly research and academic analysis,” and “in the last four decades American Jewish studies has become a full-fledged branch of American ethnic and social history.…The resulting picture indicates how an Americanized Jewry emerged from the melting pot of Old World Jewish subcultures and became internally divided along new fault lines, producing its own dialectic of vectors and forces pointing … where?”67 Seltzer’s invocation of a sense of futurity here does double duty as both invitation to further research and evidence of a field legitimating such research. Attending—running parallel to, but also intertwined with—a new focus on America in Jewish studies, that is, was a new Americanist discursive anchor of Jewish studies. Professionalized talk and scholarship about the Americanization of the Jews, in other words,

can productively be seen as in fact symptomatic of an Americanization of Jewish studies. Kramer is careful in his analysis of Americanization therefore to cast assimilation as something more complex than a simple erasure of Jewishness, and with his focus on the intersection of Jewish-American as a critical fulcrum, Irving Howe is a crucial figure for him, representing a postwar group of literary intellectuals for whom the Americanness and the Jewishness of Jewish American writers, though not exactly incompatible, could never quite be reconciled, either—and for whom this dissonance held value. Even as they “spoke of the congruence or compatibility” of Jewish and American, these “postwar critics insisted at the same time upon a pronounced Jewish difference, and upon the defiant discomfort of difference.” And the literary history they crafted “from this paradoxical understanding is a fantasy in which assimilation is given its imaginative due, in which renunciation is reconfigured as Jewish self-assertion, in which Jewishness is construed as an angle of vision, an inflection, or, at its most attenuated and mysterious, an attitude or feeling of marginality” that, in Howe’s words, American democracy’s “hospitality, tolerance, and generosity” could never “quite dispel.”68 Howe had written a famous essay for Commentary in 1946 called “The Lost Young Intellectual: A Marginal Man, Twice Alienated” that positioned itself as a response, as its first sentence put it, to “a new social type [that] has appeared in recent years on the American Jewish scene”; the article served as a kind of pacesetter for professionalized talk of the alienation of the Jewish American intellectual, who characteristically experiences an increasingly successful assimilation even while finding America not entirely welcoming.69 For Kramer, Howe’s diagnosis of this “liminal figure,” who is “both Jewish and American and neither,” sealed the fate of the interpretation of Jewish American literature Howe would pursue in the coming decades, which was for Howe—as Kramer sees it—anchored in the experience of a population caught between compelling identifications: securely able to identify as neither Americans nor Jews, these writers, like the literature they produced, could have no future. The “brief and anxious history that was invented for Jewish American literature in the postwar period” by Howe and his fellow critics was “a literary history with built-in obsolescence”:70 anchored in the experience of a subject of history occupying an unstable and impermanent historical fissure between the Yiddish-language culture of eastern Europe and the English-language culture of contemporary America, there was little question that this literature, too, would be transitory. As a result, Kramer ends by arguing that it was “inevitable” that for Howe, at least, his Jewish-American Stories should appear as a kind of “yizkor buch,” much like the Treasury had been a generation earlier, a book deliberately presented as a response to the shadow that death casts over a culture—as, in effect, a eulogy. It’s important to appreciate what Kramer does in using the Yiddish term yizkor buch; repeating to a degree the biopolitical gesture we saw in Roskies and Norich before him, Kramer deploys Yiddish as at once a language of Jewish death and a discursive vehicle of cultural recovery. And it serves as well a recognizable ideological project. By ending with a return to the familiar conceit of the improvidence of Howe’s suggestion that Jewish American literature is likely coming to an end, and by rehearsing the selfevidence of Howe’s simply being wrong (at least on this matter)—he recalls our attention to the fact that Jewish

American literature in fact did not come to an end, that Howe’s “literary history with built-in obsolescence,” clearly, is “a history to which the contemporary literature we value for its unembarrassed Jewishness and untroubled Americanness simply does not belong”71— Kramer helps historicize the image of Jewish American literary history as an expansively historicist culturalism: a literary history that takes for granted that Jewish American literature is, simply, anchored by, and therefore representative of, Jewish Americans, the Jews who now (that is around the time of Jewish-American Stories’s publication) stand at the head of Jewish history. For Kramer, Howe was wrong about the future of Jewish American literature because of where he had grounded Jewish American literary history—which is to say in the experience of his own generation of alienated Jewish intellectuals, who had fallen into the cracks between Jewish tradition and American assimilation, but who were no longer the vital center of American Jewry by the time Jewish-American Stories was published. Published as this generation was cresting its assimilatory successes and making its initial moves toward retirement, Jewish-American Stories could therefore hardly appear to Howe—as Kramer sees it—as anything other than a yizkor buch, a memorial to a body of writing that was passing away, like the earlier Treasury of Yiddish Stories had been. Kramer doesn’t repeat the error he accuses Howe of, but he does rely on the same logic that made Howe err, and his use of Yiddish to punctuate it is the coup de grâce. Howe’s discursive leveraging of Yiddish cannot be allowed to circulate in isolation as simply an event in Howe’s biography; it has to be placed in the context of the professionalizing formation of the Jewish American literary field. If in 1977 Howe judged the canon atavistic and predicted that it would dissolve as the unassimilated immigrant experience serving as its historical foundation receded further into the past, the ironic (or snarky) recitation of this error often draws its authority from precisely the same justification, crystallizing in the simple complaint that Howe simply was not attuned to new and emerging patterns of Jewish American experience. In both cases, literature’s primary interpretive virtue is taken to be that it represents, through the shibboleth of “experience” and indexed to the totemic value of Yiddish, historically real, which is to say self-evident, populations: Howe is faulted for not realizing what American Jews really looked like. Kramer’s Howe wrote two yizkor books, the first eulogizing Yiddish literature and the second eulogizing American Jewish literature, but that’s not the end of the story. In 1977 Howe may have failed to recognize how rich the American Jewish tradition had become, but his two collections effectively institutionalized the theory of Jewish American literature that is still ascendant; together their anthological labor helped establish the field of Jewish American literary history. This is the labor of Kramer’s use of the term yizkor buch. The 1954 Treasury did not simply declare Yiddish dead; it abstracted Yiddish from its erstwhile European contexts and, together with the 1977 collection, declared it part of the past of the Jewish subject whose home was now incontrovertibly in America, bringing it into the American literary tradition and making America the proper site for Yiddish’s commemoration, recollection, and recuperation. What is significant about the postwar period for the history of Jewish American literary

history therefore is not so much the breakthrough of Jewish American literature as a selfcoherent event—not the emergence of writing by Jews in the United States, nor of a scholarly focus on that writing. Rather, the convergence of two intellectual events incited this new formation in the scholarly project of producing and revising knowledge about Jews: a new kind of discourse of the American Jew—at once in contact with its Wissenschaft past, proleptically aligned with what would become visible in coming decades as social science– based vocabularies of ethnicity, and organized around an Americanist history of the Jews (even as multiculturalism and ethnic studies tended to ignore Jews and Jewishness as they developed institutionally)—and a new focus across the humanities on the representative writer. Amid this discursive ferment, the field of Jewish American literary study established itself remarkably quickly, and it pivoted on a reframing of the relevance of Yiddish. The first scholarly books and monographs looking like what we now might be comfortable calling Jewish American literary criticism—that is, as disciplinarily distinct from Wissenschaftaligned history or cultural studies—started appearing in the very late 1950s and early 1960s, but even as late as the mid-1940s critics like Howe, Alfred Kazin, and Lionel Trilling—often precisely those intellectuals we now credit with laying foundations for the Jewish American literary field72—were by and large disavowing a specifically American Jewish literary tradition. “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews,” which appeared in 1944 in the Contemporary Jewish Record (the forerunner publication of Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee), is a signal text of this discursive transformation, as a keynote of a number of the short essays— the symposium counted among its contributors emergent literary intellectuals like Delmore Schwartz, Muriel Rukeyser, Ben Field, Louis Kronenberger, Clement Greenberg, and Isaac Rosenfeld, in addition to Kazin and Trilling—is that while the American Jewish tradition such as it exists is not particularly compelling, Yiddish culture is quite persuasive.73 These writers identify as Jews, but are convinced neither of the significance of an American Jewish literary tradition nor of Yiddish’s place in it; it is this lack of conviction that will change— rapidly—in the coming few decades. Jewish American literary “breakthrough” is as important for its discursive reframing of “Yiddish” as for what it tells us about Jewish American authors. A year before “Under Forty” appeared in the Contemporary Jewish Record, Maurice Samuel had published The World of Sholem Aleichem, which Jeffrey Shandler describes as a “hybrid work,” going “far beyond translation,” that presented “biographical material about Sholem Aleichem, historical and cultural background of East European Jewry at the turn of the twentieth century, and retellings of parts of Sholem Aleichem’s writings, all fused into a highly synthetic text that defies every classification.” He quotes Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s characterization of Samuel as translating literature into anthropology, an example of ethnography that, he argues, presented Sholem Aleichem as an object of piety, a kind of ready-made, self-contained access point for a nostalgic pilgrimage back to a prewar European past, a folk world that is no more.74 Shandler also cites Alfred Kazin, who even as late as 1956, in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of Sholem Aleichem’s stories, was arguing that Sholem Aleichem is

“writing about a people, a folk, the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe,” who live “in the absence of loneliness” and “the usual level of strain, of the struggle for values, of the pressing and harrowing need” that is “so often felt” to characterize Jewish life “in America.”75 In other words, before breakthrough the Yiddish literary tradition is distant from the Jewish American experience, existing in a kind of prelapsarian nostalgic idyll before the onset of the marginality and alienation that, for Kazin, Rosenfeld, and others—including Kramer’s Howe—characterized the Jewish American intellectuals who would begin to institutionalize Jewish American literary study. It’s remarkable that in a relatively short span of years Yiddish would be naturalized and domesticated as the modernist literary inheritance of Jewish Americans and their representatives, Jewish American writers—specifically as Jewish American writers. The real discursive innovation of the postwar period, and in particular the breakthrough period, was, in a term, the field label “Jewish American literature.”

The Yiddish History of the Jewish American Future 2: Literary Studies It is a simplification to call the Treasury a yizkor book. It’s certainly true that Howe and Greenberg’s Yiddish anthology, published not even ten years after the end of World War II and the destruction of much of eastern European Yiddish-speaking Jewry, frequently positions itself as a memorial act. Conspicuously, the book is dedicated “to the 6 million,” and the seventy-page introductory essay references the Holocaust several times. Emphatically, Howe ends this essay by insisting that their concern is with the past.76 Yiddish literature “survives,” he admits, but in “isolated circles of authors and readers, who cling to a language which for them is not only history but the answer to history”: what life the literature has—not much anymore—is in this formulation a reaction to destruction, an echo of the past, a fantasy of retreat from the reality of the death of the Yiddish world. Howe admits that no one can know “what the future of Yiddish as both language and literature will be” in the wake of the Holocaust, but he also claims, in essence, not to care. What Howe cares about instead is the past, “the life and the warmth that come to us when we turn to the pages” of such writers as are collected in the Treasury. “Whatever the future,” the Yiddish writers’ “past is certain: they wait for us, ready to speak, if we will only hear them.”77 One can be forgiven for hearing in such passages concern with a tradition that, if having much to offer the current reader, even if enlivening still, is nonetheless of primarily historical interest, and not necessarily itself any longer alive.78 But while its labor of recovery and commemoration locates Yiddish literature and culture predominantly in the past, Howe’s introduction in fact repurposes Yiddish to serve the future of Jewish American literature and culture. Despite its preoccupation with the past, this introduction is not one-note. We read the introduction’s epigraph from Kafka—“… I would tell you, ladies and gentlemen, how much better you understand Yiddish than you suppose”—for example, which, even if we worry that the opening ellipsis (which Howe includes) suggests something we may be missing, suggests as well the possibility of a living Yiddish community, maybe even one for which Yiddish is still organically vernacular and of

which we’re still members.79 But Howe’s introduction makes a stronger case for the relevance and future of Yiddish through two linked argumentative moves that would be widely reproduced by critics to follow: first is a thematic orbit around a concept of mediation as a historical and conceptual operator and second is a focus on overcoming sentimentality in the reception of Yiddish literature. Together, these two argumentative vectors would prepare Yiddish for its discursive capture by an emerging professional field of Jewish American literary study; the first would establish the discursive handle by which this new field would colonize and leverage Yiddish for its own legitimizing historical self-consciousness, and the second would be instrumentalized as the means by which this new field would proclaim itself. In the simplest terms, Howe intends to make a case for the serious, secular, literary historical consideration of Yiddish literature, for disciplined study of “imaginative writings composed by individual authors who possess some awareness of their identity and role as artists.”80 Even if a relative newcomer, Yiddish literature can hold its own among modern world literature; Yiddish may have produced “no Shakespeares, no Dantes, no Tolstois” but “neither can many other widely translated literatures” that authorize prestigious scholarship claim such authors.81 If the Yiddish canon “is a literature virtually unknown to Americans,” Howe lays the blame at a constellation of factors, all failures of reception rather than origin: “translations are often inadequate, because done by devoted non-literary people, or are twisted into sentimentality, because done by translators whose attitude toward Yiddish is one of familiar condescension; a body of criticism in English that has seldom risen above the level of special pleading; and a curious resistance, if not indeed a snobbish parochialism, among American literary people.”82 Good modernists, Howe and Greenberg hope to extract Yiddish literature from the suffocatingly insular embrace of the sentimental impulse to romanticize the culture of Jewish eastern Europe. Once the Yiddish world was “destroyed in the gas chambers,” this impulse became nearly irresistible, and Yiddish acquired “a new and almost holy authenticity” by means of an ideology of unattainability.83 This “holy authenticity,” such as was active in Maurice Samuel’s World of Sholem Aleichem a decade earlier, is weaponized in the sentimentality of Howe and Greenberg’s contemporary readers, who reproduce its impossibility in their own generational attitudes about Yiddish: “Among American Jews who retain vague memories of Yiddish as the tongue of their parents, there has arisen a legend that Yiddish is untranslatable.”84 Howe’s remarkable accomplishment here—previewed by the Kafka epigraph—shouldn’t be underestimated: if Yiddish literature deserves to be taken seriously, accorded the same kind of establishmentarian respect its fellow national literatures receive, in its translation into the space of this institutional and academic prestige it is in fact familiarized.85 Howe executes an ingenious transition: though Yiddish literature lies too far from view for the general American reader, Howe suggests that the American Jewish reader, in particular, can and should take a closer look at it. The real labor of the collection is its articulation of an image of Yiddish literature that offers the American reader—but in the form of a specifically Jewish one—a culturally legitimate way to recuperate and recover the

history of the European Jews after the Holocaust. The mechanism of this articulation is a conceptual slipperiness that elides Howe’s two key terms American and Jewish as he argues for the American relevance of Yiddish literature. Organized as a reclamation of the past transcending mere devotional piety, the book pursues a critical project to destabilize the ahistorical, and in fact dehistoricizing, “hidden sentimental desire” on the part of U.S. Jews to keep Yiddish walled off from history, “to preserve it as a soft sweet haze of memory”;86 pivoting on Howe’s investment in modernism’s critique of sentimentality, it’s a critical project that puts Yiddish to work for the future of Jewish American self-consciousness. “American literary people” may be responsible (at least in part) for the oblivion into which Yiddish has fallen, but Howe seems fairly certain that it should be “American Jews” who rescue and recuperate Yiddish. Howe admits that Yiddish literature itself flirted with this sentimentalizing impulse, certainly once the communal foundations of the insular Jewish society of eastern Europe began to crumble—most notable in this regard, Howe avers, were the later stories of I. L. Peretz, and he acknowledges that Yiddish literature, especially in the “classical trio” of Mendele Mocher Sforim, Peretz, and Sholom Aleichem, was certainly distinctive for its closeness to its “folk sources”—and he concedes a “greater emotional permissibility, a greater readiness to welcome tears or laughter,” in Yiddish literature “than in American culture.” But he also insists that “the vocabulary of literary criticism rests largely upon … unexplored assumptions of value,” and that “such notions as ‘sentimentality’ are not eternal constants but are radically shaped by the context of the culture in which they are used.”87 Though these “folk materials” are still very much alive in it, modern Yiddish literature itself is “self-consciously literary” and “therefore not itself a folk literature”;88 instead, he sees the Yiddish of the first major Yiddish literary writers of the end of the nineteenth century as “still responsive to the voice of the folk but beginning to model itself on the literary patterns of the West”89—with Yiddish literature achieving a kind of mediating “balance.” Sholem Aleichem is Howe’s chief representative case history; if the literary historical narrative Sholem Aleichem himself introduced in the late nineteenth century indeed became dominant quite quickly, it becomes clear in the years following the publication of the Treasury that Howe and Greenberg gave this narrative an Americanist stamp of approval. The titular Jew of Tevye the Dairyman stands as “one of the great figures of modern literature” in Howe’s estimation,90 a declaration that authorized innumerable repetitions in the years to follow. Howe celebrates Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish as “one of the most extraordinary verbal achievements of modern literature,” comparing it to T. S. Eliot’s “revolution in the language of English verse” and “Bertolt Brecht’s infusion of street language into the German lyric”—writers whose high-literary, modernist bona fides are unimpeachable, and whose cultural value rests on a similar claim of mediation—in arguing for the national realism in Sholem Aleichem’s work, which makes literature of Jewish social experience: Sholem Aleichem’s “imagery is based on an absolute mastery of the emotional rhythm of Jewish life.”91 And it is precisely this “mastery” that Howe will leverage to rescue Sholem Aleichem from his sentimental devaluation and put him to use as a representation of

the Jewish past for an American future. In their epistolary introduction to The Best of Sholem Aleichem, a 1979 edited collection, Howe and Ruth Wisse repeat the revisionary recovery argument, impugning a sentimental scholarly past that must be overcome in the interest of a new critical order grounded in literary seriousness. Redeeming the sentimental commonplaces about Yiddish’s enduring contemporaneity, Howe suggests that Sholem Aleichem is appropriate to modern America, as he writes in a style that we usually associate with twentieth-century writers, and that contrary to his reception in clichés like the “toothless entertainer, a jolly gleeman of the shtetl, a fiddler crying on his roof,” critics need to “reject or at least complicate this view.” No mere “folk writer,” Rabinovich was a “self-conscious artist, canny in his use of literary techniques,” even as his writing achieves a “balance” between the individual and the collectivity, between Jewish tradition and personal sensibility, between guardianship of the “Jewish past” and an encounter with and “maybe” acceptance of “modern Jewish life.”92 The critics who follow in the wake of Howe and Greenberg’s Treasury in the coming years emphasize the intersection of these two arguments, acclaiming Yiddish literature for its sophisticated mediation between tradition and modernity, between America and Europe, between “high” cultural literary voice and “low” cultural folk voice, between Jewish past and Jewish future, and insisting that it warrants serious consideration rather than the sentimentalized distance that has dominated its reception. In a review that appeared in the New York Times in 1954, Uriel Weinreich, son of YIVO founder Max Weinreich and newly seated in the Atran Chair at Columbia, repeats the argument for—and from—critical seriousness, positioning it in the service of a larger argument about the Americanization of Yiddish. He celebrates Howe and Greenberg’s Treasury as “an example of the way Yiddish literature should be presented in English,” calling the editors’ introduction “one of the most intelligent essays on Yiddish belles-lettres available in English.” Too often, Weinreich laments in picking up a theme from that introduction, the American reader will “miss” the “finer points” of the Yiddish tradition, “misled by frequent ill-informed descriptions of this literature as exclusively ‘folk’ in character,” and is thus unable—Weinreich uses the word “unprepared”—to apprehend Yiddish literature’s “artistic seriousness.” But as was the case with Howe, Weinreich’s argument for critical seriousness in fact looks in places a lot like an argument grounded in Jewish communal politics, as he focuses on blaming a reductive understanding of the Yiddish world for the way Yiddish literature has been transmitted and received within the Jewish community: a “failure of intellectual communication between Jewish generations has produced a climate in which…sentimentality or condescension pass [sic] for evaluation.” Thankfully, Howe and Greenberg’s Treasury contests this reductive sentimentalism, and it “performs its task”—of “facilitating intellectual communication between Jewish generations”—“responsibly and elegantly.”93 Elaborating a tendency active in Howe’s positioning of Yiddish literature, Weinreich puts the introduction’s focus on the Jewish American recuperation of Yiddish to use—a focus, and a recuperation, that drew motive force from the productive slipperiness of Jewish and American. At the intersection of literature and “Jewish generations,” literary history is made more than a matter of heritage: it

is made a matter of heritability. For Weinreich, the Yiddish literary and cultural tradition had become the birthright of American Jews in the postwar. The elision of Jewish and American, this intimacy at the heart of an emerging Americanization of Yiddish, is again articulated by Norman Podhoretz, who in his 1955 Commentary review of Howe and Greenberg’s Treasury further invests the biopolitical legibility of Yiddish culture for American, and especially Jewish American, literary critics.94 What struck young Podhoretz, in his midtwenties and just a few years past earning a double BA from Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary when the Treasury came out, was Howe and Greenberg’s insistence that Yiddish writers could hold their own alongside other, Gentile writers: “what we have here is Yiddish literature presented under the auspices, so to speak, of the top-most intellectual fraternity.”95 The willingness to compare Yiddish literature and world literature was far more important than any particular findings that might come from that comparison. The publication of the Treasury is a “significant event,” that is, not because Yiddish comes out near the top of the world literature pile. Indeed, it doesn’t: Podhoretz repeats Howe’s admission that Yiddish literature “produced no Shakespeares, no Dantes, no Tolstois.” The real significance of the book for Yiddish, he insists, lies in the fact that “the critics have investigated it and declared it kosher.”96 Podhoretz’s use of the word kosher here is obviously, in a word, ironic, if to a second degree, and its shopworn familiarity illustrates just how successful Jewish Americanization had been. At one level of irony, the word points to the scholarly rather than Jewish validation of Yiddish literature: Jews have finally made it into the club (or canon) of critically significant literature. Yiddish literature is significant as literature, not merely on its own terms, or merely as Jewish literature. But this cosmopolitan usage only works if in fact “kosher” signals the Jewish acceptance of Yiddish literature, which is to say Podhoretz’s irony here swallows itself in ethnological pride; as Wisse will argue much later, Jewish critics in Podhoretz’s reckoning have to embrace their Jewish history in order to take their place in world literature prestige networks. The Treasury is important as well because it stands as part of a collective cultural awakening, a new acceptance on the part of the Jewish intellectuals of Podhoretz’s generation of their own, Jewish, traditions. Does Podhoretz’s use of kosher signal the Yiddish infiltration of the Western canon, or the university’s de-Judaicizing professionalization of Yiddish? Well, neither of these alternatives gets it quite right; rather, Podhoretz’s implication is that it is now in America alone that the Jews can lay claim to the Jewish past, via the agency of Yiddish scholarship. The American imprimatur of acceptance, the collection’s American authorization, signals in fact its Jewish legitimacy:97 “It is as though the worlds represented by Eliezer Greenberg and Irving Howe, after carrying on a dilatory flirtation for several years, have finally joined hands to acknowledge their kinship. The university and the yeshiva, the big city and the shtetl, have come together to explore one another’s wisdom, and they find it comfortably possible to speak the same language—English.”98 The real achievement of the book is to bring the study of Yiddish literature into the English-speaking university, to unite the (Jewish) Yiddish writer with the (American) literary critic: it’s a cosmopolitan move that liberates Yiddish from its erstwhile parochial confines—but within

the at once protected and expansive, which is to say hegemonic, confines of postwar Americanism.99 For Podhoretz the argument for Yiddish literature’s scholarly and intellectual prestige operates as an exceptionalist argument about Jewish intellectuals’ ability to accept the legitimacy of Jewish culture and authority of Jewish history—and an admonition that American Jews are now in a position of responsibility for that history. Podhoretz sharpens his point: “whatever else it indicates, the new interest seems to betoken a healthier relationship between American Jewish intellectuals and their Jewish experience” than has been common, or even allowed, up to this point.100 As an illustration, Podhoretz begs indulgence for an “autobiographical digression”: among his college coterie—fellow young, intellectually inclined Jews freshly uptown from immigrant families poised before a potential future as Howe’s alienated lost young intellectuals—he proudly admits that he was the pariah for suggesting that “Jewish culture was worth studying, as a culture.” The suspicions among his friends were characteristic of American Jewish intellectuals immediately after the war, who had not yet warmed to the idea that Jewish culture was respectable in their newly adopted terms—that is, in terms of prestigious literary and cultural criticism that was increasingly becoming aware of a need to articulate itself in relation to a professionalizing postwar academy—which is to say worthy of interest as a thing in itself, apart from whatever relevance it might have to them as Jews. Presenting the breakthrough narrative as part of the long history of the ordeal of civility, Podhoretz notes—regretfully, if not resentfully—that his friends would not “permit themselves the luxury of investigating their own origins” before being “persuaded that these agents were objects of general interest”; or, in his apposite phrase, “They had, as it were, to get the smell of garlic out of the breath of Jewish culture.”101 No “isolated phenomenon”—in “the last few years,” Podhoretz testifies in the court of breakthrough, a wide swath of “serious writers” have turned to consider “Jews and Jewish experience as one of the donnee´s of the American scene”102—publication of the Treasury marks not simply the critical legitimation of Yiddish literature by leading Jewish American literary intellectuals and professionals, and not only the coordination of Yiddish literary study with an emerging field of Jewish American literary and cultural study, but the inauguration of the Jewish literary intellectual as the privileged figure of, and presiding over, the Jewish American literary archive. Ten years down the line, Podhoretz is the return of Howe’s repressed, the validation of Jewish tradition that Howe’s lost young Jewish American intellectual could not quite manage. No “isolated phenomenon” indeed: Howe himself would reproduce the dynamics of this return, as well, in another essay, “Sholom Aleichem: Voice of Our Past,” which, though published in his 1963 book A World More Attractive, is mostly a synthetic redaction of a number of essays Howe wrote on Rabinovich and Yiddish literature generally over the course of the late ’40s and through the ’50s (including the introduction to the Treasury). Though consisting mostly of recycled material, its own innovation and force, and its alliance with Podhoretz’s polemic, comes in large part from its title’s use of the first-person plural possessive pronoun; in it we can certainly hear Howe trying out a leitmotif he will use to

more famous effect thirteen years later, in the title of World of Our Fathers. We come across the familiar argument that Sholem Aleichem “needs to be rescued from his reputation, from the quavering sentimentality which keeps him at a safe distance,” a distance that, despite his popularity, is at striking odds with the “intimacy” with which his writing holds onto the Yiddish world of Jewish America’s—“our”—past.103 The Jewish intellectuals of Sholem Aleichem’s own time104 didn’t take him seriously, even as his popularity, contextualized in and linked with a sentimentalized narrative of his representing eastern European Jewry’s folk culture, soared; only now, in America, is “our past” acceptable to us intellectualized Jews. Howe’s historicist revision of his own mediation theme proposed in this essay, highlighting the fact that Sholem Aleichem arrived on the eastern European scene at a “turning point,” a moment of transition or betweenness for the Jewish people, and that his intimacy with his culture keeps his writing in “balance,”105 emphasizes qualities that mediate the literature’s circulation in, and appropriation by, America. Indeed, popularity is a keyword for Howe’s instrumentalization of Yiddish: popularity was the reason Sholem Aleichem’s intellectual contemporaries spurned his writing, and popularity again threatens his status in midcentury America. If Sholem Aleichem’s popularity in Europe prevented the contemporary “Jewish intelligentsia” from taking seriously his role as cultural mediator for the Yiddish-speaking eastern European Jews undergoing social transformation at the hands of modernity, then his popularity in the United States is preventing the English-speaking Jews of America from experiencing the intimacy with the Jewish past that is their birthright. While Rabinovich’s popularity was a marker of his legitimacy among Yiddishspeaking Jews in Europe, it functions as a symptom of the delegitimizing distance between American Jews and Jewish history. Just a year or two after he proclaimed Sholem Aleichem the “voice of our past,” Howe sharpened his worries about popularity in his terrifically acerbic 1964 essay on Fiddler on the Roof, “Tevye on Broadway”—this time more explicitly couched in terms of a question about what kind of Jewish culture Jewish American intellectuals are poised to take responsibility for. Howe called the popular musical a “tasteless jumble of styles” that “reflects the spiritual anemia of Broadway and of the middle-class Jewish world.”106 Howe returns (albeit negatively) to the conceit of Sholem Aleichem’s promise of “intimacy,” the possibility he represents of mediating between American Jews and a Yiddish past that is potentially, but rightfully, theirs: manifested in such “tasteless” and “commonplace” spectacles as Fiddler, Sholem Aleichem’s popularity displaces a more “intimate” relationship with the writer and the Yiddish tradition; the result is that “Sholem Aleichem is deprived of his voice.”107 But “his voice” is “our voice,” the voice of Jews in America, the country that, 1967 or not, seemed one of the most hospitable places going for Jews. Howe’s complaint is that the production remained hopelessly “out of tune” with the “realism” of Sholem Aleichem’s writing, deaf to the “intimate verbal plays and turns” of Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish,” which is written “on the assumption that his readers share a profoundly ‘inside’ sense of his culture.”108 What his introduction to the Treasury described as “an absolute mastery of the emotional rhythms of Jewish life” is here amplified to a fully explicit evocation of Jewish

insiderism, developing a theme implicit in Howe’s earlier writings: “the full range of nuances” in Aleichem’s stories “is available only to the cultivated Yiddish reader.”109 But these “cultivated” (Jewish) readers, at least in the United States, are suffering from “a feeling of guilt because they have lost touch with the past from which they derive,” which has in turn been leveraged into an excuse to “indulge” in “an unearned nostalgia.”110 A production like Fiddler elicits wild applause from an audience to whom what matters most of all, indeed to the seeming exclusion of all else, is the postvernacular “sheer fact” of Yiddish reference, merely “that some sign of the neglected Jewish past is being publicly displayed.”111 Fiddler’s repeated incantation is “Tradition!,” but in that iterated platitude Broadway Yiddish became the empty sentimental affect of an inaccessible Jewish past. “One understands the anxiety prompting such nostalgia,” Howe argues, “the nostalgia prompting a lack of critical standards, and the lack of critical standards prompting a surrender of dignity.”112 What Howe finds in Rabinovich’s writing instead is “communal affection,” but his Jewish readers need to overcome an accumulation of clichés in order to rediscover a greater “intimacy” with the “reality” of their shared Yiddish past.113 America sentimentalizes Yiddish, distancing Jews from their past, but America also provides an opportunity for a Jewish reclamation of history through the agency of Yiddish as a discipline, a mode of thinking, a set of critical procedures and modernist strategies. Howe embodies this reclamatory project in a concept that links the mediation argument and the argument against sentimentality. In the Treasury introduction, Howe writes that “without didactic intentions or social ideology,” Sholem Aleichem was “one of those rare storytellers whose work sums up the outlook of a whole culture,” and that he is the “only writer of modern times who may truly be said to be a culture-hero.”114 Howe takes up the concept of the culture hero again in his contributions to the introduction to The Best of Sholom Aleichem, the 1979 volume he edited with Ruth Wisse, who herself went on to reuse it in her Modern Jewish Canon. It is “just this balance,” the dynamic concatenated series of unresolved oppositions running through Sholem Aleichem’s work that includes folk-literary, tradition-modern, participant-critic, and collective-individual, that Howe finds “enchanting” in Sholem Aleichem’s work and that makes him a “culture hero.” Sholem Aleichem “embodies the culture of the Eastern European Jews at a high point of consciousness, at the tremor of awareness that comes a minute before dissolution starts.”115 Howe compares Sholem Aleichem to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens in this regard, writers who were also culture heroes “in their time and place”;116 if a focus on “intimacy” and “affection” are Howe’s answer to the dominant sentimentalization of Sholem Aleichem’s work, it’s because Howe urges critics to historicize Yiddish literature, consider it not the stable representation of an idealized Jewish past, but the situated and dynamic embodiment of a world they inhabit in transition. The culture hero is such for culturally bridging reader and writer. By approaching the literature of a culture hero in the right way, readers can achieve intimacy with the past —their past. As a critical historiographic concept the culture hero relocates the significance of Yiddish from the sentimentalized ground of identitarian clichés and submits it to the disciplinary

procedures of professionalized scholarly objectivity. In the introduction to The Best of Sholem Aleichem Howe suggests that there may be two Sholem Aleichems—the “universally adored” writer but then, “beneath the scrim of his playfulness and at the center of his humor, a world of uncertainty, shifting perception, anxiety, even terror” that has not been made an object of critical attention—indeed, serious critical attention has not fully taken on Sholem Aleichem or Yiddish literature.117 Howe wonders if his “modernist bias and training” makes a “distortion” of his view of Sholem Aleichem, leads him to look for “anxiety” or “terror,” but he reassures himself it’s there; so he wonders why it has not been seen before: “Perhaps the ferocious undercurrent in Sholem Aleichem’s humor has never been fully seen, or perhaps Jewish readers have been intent on domesticating him in order to direct attention from the fact that, like all great writers, he can be very disturbing.”118 So the real distortion is in how the recognition of Yiddish—literature and culture—has been administered by a particular style of Jewish self-regard: Howe does not say “merely” that we should look at Sholem Aleichem as a “self-conscious, disciplined artist” rather than “a folk voice (or worse yet, the ‘folksy’ tickler of Jewish vanities)” because, while Sholem Aleichem may be “close to the oral tradition of Yiddish folklore,” Howe insists that that “folk material is itself not nearly so comforting or soft as later generations of Jews have liked to suppose.”119 Howe’s concept of the culture hero therefore leverages a kind of paradox: if the introduction of the concept is premised on a kind of secular historicization of Sholem Aleichem, precisely by these means Howe effects the abstraction of the writer from specifically bounded historical context, freeing him to be put to use for Jewish American literature. The concept of the culture hero is an amped-up concept of representativity, supercharged with a powerful concept of multidirectional agency; as such, it is, in essence, the partner concept to Howe’s exceptionalist-insiderist image of the literary intellectual, the vehicle of an ethnic group’s historical subjectivity. The culture-hero—via the literary intellectual—becomes the agency through which a cultural group makes contact with its proper cultural past. It’s not simply that Sholem Aleichem or Yiddish more generally needs to be recovered to stabilize “our” image of the Jewish past; this revisionary project needs to put Yiddish to use for American criticism’s present and future.120

American Jewish Yiddishism: A Cost-Benefit Analysis As Yiddish became a kind of historiographic battleground in the decades after the Holocaust, a fetish of Jewish history dominated American scholarship on Sholem Aleichem. In the twentieth anniversary issue of Prooftexts, David Roskies combines Howe’s canonization and Podhoretz’s irony in a powerful literary historical narrative, providing the final turn of the screw of Yiddish’s Americanist professionalization. Roskies famously argues that, though Howe and Greenberg’s inclusion of Sholem Aleichem’s “On Account of a Hat” in their Treasury can indeed be read as “rescu[ing]” or redeeming, in the name of literary seriousness and “modernism,” Sholem Aleichem’s story—indeed Sholem Aleichem himself—from the sentimental presumption of a parochial Yiddish, such an expectation deconstructs, reproducing and magnifying the more fundamental mistake not simply of taking Yiddish as a

symbol of atavistic parochialism incommensurate with modernist, high-literary value but also of taking for granted a whole constellation of oppositions, including high-low, center-margin, university-street, state-popular, modern-parochial, and literary-vernacular—in other words, precisely those oppositions which Sholem Aleichem, in the emerging consensus that was consolidating in the 1950s, presumably mediated and transcended.121 The risk in arguing merely, simply, for the seriousness of Yiddish literature is reinforcing precisely the hierarchies the scholar presumably hoped to overcome. Much in Sholem Aleichem’s story, Roskies admits, “fairly cried out for the modernist reading” that Howe and his buddies, like Isaac Rosenfeld, whom Howe drafted to translate “On Account of a Hat” for the Treasury, felt so strongly that Sholem Aleichem deserved. In a rehearsal that seems at once tailor-made for Suchoff’s argument about modernism’s domestication of Jewish identity and also to warn against its imperial power, the “professional class of readers” who grew up in the wake of Howe, including Roskies himself earlier in his career, “agreed with Howe that this story provides an unusually stark portrait of the modern Jew in extremis,” and that Sholem Shachnah, the story’s protagonist, is indeed “the father of us all.”122 But now Roskies diagnoses an “overriding concern with character” in these readings, one that operates “at the expense of so many other tantalizing elements in the story,” and that “bespeaks a very modernist agenda”; in essence, this modernist reclamation of Sholem Aleichem sought to rescue the author and his writings from the particularity of their historical origins, translating them into a universal significance and value. While Roskies does not “disavow these modernist readings,” looking back from the vantage point of Prooftexts’s twentieth year, he does admit “I view them now as woefully inadequate—indeed, as patronizing and apologetic.” They are patronizing because in trying to bridge the gap between the story’s past significance and present meaning, these ingenious interpretations place the critic and modern reader far above the author and his intended audience, and they are apologetic because in “applying terms and concepts that are utterly foreign to Sholem Aleichem’s time and place, they aim to remove the stigma of provincialism” from what looks otherwise like a lowprestige folk tale. Ultimately, Roskies felt a “mandate to revisit Sholem Aleichem in the Yiddish original,”123 and he realizes that when Sholem Aleichem and his story are raised “onto a high literary pedestal,” what was “unwittingly sacrificed was nothing less than the Yiddish original.” Rather than extracting and abstracting Sholem Aleichem or his muchanthologized story from their world—and thereby reducing them—Roskies realizes he “had to relearn the communal, cacophonous art of listening.”124 Indeed, in Roskies’s closing admission that “when Alan Mintz and I launched Prooftexts twenty years ago, our goal was to rescue Jewish literature from its paraphrasers, plagiarizers, and panderers,” one hears what almost sounds like an apology, and maybe even a warning about the danger in the intention to “rescue” “Jewish literature” or Yiddish in particular—a danger that this is all too simple, relying on a reductive opposition.125 This guilt—even if only intimated—is a declaration of answerability that traces its origins directly to Howe’s confident “our” in declaring Sholem Aleichem the “voice of our past.” But it integrates that “our” into the professionalized protocols of literary criticism. There’s a bit more than a whiff

of an authenticity fetish in the “original” of Roskies’s “Yiddish original,” which we should likely imagine as the ethnographic incontrovertibility of history, of the past—a kind of actuality and reality and substance that are lost in the universalizing abstractions of modernism that Roskies challenges here (and which Howe can be seen to have previewed in his worry, if that is the right word, about Singer’s “modernism”). For Roskies, Sholem Aleichem’s story shows how Yiddish is already intensively imbricated at once with modernism’s high-literary cathexes and sentimental clichés, how the “unredeemable facts of Jewish life in exile”126 are themselves, in their resistance to rescue or redemption or perfect translation, already inextricable from what we might call the “literary.”127 Roskies suggests that with his intensive anthologizing interest in this story, Howe “launched an ongoing search for socio-psychological verities about the Jewish condition that lay buried beneath the surface of this hilarious tale of a scatterbrain who loses his head when he loses his hat.”128 And yet Howe’s anthologizing drive to translate Sholem Aleichem, first for a project of postwar literary history and then for a project of Jewish American identity work, meant that he missed out on all of what in the tale exceeds its historiological relevance, or at least that he brought the former under the ethnological oversight of the latter. Howe missed the “polyphony,” the “complex interplay of voices,” all the “speech rhythms,” the “stylization,” the “multilingualism” and “diglossia”—all of which, Roskies admits, Sholem Aleichem might have missed himself; to “push the text in a centrifugal direction toward an even more ‘universal’ reading” would be to lose Sholem Aleichem’s “world.”129 Ultimately, Roskies illustrates how, from the national realism of Howe’s “mastery of the emotional rhythm of Jewish life” to Kramer’s “yizkor book,” a newly Americanized Yiddish was deployed as the representational bearer of a new Jewish American past. That this history of the professional literary critical disciplining of Yiddish, which so often operated as a modality of postwar Americanism, functions to denormalize Yiddish as simply the national vernacular of the Jews of eastern Europe and thereby prepare it for belonging in some way to the Jews of America as a kind of heritable birthright offers more reason to understand it under the rubric of what Jeffrey Shandler has famously diagnosed as Yiddish’s postvernacularity. Shandler anatomizes a shift in the meaning of Yiddish in the postwar: even as one of the genocidal effects of the Holocaust was a marked reduction in the use of the language as a vernacular, in the postwar period it became increasingly possible to register a “proliferation of other forms of engagement with the language.” If “ready connections among language, culture, and people” could “no longer be assumed” after World War II, “Yiddish culture” developed “a sizeable constituency independent of a vernacular speech community.”130 With the United States becoming home to the world’s largest and most prosperous Jewish community after the war, but a community that was not majority Yiddish speaking, Yiddish, in losing its function as a vernacular, became at once “a compelling metonym for the tragic loss of its speakers” and “a reification of [Jewish] heritage.”131 If a normalized image of its prewar function as a vernacular rendered the links and relays between Yiddish and the identifiably Jewish population of its speakers inconspicuous (in a word)—the “assumed” “ready connections among language, culture, and

people”—then in its postwar postvernacularization Yiddish becomes more conspicuously, and explicitly, a marker of Jewish heritage: “In other words, in postvernacular Yiddish the very fact that something is said (or written or sung) in Yiddish is at least as meaningful as the meaning of the words being uttered—if not more so.”132 (This is a conclusion Howe had essentially reached in his piece on Fiddler.) The critical responsibility in assessing Yiddish culture, therefore, is to do so without judging it from pre-Holocaust—which is to say, inelegantly, pre-postvernacular—perspectives; in other words, the primary job of the postwar critic is to protect against the temptation to normalize Yiddish as a national vernacular.133 But Saul Noam Zaritt has argued that Yiddish has never had a frictionless relationship with the nationalist ideology of proper identity between a vernacular language and a coherent people—what in the nationalist imaginary is always at least potentially a polity. Recalling us to Max Weinreich, Zaritt reminds us that the label “Yiddish” is actually a rather late adoption; while appearing sporadically as early as the seventeenth century, it “only becomes widespread and ‘official’ in the twentieth century (inasmuch as Yiddish had any centralized administrative bodies capable of making official pronouncements), in particular following the famed Czernowitz conference of 1908.” Before this, it was more frequently known as “taytsh” or, essentially, “German”; when it was necessary to differentiate it from German, it would sometimes be referred to as “yidishtaytsh.” It was only under the influence of nationalist ideologies that establishmentarian forces would take hold of Yiddish and police an understanding of the language as a “proper,” which is to say national, vernacular.134 “In order to produce the normalization of Yiddish as the language of a modern nation-state one needs to remove taytsh from the equation—to go from yidish-taytsh to yidish,” Zaritt asserts.135 By tracing this history Zaritt hopes to destabilize the hold concepts of nation and vernacular have over our usage of Yiddish by acknowledging the language’s primordial basis in translational difference. Indeed, when Shandler argues that for whatever else it signifies postvernacularity also means that “ready connections among language, culture, and people” can “no longer be assumed,” one wonders if this is perhaps too easy; after all, the “sizeable constituency” operating “independent[ly] of a vernacular speech community” that Shandler identifies as the MO of the postvernacular is still a constituency, and it may indeed be representable as a “community,” even when it becomes “a reification of heritage” and a “metonym for the… loss of its speakers.” In fact, postvernacular Yiddish may offer even more powerful representation of the “connections among language, culture, and people” than can vernacular Yiddish, as it is able to operate at a distance from, and, amazingly, in the absence of, any actual vernacular speakers of Yiddish. Shandler reminds us that vernacular Yiddish came to function for post-Enlightenment Europe as a synecdoche of national otherness,136 but his foundational concept of postvernacularity de facto functions according to the same logic, synecdochically signaling the affects of identity. Shandler helps us understand how Yiddish has come to function in professional Jewish studies discourse in league with concepts of population and even polity, under the administration of a yet more fundamental theoretical operator: namely, representation. The postvernacular Americanist reproduction of Yiddish promises a Jewish past secured by the ethnologically compelling history of a self-evidently

Jewish population. Close to a decade before Shandler’s book (and close to a generation before Zaritt replaced her at Harvard), Ruth Wisse, on the occasion of the opening of the National Yiddish Book Center (NYBC) in Amherst—which she called, in one of the great triumphs of either provocation or nerdiness, or both, “the most exciting new venture in American Jewish institutional life at least since the founding of the American Israel Public Affairs committee (AIPAC) in 1954”—wrote (where else but in Commentary) a sort of cri de coeur on the side of precisely the vernacular normalization of Yiddish. Triumphantly extoling “the centurieslong saga of Yiddish, the language of European Jews and their descendants,” she writes in defense of Yiddish’s vernacular authenticity,137 presumably what it could claim before its postvernacular spectralization, with its safely policed links between polity and language. Lacking (or refusing) the vocabulary, Wisse would seem to suspect the NYBC of being a postvernacular institution, threatened by, and also itself threatening, a malignant simulacrum of genuine culture. More pointedly, its dedication became for Wisse an opportunity to diagnose the current state of thinking about Yiddish in the United States. Wisse compares the careers of two leading postwar Yiddishists—Khone Shmeruk, who went to Israel and found a thriving community, and Max Weinreich, who stayed in America and toiled alone, despairing that his four-volume History of the Yiddish Language would not find even “ten people in the world who would read it.”138 The difference between the two scholars reveals that it was only in Israel, with its actually existing Jewish polity, and therefore actually existing condition for vernacularity, that “research into Yiddish language and literature was booming, and if the idea of a secular Jewish culture had any chance of being realized, it was certainly there.” Suffice it to say that for Wisse, this polity and vernacularity are entirely dependent on Israel’s ability to defend itself with military might particularly, and they are wrapped up in Cold War politics more generally.139 Ironically—“perversely” is more like it—Wisse deploys an image of Yiddish that is entirely a function of its postvernacular American spectralization. The 1997 dedication of Aaron Lansky’s National Yiddish Book Center is an occasion for worry because though “some” American Jewish students certainly evince “an attraction to Yiddish,” it’s often a “sentimentally” colored picture of the language to which they’re attracted (shades of Howe’s modernism pivot), a picture of weakness, of “the language of Jewish socialism and Jewish poverty, hence acceptable in the recycled leftist terms of the day” (maybe I was too quick to bring Howe back into the picture)—precisely not the culture of “Jewish strength” embodied in Israel and responsible for the survival of Yiddish in the first place. For Wisse Yiddish’s current American popularity presses into service an image of Yiddish and Yiddishkayt as “powerless” and as “lost causes,” as symbols of “martyrdom” incapable by definition of protecting a sphere of Jewish cultural vernacularity and indeed expressing the Jewish polity; it’s an association that “represents a perversion of historical truth,” because “Yiddish first came into being in Europe as the vernacular of a religious Jewry that was so very cohesive and culturally autonomous that it could generate a language of its own even while living alongside and interacting with speakers of other languages.”140 The success of Yiddish in

America as symbolized by the new NYBC finds, because it “seeks,” the foundation of a vernacular culture, but it finds it paradoxically in “a debased image of Yiddish” that could never have served as (because it could never have defended) that foundation; it’s “a substitute for Jewish civilization as a whole” that “not only traduces the past but can become” a “caricature.”141 But in her angry fear that Yiddish can be debased in this kind of sham veneration, Wisse paradoxically demonstrates that her ostensible interest in establishing the self-evident normativity of vernacular Yiddish is in fact a postvernacular dream. Wisse’s nationalist deployment of Yiddish as representative of the Jewish polity, bearer of Jewish history, and policer of Jewish identity is the brutal, brutalized end of the professionalizing ethnological project Howe initiated a half century earlier. Wisse and Shandler would seem to occupy opposing positions regarding the survival of Yiddish. On the one hand, Shandler celebrates the language’s postvernacularity, its ability to survive beyond an idealized vernacular past, the glorified history of its normalized link with a Jewish population to which it properly belonged. When he writes, “indeed, having an affective or ideological relationship with Yiddish without having command of the language epitomizes a larger trend in Yiddish culture in the post-Holocaust era,”142 we envision an expansive and multidirectional Yiddish culture open to transverse histories of Jewish identification. On the other hand, Wisse ends her essay by quoting Aaron Lansky, founder and president of the NYBC, saying that the “only” way to “revive Jewish literature” is “by reviving Jewish life”; and while she suggests that a visit to the center or to “the Jewish cemetery on Okapowa Street in Warsaw” (where Shmeruk is buried) might begin such a revival, she insists, in her essay’s final line, that “it had better not end there,”143 her implication being that the vernacular link between a language and a population only works in one direction. Similarly, their respective attitudes toward Yiddish’s future differ: for the characteristically Manichean Wisse, there are only two options, either reasserting the language’s normalized vernacular foundation in Jewish life and tradition (presumably via the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians) or “debased” death; but for Shandler “the notion of postvernacularity is key” to envisioning the multiplying “possibilities” of the future of Yiddish because of postvernacularity’s “increasing primacy in Yiddish culture since the war.”144 Yet both scholars, Shandler no less than Wisse, reproduce the ethnological selfevidence of a biologistic concept of Jewish history in imagining the significance of Yiddish: Wisse’s concern that liberal “debase[ment]” of Yiddish “traduces the past,” Shandler’s interest in postvernacular Yiddish’s ability to represent the relationship of a “people” to its history and culture. If Wisse is relatively more interested in policing a particular normalization of those links that support her concern with a nationalist rhetoric of polity, Shandler shows how difficult it is to imagine language use outside a project to resolve a population’s affective relationship to its identity, as administered by his inability to avoid relying on a concept of heritage. Shandler’s construction “in Yiddish culture,” in describing postvernacularity’s “increasing primacy in Yiddish culture since the war,” especially with its preposition, is conspicuous given that his concept of the postvernacular would seem to run against the grain of a simplified opposition between the “inside” and the “outside” of what, I

guess, we’re ultimately supposed to be able to take for granted as “Yiddish culture.” The only agency capable of policing such a boundary is the history of those who, speaking Yiddish, were in a position to ground, in contributing to, “Yiddish culture,” and the only agency capable of policing such a Yiddish history is some biopolitcal concept of Yiddish-speaking Jewish population. Indeed, Shandler’s “in” seems more or less commensurate with Wisse’s concern with polity, and even her argument that Israel—with its naturalized and policed link between Jewish state, population, and culture—has been what has allowed Yiddish to flourish since the war while the United States has still to prove its ability to nourish it. That “in” offers powerful testament to the Jewish American colonization of Yiddish. Yiddish language has become a mode through which a dominant image of American Jewry reproduces for itself its imagined relationship to Jewish history. Howe’s anthologization of Yiddish literature has to be seen as part of a postvernacular mobilization of Yiddish literature as the medium through which postwar American Jews could access a Jewish past that was to be properly theirs, and this project served as a fulcrum on which the emerging field of Jewish American literature would leverage its historicist field imaginary beginning in the 1950s and ’60s. Julian Levinson suggests that we attend to Howe’s “construction of Yiddishkayt”:145 across Howe’s writings on Yiddish, Levinson discovers a form of staged remembrance that stops short of sentimental nostalgia. Howe’s is an “elegiac portrayal of the Old Country” that “forge[s]” a picture of “the essential geography of prewar Jewish life” that “spoke to a pervasive feeling among postwar American Jews of living in the aftermath, of having missed the defining phase of Jewish history that was abruptly destroyed in the Holocaust”—but that, unlike other related postwar elegies, nonetheless acknowledges that that world was already breaking up before the war.146 Clearly in the spirit of Shandler’s legitimation of the postvernacular as signifier of Jewish identity, Levinson casts Howe as the “creator of a discourse” that succeeds in opposing Yiddishkayt, “which stands for collective memory and ethics,” to “nihilism,” with the identitarian oblivion of forgetting.147 Levinson’s interest, like mine, is in charting Howe’s institutional agency: “Howe’s prognosis of decline can be read as itself a literary trope. Howe’s own writings—with their brooding seriousness, their restless searching among old texts, their pained admissions of defeat—constitute in themselves a compelling image of a Jewishness striving to find its bearings. For Howe, literature at its most poignant and meaningful is an expression of crisis; it tells us what has been lost, what we are losing, and, perhaps, what we might hope for again.”148 In Levinson’s “literary trope” we can hear a warning against merely reproducing the culture work of the Treasury, rehearsing Howe’s recuperative identitarian project and restaging the disciplining justification of Jewish literary study’s historicist foundations. Howe’s “elegiac portrayal” for Levinson “offers a way of participating, at least imaginatively, in a culture whose end has been declared.”149 Thus, “although he reads modern Jewish culture as slated for disappearance,” Levinson’s Howe, with Greenberg, in fact functions as a kind of origin, insofar as the Treasury spurred a burst of Jewish American writing, by people related in one way or another to the book, like Saul

Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick. Citing Benedict Anderson, Levinson links postvernacularity with the idea of the Jewish past: through Howe and Greenberg’s Treasury, “Yiddish literature gained a new lease on life among second- and third-generation American Jews for whom the language had suddenly become a poignant symbol for a distant but more ‘authentic’ way of being Jewish. The American Jewish community, haunted by the Holocaust and dispossessed of the language of its forbears, was transforming into a self-conscious subculture defined through a connection to an ‘imagined’ Jewish community.”150 But this only tells half the story, and doesn’t explain how this imagination of a collective past was institutionalized in a professional field. Which is to say that Levinson’s critique operates largely within the logical space Howe’s project itself explicitly maps. What we don’t quite get in Levinson is a reckoning with the institutional consequences of the fact that literature—that is, as a discipline, as professionalized in the Jewish American field—becomes the Jewish means of participation in Jewish cultural history. Through the imperial imagination of Yiddish literature as signifying the past of the historical subject at the heart of its own disciplinary project, Jewish American literary studies at the moment of its emergence could declare its own historiographic self-evidence.

Chapter 3

After Jewish American Literature

Here I am. —Philip Roth, 1995

Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One Before; or, Why Ethnicity Isn’t Particularly Useful to Jewish American Literary Study There’s a classic Jewish joke about a Chinese waiter at a deli who speaks perfect Yiddish. An amazed customer asks the owner how he managed to find such an employee. “Shhh!” says the owner, “He thinks he’s learning English!” Many of us have heard it before, and some of us will recall that in 1993’s Operation Shylock, Philip Roth has the overdetermined character Smilesburger refer to it as “the old joke about a Jewish restaurant.” The joke is funny, obviously, because of the farce it makes of assimilation narratives, and as obviously it performs this bathetic labor by playing differentially with stereotypes: the Jews come out on top precisely because the Chinese are lampooned. But I want to pause over its establishment as what I termed above classic: what’s interesting about its classic status is that, contrary to what Roth’s character said, the joke is likely not that “old,” possibly appearing in print for the first time only in the 1950s.1 Another symptom of breakthrough: we went from zero to hackneyed in forty years. This accelerated history presents a pressing question, not so much about what gets to count as established or “classic”—or representative—in professional practices of knowledge production oriented around a concept of Jewish American identity, but more precisely about when it does. Once we begin thinking about the categories of Jewish American literary study rather than merely by means of them, we realize that the historicality of the field is, in a word, conspicuous. I recognize, and to a point apologize for, this awkwardly obtrusive jargon, but by historicality I mean, quite simply, to highlight the ways in which the field is historical—primarily the ways in which it presents itself as providing access to the history of its field objects, but also the ways in which it is itself a historical object.2 Which is to say that for a field as quick to take for granted its role as primarily an ethnological-historical enterprise—understanding itself as tasked with providing what is essentially historical information about the sociocultural matrix in which Jewish American writers pursue a representational labor—Jewish American literary study has devoted precious little attention to either its own institutional history or the institutional development of its keywords’ explanatory power. In this context the Chinese waiter joke can become a useful resource for critical Jewish studies work: as its own history demonstrates, where the gap between the “classic” and the “contemporary” can be quite small, this field of ours can be pretty tricky when it comes to

revealing the institutional forces whose history expresses and constitutes it. What we consider to be “classic” Jewish American culture, like this joke for example—the heavily Yiddish-inflected and -influenced, often Borscht-Belt-y or vaudevillean, pickle-and-cornedbeef-redolent stuff that now reads as cliché (how many times have we heard breakthroughera Jewish intellectuals—think of Podhoretz in the last chapter—return to the theme of having, getting rid of, or otherwise worrying about the smell of garlic on their breath?)—is mostly a Depression and early postwar phenomenon, having been circulated if not in fact forged in an emerging field of mass cultural, mass media communication; after all, it could only become possible once Jews had seized the means of cultural production. While the distance between the influx of eastern European, Yiddish-speaking immigrants who would form this humor’s historical environment—starting in 1881 with pogroms and ending in 1924 with the Johnson-Reed Act—and this “Jewish” humor’s postwar consolidation is not particularly great, the period between the advent of this humor and its ascendency and institutionalization as “classic”—which is also to say as intensively representative and even clichéd—is positively short, no more than a generation or so. Thus, while the second chapter demonstrated how a key function of the breakthrough narrative was its invention of a cultural past for the historical subject with which it was articulated through the discursive capture of the Yiddish tradition, in this chapter I argue that equally important to the emergence narrative’s institutionalization was its production of its own ethnological facticity, its own historical self-evidence, of an understanding that it was already a recognizable discursive entity—of, that is to say, a future in which “emergence” or “breakthrough” could be taken for granted as the Jewish American past. But this historiographic consolidation took place so rapidly and established itself so persuasively that it suppressed opportunities to critically consider the perverse contradiction between the ideological meaning of the breakthrough narrative and the ethnological pluralism that so often housed it. The Jewish American literary emergence should be imagined as an event, not part of the more or less continuous story of a coherent Jewish subject, however, but rather something close to the opposite: breakthrough needs to be conceptualized as an epistemological event that created a vocabulary for grasping a historical subject. In other words, “breakthrough” is not an event in the history of Jewish American literature; it is the event that creates Jewish American literary history. Before “breakthrough” we can point to an array of historical and disciplinary objects—a historically bounded surge in U.S. immigration; a growing Jewish community in the United States, legible as itself diverse, and increasingly engaged in the establishment of social, political, and cultural institutions; relatively coherent objects of literary historical disciplinary investment like “immigrant writing,” “urban writing,” and “regional writing,” and also a literary-historically compelling difference between realism, naturalism, and modernism; sociological objects like suburbanization, assimilation, and Americanization; the destruction of European Jewry; displaced persons and refugees; Wissenschaft-situated cultural history; and Jewish American professionalization, for some examples—and then after “breakthrough” it becomes possible and professionally apposite, even inevitable, to engage a discourse of the coherent history of the Jewish American subject,

with the “American Jewish novel,” initially, and eventually “Jewish American literature” institutionalized as one in a connected series of institutionally situated disciplinary modes of access to that history. In order to analyze the history of Jewish American literary study as an institutional formation articulated with certain techniques of knowledge production that it houses, we cannot assume that formation’s necessity or self-evidence. At the same time, we need to keep in mind that this exceptionalist history was eccentric to the development of literary study more generally during this era. As the breakthrough intellectuals were devising disciplinary vocabularies for recognizing Jewish American literature and its Jewish American authors, the English department was mostly going in a different direction. Following the breakthrough period, literary study in general would in relatively short order give up on any real interest in “Americanization” or “assimilation” in themselves, and would develop more elaborately theorized frameworks for focusing on keywords like “regionalism” or “naturalism” (for example); and while it retained a focus on the “immigrant,” it almost always contextualized that figure within the increasingly rigorous methodologies of postcolonial studies and critical race theory. The field of Jewish American literary study developed relatively hermetically in the Cold War academy—and therefore never experienced an incentive (maybe even an opportunity) to criticize its own origins. If the historical narrative of postwar assimilation—with its trusty right hand, the Jewish American literary breakthrough—dominates professional and popular understanding of Jews in the United States, what’s useful about the Chinese waiter joke is the perspective it offers, and the negative labor it performs, on this scholarly and popular narrative. The twenty or thirty years after World War II are customarily understood as a period of intensive Jewish assimilation in the United States, but as this joke is not alone in suggesting—Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus,” for example, published within a few years of the joke’s first recorded appearance in print, can certainly be seen in the same light—even in the thick of this period that story of assimilation was so established, so legible as a narrative, that it could also be subject to an intensive irony: what we now know as clichés of the Jewish American postwar were likely clichés to postwar American Jews themselves.3 The Chinese waiter joke is funny because it inverts the assimilation narrative, suggesting that it’s not that Jews lose their ethnic difference in becoming American, but that the way to become American is to take on recognizably Jewish traits: perhaps, the joke seems to be suggesting, Jewish difference became more dominant (and less conspicuous) in the decades after World War II not because Jews increasingly abandoned those characteristics that distinguished them from “normal” Americans, but because those erstwhile distinguishing characteristics increasingly became normalized as American. There’s a reason it’s not called the Jewish deli joke. As Timothy Parrish writes in discussing the joke’s place in Roth’s Operation Shylock, “The point of the joke is not that Yiddish has been assimilated into American culture, but that Yiddish has become a medium through which one becomes American.…Roth’s ‘Chinese waiter joke’ undermines the logic that there is such a thing as ‘authentic’ ethnic identity not implicated within a broader system of identity acquisition.”4 The point is obviously not that Americans became Jewish en masse after the war, but rather that in becoming intensively visible in the

United States after the war, Jewish difference paradoxically was leveraged as nationally familiar, as normal, and “breakthrough” or “emergence”—that is, deployed as part of the record of a self-evident historical subject—was one of the agents of this new legibility. Accordingly, we need to analyze this visibility as a discursive fact within the institutional history of knowledge rather than a sociological or ethnographic fact within the normalized history of populations. But of course assimilation is a tricky concept: in the name of a putative destabilization of identity categories it can in fact naturalize them, reinscribing their necessity and selfevidence. Jonathan Freedman provides a framework for looking at the Chinese waiter joke in Klezmer America, his investigation of the relationship of Jewishness and multiculturalism, though it might be more appropriate to think of the joke (which as far as I know Freedman does not discuss itself) as a proleptic commentary on—or maybe just statement of—his argument about the metaphoric proximity between constructions of Jewish Americans and Asian Americans as “model minorities,” a series of “crossings” that contributes to what he calls a “dialectical” encounter between patterns of minoritarian identification and Americanist expectations about assimilation.5 Like Parrish, Freedman cautions scholars against reading assimilation as simply a matter of “slough[ing] off the Jewas-Other,” and instead to be receptive to Americanism’s patterns and “possibilities” of “racial and ethnic crisscross.”6 Assimilation is not unidirectional, the progressive attenuation of historically marked Jewish difference as it is absorbed within a naturalized and ahistorical Americanness, but rather a dynamic multilateral and multidirectional process with no obvious end point. Thus, in analyzing what he calls the “complex admixture of affect in the face of Jewish difference,” Freedman argues that the established narrative of Jewish American assimilation does not exist simply in the world, but rather circulates and signifies, in overlapping registers, through what can end up looking like more or less isomorphic ethnic groups, like Asian Americans. Freedman recalls the example of how Asian Americans have repeatedly been called “the new Jews,” including by Asian American intellectuals, during the consolidation of the synthetic category of “Asian American” identity.7 For Freedman, Asian American critics and activists, starting in the 1960s and 1970s, understood the dynamics of hybridity that characterize their American identity in such a way that Jewishness could appear, and could in fact actually be, the currency of assimilation. The phenomenon was given humorous narrative form in Gish Jen’s 1996 novel Mona in the Promised Land, for example, and the “Asian American” literary cohort with which Gish Jen is often associated, which includes writers like Chang-Rae Lee, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Frank Chin, and others, is hard not to define—as they themselves have done—according to coordinates mapped by the earlier Jewish breakthrough writers. Indeed, it is the Jewish example that enables one to recognize these writers as a cohort, representing a unified “Asian American” historical subject, in the first place. Freedman writes that “these writers enter a field they recognize, willingly or not, as massively shaped by the Jewish example,” and he cites a Publishers Weekly piece on these then newly conspicuous writers from 1991: “Perhaps not since the mainstream ‘discovered’ Jewish

American fiction in the 1950s has such a concentrated, seemingly ‘new’ ethnic literary wave come our way.”8 Freedman’s approach in Klezmer America is largely ethnological, focusing on the way in which Jews in the United States have “responded to their social construction”; and though this is certainly a productive way to examine the dynamics of identity-based Americanism, it’s not the only one. The history of “twentieth-century Jewish American imaginative production” is for Freedman not only a record of how Jews lived out the “ambivalences and overdeterminations” of American culture’s “figure of the Jew”—whether they “contested” the images, “internalized” or “perhaps apotropaically externalized by embodying” them, or “projected these images outward onto other racial and ethnic groups”—but also a register of how “Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals helped transform the ways in which Americans imagined Otherness itself.”9 As simultaneously “both subjects and objects” of their own representation, Jews and Jewish cultural production allow Freedman to analyze the function of identity—that is, as a concept that links some affective sense of heredity or inheritance with some affective sense of group or collective cohesion—in the United States, and ethnicity defines the conceptual arena in which this inquiry takes place: Freedman refers to his methodology as a “privileging of the ethnic as a space of category confusion and hybridizing reinvention.”10 And to be sure, Freedman is not alone in “privileging” ethnicity. But the field needs to think more critically about how the concept of ethnicity functions as an epistemological technology; my concern is less with ethnicity as a way of describing the affective experience of “ethnic” subjects than with the way it operates discursively—and indeed categorically—in the scholarship and institutional modes of thinking that employ the concept. The keyword ethnicity allows critics both to engage a discourse of social construction—for Freedman “ethnicity” itself was “constructed” as a “category of group identity shaped around national or regional origin, culture, [and] language” rather than around “religion” or “race” in large part only as “negotiated through the figure of the assimilating Jew”11—and also to maintain a kind of demographical, biologistic security. If Freedman wants to be able to pay critical attention to “the shifting figure of the Jew” in his analysis of Jewish American culture,12 he doesn’t seem to worry too much about relying on a genetic concept of “Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals” or “Jewish American imaginative production” to anchor that attention. Part of the difficulty here may be seen to be forecast in Freedman’s interest in Asian American identity as a counterpoint or intertext in his analysis, insofar as it exists on unstable epistemological terrain. Gregory Jay has written that “the shifty meaning of the words ‘race,’ ‘culture,’ and ‘nation’” shows up dramatically when we consider the emergence of what are called ‘panethnicities,’” among which he includes “categories” like European American, Native American, African American, and Latino American in addition to Asian American. These groupings can include “people of every imaginable” skin color, race, language group, ethnicity, and nation-state, and the categories gained currency as a way to emphasize cultural groups more than racial ones (at least when race is simply reduced to biological factors like skin color).13 But the panethnicities merge or fuse cultural and racial concepts in an elusive,

and maybe even paradoxical, affective fact: if one might not have too much difficulty describing oneself as “Chinese American” or as having Chinese heritage, it’s not so easy to explain how, precisely, one is “Asian American,” or in what that concept inheres. If we can now probably fairly say someone can be born as an “Asian American,” one is certainly not born “Asian American” in the way one is born with brown eyes; rather, we use the term to indicate that someone can be recognized via a demographically legible and discursively instrumental cultural heritage. It’s an imaginary identity even if it’s affectively real, and it operates precisely by naturalizing its imaginative administrative power as genetic. What Freedman’s argument illustrates is that it’s hard to imagine how “Jewish American” as a categorical term—especially as it’s increasingly allied with a concept of “diversity”—escapes these same epistemological difficulties. I don’t think I’m drawing too fine a point here (and I hope I’m not mixing my metaphor too egregiously), but the important lesson of the Chinese waiter joke is that we need to be careful about scholarly agendas that hope to have their biologized identity concepts and challenge them too. Which is to say that, carried out in the name of “ethnicity,” ethnological attempts to denormalize the link between Jews and Jewish American culture—like Freedman’s and adjacent cultural studies–situated attempts within Jewish studies to historicize Jewish identity in supposedly heteronomous terms—rely on the categorically normalized identifiability of population, a concept that during the breakthrough period was being hegemonically linked with the emerging concept of the Jewish American writer. “Ethnicity” would become in the postwar decades a machine through which Jewish American literature became a hegemonic signifier of the Jewish American historical subject, an example of what Michael Omi and Howard Winant define by way of their concept of racial formation, “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed,” a process that manifests in racial projects that labor toward hegemony in which “human bodies and social structures are represented and organized.”14 Race in this formulation is neither illusion nor essence, and it is both symbolic and material, a matter of both representation and social structure. Indeed, Omi and Winant’s racial projects do precisely the “ideological ‘work’” of establishing and investing links between structure and representation: “A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, [sic] and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines.” Which is to say that “racial projects connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized.”15 Through the work of racial projects race becomes a kind of commonsense way of explaining and acting in the world.16 That said, to be honest, I’m not particularly bound to the concept of race, and for a lot of predictable reasons I find it more obfuscating and burdensome than helpful. But given how often ideas about inheritance and ideas about recognizable group coherence stick to each other in particularly (and disturbingly) racialist ways when we engage in discourse about culture, and with the caveat that I have nothing particularly invested in retaining the term race (except as a foundation for analyses and charges of racism), Omi and Winant’s concept

of a racial project is a useful way of describing Jewish American literature “after” breakthrough: breakthrough-era Jewish American literature became a powerful technology for anchoring the legibility of Jewish American culture in the biopolitical bedrock of population. This project would normalize an ethnologically representational historicism as the authoritative way of thinking about Jewish American writing, even as the lingering structural-ideological effects of breakthrough compelled literary intellectuals to minimize any literary differences between “Jewish American” and “American.” The narrative of Jewish American literary breakthrough established itself so quickly and has been so enduring because it was a highly visible and accessible synecdoche of the structural link between a newly legible Jewish American culture’s historical self-evidence and a newly identifiably Jewish American population, and the itineraries of Jewish American literary study that grew up in the wake of this establishment need to be read as symptomatic of this biologistic articulation. This third and final chapter analyzes the emergence of a new, postwar Americanist circulation of “Jewishness” as a historical marker; my claim is not that “Judaism” or “Jews” became a recognized constituent of and participant in what would come to be understood as a multicultural America, but rather that a particular concept of identity came to be normalized as a mode of historical knowledge production. Ethnicity is a catachresis that naturalizes the epistemological operator “identity.” The history of Jewish American literary history calls not for an ethnic history of Jews and Jewish culture in America, but for a critique of ethnicity as a figure for history in the first place.

Cynthia Ozick; or, How to Write a Jewish Book Perhaps no one more pointedly illuminates how the paradox of breakthrough is reproduced in the ethnological form of literary study it inaugurated than Cynthia Ozick. Ozick was uncharacteristically choleric in a 1995 forum on the launch of Syracuse University Press’s Modern Jewish Literature series, which would reissue several of her books. The twinned topics of the forum, in which Ozick participated with fellow series authors Johanna Kaplan and Norma Rosen, were, first, whether it’s still possible to talk about Jewish American literature in the 1990s given, second, what moderator and then director of Syracuse University Press Robert Mandel calls the “hyphenated-Identity crisis” of writers operating within the discursive horizon of multiculturalism.17 The mood of the symposium is defensive, bordering on resentful, which is also to say exceptionalist, flirting with investing Jewish American writing with the synecdochical power to champion literature generally against the predations of politicized agendas. The three participating authors feel to varying degrees the need to make a case for Jewish American literature’s value: before the ascendency of multiculturalism no one had to prove the value of Jewish American literature because no one had to prove the value of literature.18 The current problem, as Ozick sees it, is that culture institutions like universities no longer sponsor, support, or enable the reading of literature literarily. Ozick is perfectly happy to retain terms like major and minor in order to think about literary texts, and maybe even about authors, “but ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ writers? Such a concept leaves out literature altogether”; in the “literature departments of the

American university,” she complains, “literature is being displaced by demography.”19 As adjectives of appraisal, major and minor are perfectly fine, but to elide that evaluative force with the indicative force of the identitarian nouns majority and minority is to endanger the aesthetic enterprise. For certain partisans in the culture wars, multiculturalism’s investment of a concept of “ethnicity” replaces terms of literary valuation overseen by a concept of universality with terms of sociological categorization overseen by a concept of marginalization. Rather than an author’s aesthetic achievements, multiculturalism concerns itself primarily with an author’s ethnic origins, reckoning literary value as secondary to that. Ozick indicts multiculturalism as “intellectual deceit”: before its “advent,” with its “pernicious” categorization and channeling (its “divisions and divisiveness”), there was only “mainstream”—just, presumably, literature, to be parsed for good and bad aesthetic qualities, and, one supposes, “major” and “minor” literary historical effect, but not for any other, inappropriately sociological or ethnological, markers—with Jewish writers like Cahan, for example, read by the same people who were reading William Dean Howells, and evaluated in similar terms.20 But Ozick is also quick to note that if marginality and demography are the rules of the multicultural game, Jews should qualify: given that “Jews in America constitute 2.7% of the population” (“a percentage that is fast dropping, thanks to a negative Jewish birthrate and the non-Jewish posterity of increasingly intermarrying Jews,” Ozick notes with demographic reaction), Jewish writers can certainly be considered “minority writers.” But multiculturalism is “intellectual deceit” because it is not up-front about its key terms of valuation. Claiming to yoke the evaluation of aesthetic representation to a political concept of representation indexed to recognizable groups, multiculturalism in Ozick’s eyes in fact represents a specific (left-liberal) representational agenda. Bracketing the creeping misusage that holds minority as a synonym of ethnic (even if ethnic at root means pagan), Ozick wonders “how is to be determined who is to be an ‘ethnic’ and who is to be ‘mainstream’?” Referring anecdotally to a course on “representative” literature offered at a university where a friend teaches, she notes that all the writers on the syllabus were indexed to their respective sociological categories, that is, as limned by “identity-politics,” or, “more pejoratively,” by “victim politics”—including “Chicano, Chicana, Latino, Latina, Native American, African American, as well as certain women writers, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Constance Fenimore Cooper, who have attained special status in Women’s Studies Programs.” Missing from the syllabus, of course, were WASP writers, like Richard Ford, Reynolds Price, Annie Dillard, John Updike, and Alice Adams, who, after all, according to the canons of multiculturalism, do not arise from a culture defined by a history of victimization or marginalization and therefore do not demand reparative “representation.” But also, Ozick tendentiously notes, there were “no Jews.”21 Perhaps we’re being too quick here in characterizing her critique of multiculturalism, as Ozick certainly has no interest in dispensing with categories like “Jewish writer” or “Jewish literature.” Indeed, her complaint that multiculturalism neglects Jewish writers seems at times willing to concede the very vocabulary of multiculturalism even as she suspects

multiculturalism’s true motives: despite a “recognizable cultural matrix,” and despite a history of having been “victims” (“God knows” they have been victims), “the fact remains that there is clearly no room for Jewish writers at the multicultural table. They are not welcome there.” Imagining itself tasked with “rescuing groups from the margin” rather than evaluating literary achievement, multiculturalism devalues Jewish writers because, postbreakthrough, Jewish writers operate not on the margins but in the mainstream. Ozick does not want to abandon a concept of Jewish literature grounded representationally in the figure of the recognizably Jewish writer. Rather, she pushes back against the way that figure is defined; given the particular institutional investments of the term, a focus on ethnicity stacks the deck against Jewish literature, making multiculturalism generally “indifferent to the singularity of genius,” and so it “ends by marginalizing nearly everyone”: “Trampling on writers’ autonomy, it pretends to be about literature, and engages in social work based on population ratios and bloodlines.” Under its banner, all writers become “servants of ideas not necessarily their own.” Multiculturalism “diminishes writing and writers.” Though she insists that “cultural and historical particularity can flourish undamaged” in “an intellectual environment where literary standards are the only acceptable basis for literary inclusion,” unfortunately, with “identity politics … now sovereign in the land” (“pursued with McCarthyite zeal”), “Jewish writers are shunted off as marginal, as ‘minority.’” In the end, “numbers, not words, have won.”22 It’s probably unfair to charge Ozick simply with circulating another iteration of an exceptionalist complaint about multiculturalism and the Jews23—well, at least Ozick isn’t only recirculating that exceptionalist complaint—as one has to assume that she’s aware of the irony that though she opens by lamenting that under multiculturalism’s elevation of marginality as the chief academic virtue Jews no longer seem to count, Ozick closes by complaining that Jewish writers are sidelined as minorities in and marginal to the new multicultural paradigm. Of course there’s no real paradox between her objection to using what she calls the “demographic” (I might prefer something like “populational,” but I concede it’s awkward) word “minority” as an important analytical term in literary study on the one hand and her complaint that Jewish writers are “shunted off as marginal, as ‘minority,’” on the other: her closing complaint contests the way in which Jewish writers have become marginal to the multicultural enterprise, not the way in which the Jewish American community functions in U.S. society. One usage labels the institutionally authorized techniques of a professionalized field, whereas the other labels a representational concept that functions as a critical keyword for that field. While doing criticism the great service of bringing Jewish studies exceptionalism explicitly to the surface, and while certainly capable of recognizing Jewish victimhood, her literary definition of Jewish identity resists multiculturalism’s categorical criterion of sociological victimization, which emphasizes identitarian history and colonial trauma but deemphasizes literary quality. Too quick indeed. This is perhaps more of a tangle than a superficial read of Ozick’s confident anger might initially suggest. On the one hand, Ozick aggressively rejects a multiculturalist orthodoxy that would categorize writers by their (misnamed) “ethnic”

heritage, what she indicts as a stalking horse for a demographically framed politics of victimhood. Such orthodoxy ignores the literary fact that writers have “autonomy,” they have ideas, they have distinctiveness, they have “singularity” (as in “the singularity of genius”), even peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, and eccentricity. On the other hand, Ozick at the same time gestures toward a “Jewish cultural matrix,” a foundation on which to ground what she still wants to be a categorically and recognizably Jewish Jewish literature. She rejects the concept of ethnicity for reducing identity to a matter of cultural attributes unified by the biological fiat of “bloodlines,” so her embrace of a literary concept of Jewish identity would seem to rely on something more deeply rooted, something that’s inevitable and essential to Jewish writing, something Jewish that’s free of the contingencies of identity politics’ narrow sociological preoccupation with victimization and marginality, a preoccupation that ultimately concerns itself with, and institutionally invests, little more than a static image of the “minority” writer underwritten by a population count. But what is this “cultural matrix” that cannot be reduced to “ethnicity”? Running oblique to much of postwar academic Jewish (and Jewish American) literary study, Ozick turns to Sinai and covenantal distinction for a literary, nonethnological and nonmulticulturalist concept of identity. We can trace the logical beginnings of Ozick’s culture wars–era attack on multiculturalism to the period in which the emergence of multiculturalism was first making an impact on academia. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, Cynthia Ozick wrote a few essays inquiring about “What Literature Means,” as the title of their combined and synthesized form, published in Art and Ardor (1983), had it; together, they stand as a denunciation of “experimental writing,” the vogue of which during that period I can only imagine may indeed have seemed a cause for despair, and which, in any case, she found largely “unreadable.” Ozick pronounces experimental writing “neither intelligent nor interesting” as judged against her keywords “seriousness” and “mastery,” terms that derive from a “moral” intention to contend not simply with “the ego or ambition or the workings of the subjective self, but from the amazing permutations of the objective world”24—and that align with her later, culture wars–era elevation of literariness over victimhood. The innovations of what she derides as experimental writing, by contrast, which she sees as confined entirely to a stylistic register, sever literature’s relevance to anything outside itself and serve to degrade literature’s properly anchoring relationship to worldly importance.25 However, if Ozick demands a writer be responsible to more than the mere “seizures of language and dream,” that literary writing maintain a referential link to the “objective world,” this moral impulse is not coordinated with something we might easily name the “sociologically real” or the “theologically ideal.” Ozick is committed to a kind of objectivity —an objectivity aligned not with a weak realism (such as her teacher Lionel Trilling famously maligned in The Liberal Imagination as limited and simplistic), but rather with strong concepts of “imagination” and semantic promise in its appeal to a moral framework— at the same time that she is dedicated to New Critical ideas about formal parsimony. “Imagination” is not without its dangers in Ozick’s schema, as it “always has the lust to tear down meaning, to smash interpretation,” but it is “more than make-believe, more than the

power to invent.…[I]magination owns, above all the facility of becoming” (247). In the main, “literature is the moral life”; the tales we care about “touch on the redemptive,” which means for Ozick that they “insist on the freedom to change one’s life,” which implies in turn a kind of unrelenting affirmation of our embeddedness in the world, and also an adamant declaration of and dedication to life and possibility (245). Good literature—serious literature—turns at once outward and inward: it faces the world ethically, from a specific perspective and in a spirit of worldliness, even as it is fundamentally characterized by implicitness or inherency. Though her concern in this essay is arguably nonsectarian, midrash is her illustration of this implicitness that is also directed outward, this inherency that claims objectivity and ethical relevance; in midrash “the tale is its own interpretation. It is a world that decodes itself” (245–246). Literature—good literature—is marked by “the nimbus of meaning that envelops the story” (246). For Ozick, “what literature means is meaning”: literature exists and functions “for the sake of humanity” because it lays the world open “to our astonishing sight,” rejecting the “blur of the universal” (247–248). Literature “distinguish[es],” it “illumines diversity” and “the least grain of being, to show how it is concretely individual,” telling, “in all the marvel of its singularity, the separate holiness of the least grain” (248). In claiming language’s self-referentiality, by contrast, dedicatees to experimental literature misunderstand the nature of literary language, making it into an “idol.” Leading “imagination…nowhere except back into its own maw,” an “idol serves no one; it is served,” and “the writers who insist that literature is ‘about’ the language it is made of are offering an idol. Literature for its own sake, for its own maw: not for the sake of humanity” (247). The high postmodernists commit much the same crime against literature Ozick would find the rising generation’s multiculturalists guilty of: practicing a kind of de facto idol worship, “they annihilate the thing they hope to glorify” (247).26 The formal and representational properties of (good) literature cannot be pried apart: literature is a universal medium insofar as it means something particular, and insofar as well as it renders its own inherent coherence something objective, thereby presenting itself as something to be interpreted and understood. Promoting midrash as an ethically framed practice of close reading, Ozick begins to reveal her project to establish terms of a nonethnographic form of literary Jewish identity. It is not my interest to adjudicate Ozick’s complaint about experimental literature, but rather to tease out something from its structure that clarifies how she defines Jewish literature. Some of the analytical vocabulary and keywords of the experimental literature essay appear as well in her contemporaneous (and more famous) essay about Jewish writing in Diaspora, which is to say in conditions in which Jews are—wait for it—a cultural minority. In fact, her attention in the experimental fiction essay to “distinguishing” and “illumining,” to the concrete and singular and objective, and her warning against the fake allure of “the universal” will be just as important to her theorization of a properly Jewish literature in “Toward a New Yiddish,” the text of a talk she delivered in Israel in 1970. In the “Note”

introducing the text of her talk in Art and Ardor (published a dozen years after her original lecture), she opens by emphasizing the “contradictions” in her own “self-portrait of a thirdgeneration American Jew,” contradictions that by the time of her writing had become, thanks to intellectuals like Howe and Kazin, the clichés by which Jewish literary study understood its field: “perfectly at home and yet perfectly insecure, perfectly acculturated and yet perfectly marginal”; and though she admits to be “sometimes taken aback” by them, she insists, “what I do not feel uneasy about is the thesis of American pluralism.”27 Readers of her splenetic critique of multiculturalism in the ’90s may be surprised to hear this vigorous defense of pluralism. Dean Franco helps us understand how Ozick’s aggressive defense of ground on which to retain a category of Jewish literature is isomorphic with the pluralist logic underwriting multiculturalism—though admittedly not necessarily with multiculturalism itself: much of the fiction Ozick wrote during this period in fact “parallels and is responsive to ideas prevalent in ethnic separatist movements,” as her pluralism implies real boundaries between groups. Perversely, given what she would say in the 1995 symposium, “Ozick’s New Yiddish amounts to a theory of Jewish culture in America sympathetic to what we now call multiculturalism.”28 Ozick vigorously opposes her pluralism to the “universalist” mood she associates with Saint Paul’s “tactical”—and Christian— attempt to “be all things to all men.” Her own goal is “to be one thing all the time” and “to speak in the same voice to every interlocutor”; anything else, she insists, is “parochial,” insofar as it implies anxiety about how others might respond to one’s experience and perspective (152). Ozick insists that the “parochial” invented the “intolerable” word “ethnic” to dismissively describe “a civilization not your own”; but at the same time, and more to the point, “parochial” describes “the point of view that characterizes Jews who, for whatever reasons, personal or political, are not much interested in Jewish ideas” (153)—Jews like Philip Roth, especially in his famous 1963 pronouncement that “I am not a Jewish writer. I am a writer who is a Jew,” uttered in the wake of the establishmentarian Jewish scandal brought on by the publication of Goodbye, Columbus, and which Ozick mentions toward the beginning of her essay proper, noting that Roth made his notorious claim seven years earlier while he, like Ozick now for her lecture, was in Israel. She wonders if he would still “hold this view today,” when, presumably, threats to the stability and security of Jewish culture are more pressing; in any case, she insists that Roth’s words “do not represent a credo; they speak for a doom” (158).29 Unless Jews explicitly and deliberately direct themselves in their pursuits—including writing—to active Jewish differentiation, they are “doom[ed].” Quite simply, Ozick refuses the distinction Roth attempts. If a text is “centrally Jewish it will last for Jews. If it is not centrally Jewish it will last neither for Jews nor for the host nations.” In Diaspora “we are condemned to our vernaculars,” so Ozick calls on Jewish writers to make what she calls a New Yiddish by making the languages in which we operate, like English, “our own” by investing them with “Jewish ideas”—just as, in the past, “when Jews poured Jewish ideas into the vessel of German they invented Yiddish” (176–177).30 Jewish literature is an actively produced category; we cannot take it for granted as the effect of any mere sociological

determinant like ethnicity, language, and so on. For Jewishness to be a literary value, it needs to be grounded in something specifically Jewish, in modes of thinking and believing that constitute Jewish difference more strongly, explicitly, and necessarily than ethnicity can, and in literary form. Rather than relying on ethnicity for its identity (arguably as “old Yiddish” now does, at least for certain streams of scholarship and popular culture), Ozick insists that the new Yiddish will be “touched by the covenant” (175). By 1983, Ozick proposes her innovation of a “New Yiddish” as an aggressive challenge to a literary study articulated around a parochial concern with ethnicity. As both the experimental fiction and the New Yiddish essays argue, literature is meaningful—it means— not only because its formal parsimony becomes an objective fact but because it represents— because it speaks in the voice of—a specific position and perspective. And this position and perspective are defined not by “ethnicity” but by “ideas”—like the covenantal uniqueness of the Jews—that can in fact be understood by others. To imagine identity in terms of ethnicity is to resign oneself to parochialism, as ethnicity defines its world by dismissing as inaccessible what is not one’s own. To imagine identity in terms of ideas, however, is to perform a double labor, at once centripetal and centrifugal. Active in her uneasiness about Roth is a concern with the survival of specifically Jewish culture and literature in Diaspora; she asserts that “nothing thought or written in Diaspora has ever been able to last unless it has been centrally Jewish,” and by “centrally Jewish,” she famously clarifies, she means not ethnic but “whatever touches on the liturgical,” a metaphor she glosses with a pluralistic image of the shofar: only by blowing through the narrow, not the wide, end can one produce a resonating sound (168–169).31 Ozick cautions her reader to distinguish the liturgical from the poetic, which we might otherwise be tempted to consider synonymous; Ozick insists that whereas poetry “command[s]” an “isolated lyrical imagination,” the liturgical “has a choral voice, a communal voice,” and “command[s]” what she calls “the reciprocal moral imagination.” For Ozick a poem only “moves the “private heart,” but liturgy is “meant not to have only a private voice.” Defined liturgically, literature expresses one’s group belonging and opens one to others and therefore to universality. Ideas not ethnicity, thinking rather than idolatrous self-reflection: this is the foundation of Ozick’s pluralism. Ethnicity’s parochialism and poetry’s “private voice” are parallel expressions of a logic that closes off possibility, objectivity, otherness, and history. In the “New Yiddish” essay, initially written just a year before the first antecedent parts of “What Literature Means” were coming out, Ozick rebukes New Criticism for making an “idol” of the text by not allowing “history” to intrude into its consideration, for taking the text as a “sacrament,” a “ceremony of language” (163–164). The prohibition against idolatry, which reveals itself as a narrowing ahistoricism, links the two essays and stands as a literary challenge to the reign of ethnic thinking.

Ethnicity and the Subject of History; or, What’s a Jewish Author? A few years following her 1995 broadside against marginalization-obsessed multiculturalism, and in a preview of the sort of cultural politics that would inspire the 2012 MELUS special issue with which I began in Chapter 1, Andrew Furman approvingly cited Ozick’s protest

that there’s no place for Jews at the multiculturalism table in bolstering his case for— conspicuously—making room for Jewish American writers at the groaning board of minoritarian Americanism: “What concerns me today is not so much the tepid academic interest in Jewish American writers but that scholars of American literature have ceased to consider them multicultural or minority writers at all.”32 While Ozick laments multicultural orthodoxy, Furman accepts it, even embraces it. Furman deploys Ozick’s grievance about Jewish American literature’s position vis-à-vis multiculturalism’s focus on the extent to which a writer’s ethnic group is victimized in U.S. society to support his project to put the “Jewish American voice” back “on course syllabi”—precisely with the blessing of, indeed on the authority of, multiculturalism; he wants to get Jewish writers taught in Ozick’s friend’s class on representative literature. Furman offers an apologia for considering Jews “ethnic” and Jewish American writers legitimate members of the multiculturalism club, pleading for understanding Jewish American literature as embodying “the distinct values and preoccupations of a decidedly minority culture.” Taking up one of Ozick’s themes, he suggests that despite sporting Ozick’s “recognizable cultural matrix,” Jewish Americans have been disregarded by the multicultural “paradigm” because of the mainstream literary success of Jewish American novelists and the social and economic success of Jewish Americans.33 At one point asking rhetorically, but also sincerely, “are not all writers ethnic?,”34 Furman equates Ozick’s “cultural matrix” with “ethnicity,” reclaiming what she would dismiss by domesticating her critique of multiculturalist identity politics precisely as ethnicity—as a concept of ethnicity that is in fact a reinscription of population-based history. In another recirculation of the breakthrough narrative’s bad conscience, Furman locates the problematic status of Jewish American literature in its emergence from the provincial confines of immigration fiction to the literary mainstream and its claims to universal relevance: by its own literary historical admission Jewish literature should not be considered marginal, and Jews should not be considered a minority. Furman traces the consolidation of this prejudice, citing in particular Howe’s 1977 pronouncement that Jewish American literature had “moved past its high point” and Fiedler’s similar 1991 observation that “by the late sixties…Jewish American writers had ceased to seem central,” noting that by 1990 Paul Lauter could group Bellow in with “mainstream” literary blue bloods like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, and T. S. Eliot.35 But if the paradigm that defined the golden age of Jewish literature—named by “breakthrough” and defined by its dialectical aufhebung of “marginal” immigrant origins—weakened over time as marginality receded further into the remote past of Jewish experience in America, Furman insists that this doesn’t at all mean that Jewish American literature died, too; the “recognizable cultural matrix” of Jewish America merely shifted to match a developing Jewish American society: “this very evolution of the Jewish American experience, I believe, is what Fiedler and Howe did not anticipate.”36 Furman’s argument is a cousin of Kramer’s claim that Howe’s generational preconceptions rendered him incapable of recognizing Jewish American literature’s new directions, but Furman is brazen in doubling down on what Ozick diagnosed as

multiculturalism’s overdetermined investment of demography, its embrace of the “ethnic” as a tendentious reinscription of “victim politics” as self-evident population-based value— brazen at least given that he cites her approvingly in adopting an approach she indicts. Even as he latches on to a concept of ethnicity, Furman is at the same time far too coy about offering a definition or theory of Jewish American literature. To be honest, he proudly refuses a theorization. He can settle for a vague, largely implicit historicist link between the fact of a work’s having been “written by a Jewish American writer” and the presence of “Jewish content” in that work precisely because this conjunction was the enduring accomplishment of breakthrough, and it’s reproduced in a repetition of the critic’s professional desire for Jewish identity overseen by the critic’s investment in the Jewish American field.37 It is his genius that, unlike Ozick, he recognized this license granted by the concept of ethnicity. In fact, Ozick and Furman together demonstrate the symptomatic paradox of breakthrough’s hegemony in the era of ethnological thinking. If they take different approaches to Jewish American literature’s dubious status under latter-day multiculturalism, they both feel a need to respond on behalf of the field—Ozick by resisting the orthodoxy of ethnicity and Furman by taking it for granted and accordingly expressing Jewish American literature’s value in its terms. And yet, perversely, neither of these defenders of Jewish American literature’s honor has been rewarded all that much by the field, as each maintains a tenuous relationship with Jewish American literary study. On the one hand, for all his good will, far from breaching multiculturalism’s resistance and blazing a path for some kind of critical rapprochement between Jewish American literature and ethnic studies–allied scholarship in the English department, Furman’s efforts seem to have spurred little critical frisson, not only on the part of those whom one might expect to be resistant to his claims—namely the doctrinaire Americanist multiculturalists in English departments and American studies programs whose hostility to Jewish American literary claims to marginality spurred Furman and Ozick to action in the first place—but also, ironically, on the part of the field for which Furman imagined himself to be speaking and advocating; while many field operators likely agree with him, his work has done little to incite new forms of intellectuality aiming to overcome the field’s isolation.38 On the other hand, while Ozick has become a key figure for Jewish American literature (certainly since the 1980s, when it became clear that a major current of Jewish American writing was no longer neglecting piety as the major breakthrough writers had for the most part done), she remains at the same time a decidedly eccentric figure, often far too eccentric for Americanist literary study generally, while Jewish American literary study, not to put too fine a point on it, doesn’t quite know what to do with her. Furman is preaching to a choir that has little standing in the contemporary academy, and Ozick is preaching theology—in the key of metaphysics—as a response to the problem of religion’s decided unpopularity to a bunch of people who feel really uncomfortable stepping in a church, or synagogue (to say nothing of singing in the choir). Coming at it from opposite directions, Ozick and Furman allow us to understand the concept of ethnicity as a kind of spectral reification of the ability to take culture for granted as history, operating as the neutralization of the Jewish American literary

field’s critical potential. Another consequence of breakthrough’s normalization of Jewish identity’s grounding in population: “ethnicity” names the conceptual resolution of the paradox of “breakthrough.” As Jews became decreasingly defined by a restrictively defined Judaism—echoes of Guttmann’s concern about Jewish writers choosing no longer to be chosen—the assemblage of cultural attributes organizable under the “ethnicity” rubric could do the work of maintaining Jewish continuity and recognizability. This signifier of assimilation’s supposed threat to Jewish visibility—that is, its recirculation precisely as a cliché—is central to how the breakthrough narrative has continued to structure professional thinking about Jewish American literature. Morris Dickstein reproduces many of these pieties in a retrospective piece, written deliberately from the standpoint of a leading intellectual or master of the field, published within a year of Furman’s book. Indeed, as an expression of field-logic, his essay stands as a triumphalist reiteration of breakthrough for a new generation. His aim, ultimately, much like Furman’s, is to demonstrate the literature’s—and the field’s—persistent vitality, offering at one point a representative epic catalog of the “writers who have emerged since the 1980s” and a list of their varied subjects and themes, reflecting the sweep of contemporary Jewish life, specifically in the note of diversity; now here is the answer to Furman’s demand that Jews be included on Ozick’s friend’s representative literature syllabus! Dickstein opens, cannily, by pointing out that despite the fact that “as early as the 1960s, influential critics argued that American Jewish writing no longer counted as a distinct or viable literature project” given that young American Jews were growing so assimilated and “so remote from traditional Jewish life, that only nostalgia kept it going”—he’s clearly thinking of people like Guttmann here—the field continued to foster debates for decades to come about “the core of the Jewish literary tradition” and the future possibilities of the Jewish American writer— most famously that between Irving Howe and Philip Roth, initiated by Howe’s 1972 attack in Commentary. Dickstein repeats Howe’s 1977 claim from the introduction to JewishAmerican Stories that Jewish American literature was probably past its high point because the matrix in which it is grounded is passing away—“a subculture finds its voice and its passion at exactly the moment it approaches disintegration”—noting the compressed chronology of Jewish American culture: “it comes as a surprise to realize that the major current of Jewish writing in America dates only from the Second World War.” It’s also here that Dickstein parts ways with Howe, rhetorically asking, “in what sense was Jewish life in America approaching disintegration in the first two decades after the war, when the best Jewish writers emerged?” Dickstein’s answer, much like Furman’s and Kramer’s, and in contrast to the arguments of Howe’s fellow breakthrough intellectuals like Guttmann and even Fiedler, is that it was only one stage of Jewish American life that was passing into history: “What was dying, quite simply, was the vibrant immigrant culture evoked by Howe in World of Our Fathers.”39 One generation’s image of Jewish American literature died so that Jewish American literary study might live. With Dickstein’s late-career pollyannaism about the field standing as symptomatic evidence, there have in fact been few debates—with Ozick perhaps an eccentric, and exceptional, dissenter; if critics may have voiced differences

about “the core of the Jewish literary tradition,”40 the field as such has persisted in its more or less unquestioned organization around the ethnologic historiography of Jewish Americans. As Furman did and Kramer would, Dickstein casts Howe as simply unable to foresee a new formation of Jewish American society, unable to imagine what a Jewish American culture might look like that was no longer defined by the immigrant milieu in which Howe’s own generational intelligence was forged. Conspicuously, however, Dickstein revises Howe’s confident culturalist historicism by way of a concept of ethnicity, restrictively reproducing the Jewish American literary field as little more than a project to narrate the history of Jews in America. Jewish American culture follows a predictable script for Dickstein, and he repurposes (as Furman did) Howe’s generalization from the introduction of Jewish-American Stories, that American literature as a whole tells the story of successive subcultural and ethnic groups of writers “break[ing] into the national literature,”41 as the paradigm of ethnic history. Dickstein writes that “in any ethnic subculture, it’s almost never the immigrant generation that writes the books”; the immigrants are too “focused on survival, on gaining a foothold and ensuring an education for their children,” and what’s more, they “don’t have the language.” To be sure, Dickstein recognizes “powerful works of the 1920s and ’30s”: in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money, and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, “writers pay tribute to the struggles of their parents yet declare their independence from what they see as their narrow and constricting world.” But for Dickstein, “the scattering of excellent novels by individual writers before the war belongs less to a major literary movement than to the process by which the children of immigrants claimed their identity.”42 Thus, if Jewish American literature “dates only from the Second World War,” a strong concept of ethnicity links the postwar literary breakthrough—the “movement”—to the cultural history that came before. “Ethnic subculture,” the keyword of Dickstein’s dynastic analysis, which he borrows from Howe, is the multidirectional machine through which the writers of the Jewish American literary breakthrough at once recuperated the history of the Jews who came before them and thereby “claimed their identity,” but also turned toward the future and secured the identity of the Jewish American literary field for institutional and professional posterity. Ethnicity is the concept that makes Jewish American literature historically self-evident: it is the representational promise of description at the heart of the expectation that Jewish American literature provides accessible information about Jewish Americans. As scholars like Furman and Dickstein bear out, postbreakthrough Jewish American literary study has largely suppressed the critical history of the field in an overdetermined concept of ethnicity. To recover this history and reinvigorate the possibility of critical practice, the Jewish American literary field needs to analyze how ethnicity has become the name in which it takes cultural production for granted as registering and representing the populations who write it. Werner Sollors explains that ethnicity in its current usage was “an obsolete English noun revitalized during World War II” to replace the term race, which, before the NSDAP made it into a dirty word, had since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries been essentially doing the labor for which we now call on ethnicity, when

culturalist usages like the “Irish race” or the “Jewish race” were roughly equivalent to what we now without discomfort call Irish or Jewish “ethnicity.”43 Etymologically, as we know, ethnicity derives from a translation of the Hebrew goy, which signified nation or group; Sollors reminds us that the Greek noun ethnos bore a kind of “ambivalence,” carrying meanings of both group of people or tribe more generally and also others more particularly, and the Greek ethnikos, from which the English words ethnic and ethnicity arise, meant gentile or heathen. Sollors notes, “Only in the mid-nineteenth century did the more familiar meaning of ‘ethnic’ as ‘peculiar to a race or nation’ reemerge,” though “the English language has retained the pagan memory of ‘ethnic,’ often secularlized in the sense of ethnic as other, as nonstandard or, in America, as not fully American.”44 Similarly, Omi and Winant argue that ethnicity became an attractive concept in early twentieth-century U.S. social science because while it challenged what they call the essentialist “biologism” of race, the idea that race was a biological category and therefore amenable to hierarchization, it nonetheless retained social and cultural categories of difference capable of accounting for America’s immigrant citizenry. But more pointedly for them, the concept of ethnicity was important in the United States because it allowed people to envision assimilation—at least for those European immigrant groups, from the great waves of the “Atlantic migration” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who could be perceived as white. Omi and Winant are quick to point out that the concept didn’t work nearly as well for racial minority groups who couldn’t be so easily assimilated to the assimilation paradigm.45 Ethnicity’s “ambivalence” therefore extends as well to its tendency in popular usage to apply better to “white” population groups than groups of color—a fact that the postbreakthrough narrative of the “whitening” of the Jews leverages to great normative effect. For Sollors, this “ambivalence” demonstrates that “it makes little sense to define ‘ethnicity-as-such,’ since it refers not to a thing-in-itself but to a relationship: ethnicity is typically based on a contrast.…‘X # Y’ is the fundamental ethnic formula…. In the modern world the distinction often rests on an antithesis between individuals (of the nonethnically conceived in-group) and ethnic collectivities (the out-groups),”46 but at the same time, “ethnic studies today” holds as axiomatic the normative “assumption that experience is first and foremost ethnic.”47 This helps explain the agenda-driven usage Ozick warns against, and also why the critical refusals of scholars like Furman and Dickstein are so illuminatingly important for the project to theorize Jewish studies: as Freedman I think wanted to argue, the concept of ethnicity naturalizes in the image of a historical population what is in fact a mode of thinking about a relationship. Ethnicity is a catachresis and supplement, projected back before an act of scholarly thinking oriented by a professional desire for Jewish American identity. Under the humanities-wide professional sway of what Bill Readings indicted as the “damaging assumption that thinking and describing are one and the same activity,”48 it can be easy to mistake “ethnicity” for a cultural positivity to be discursively traversed by professional scholarly activity—indicated, examined, archived, researched, elaborated. A critical program in Jewish studies needs to contest “ethnicity” as a proleptic reification of the project to name the development and reproduction—the affirmation—of a recognizable

historical subject through its naturalized culture. For whatever else it is, multiculturalism, as it was institutionally established in academic Chicano studies, ethnic studies, black studies, women’s and gender studies, and queer studies starting in the late 1960 and 1970s, can be understood as a way of knowing that was also a new technology of management articulated with the recognition and elaboration of identity. Roderick Ferguson has argued that the advent of interdisciplinary “studies” formations should be seen as the consolidation of “affirmative modes of power” that harnessed archival technologies in the interest of a strategy to incorporate the potential and active dissent that was breaking into disruptive visibility with the post–civil rights social movements: part of this “achievement” was “to make the pursuit of recognition and legitimacy” into “grand enticements” and “formidable horizons of pleasure” for a new “ensemble of institutions and techniques” that offered identity-based “positivities,” including images and structures, to populations and constituencies that had been denied institutional claims to agency.49 The multiculturalism-informed interdisciplinary “studies” formations (which Ferguson calls “interdisciplines”), therefore, “connoted a new form of biopower organized around the affirmation, recognition, and legitimacy of minoritized life” and that took form in the recognition and affirmation of “minoritized histories, cultures, and experiences.”50 While prior to the advent of multiculturalism the exclusion of certain classes of writers was itself an exercise of power organized around one kind of recognition of minoritized life, the multiculturalism-aligned interdisciplines coordinated identity-based cultural representations, formations, and policies with populations newly able to recognize themselves by means of those positivities. Knowledge production is always also a mode of administration, but under this new regime knowledge and management crossed at sites of incitement rather than of suppression, and the concept of ethnicity operated as a lever, an instrument of structural articulation more than a simple instrument of informational description. In English departments and allied academic units, ethnicity became the spectrally reified historicist object of a logic of literary historical knowledge production. As demands for radical institutional change organized around specific positions of difference became louder and harder to ignore in the late 1960s, ethnicity would within a decade or so became the anchoring concept, the warrant and justification, of a newly powerful mode of literary study under whose banner literary study pursues a quest for ethnic information, for knowledge of cultural content, to be archived and included in an emergent way of thinking about the nation-state that was itself consolidating along parallel tracks during the decades after the war. This logic is at work (if not exactly acknowledged) in Furman’s and Dickstein’s multiculturalist efforts to reestablish Jewish American literary history on the self-evidentiary ground of a concept of ethnicity—Furman by way of showing how Jewish American literature is an ethnic literature like any other and therefore belongs in the multicultural literature club, and Dickstein by way of a project to utilize Jewish American literature for an ethnic historiography. These two performances of precisely the labor that Ozick complains about—in both cases by citing her to boot—shine perverse light on the processes by which

breakthrough-era Jewish studies–based thinking normalized a biologistic articulation between culture and population. A number of projects and narratives do the work of this normalization, whether by embracing multiculturalism’s concept of ethnicity (certainly as institutionalized in some curricula and in public policy), racial formation theory, or something else; but in almost all cases this dominant form of thought has grounded the study of Jewish literature and culture in the historiographic investment of Jewish people. In fact, despite her complaint that multiculturalism installs an intellectually bankrupt concept of “ethnicity” as the hegemonic standard of academic legitimacy, Ozick also seems to root the existence of Jewish American literature in Jewish population, albeit one organized by and expressive of theological or covenantal rather than ethnic experience; by means of her biopolitical-aesthetic keyword mainstream, she pursues the same sort of anachronistic projection of the breakthrough narrative’s ideological coherence back to before World War II that seduced Furman and Dickstein. As she writes: “Do Jewish writers, major or minor, today sit at the mainstream table? No longer. Recall that in what we now think of as the Golden Age of Jewish-American literature, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth (that celebrated triumvirate whom Bellow wittily termed the Hart, Schaffner and Marx of American literature) were unquestionably in the mainstream; and I would set the late Stanley Elkin and Henry Roth among them. Even earlier, Charles Angoff, a kind of Jewish James T. Farrell, was in the mainstream; and Ludwig Lewisohn, author of ‘The Island Within,’ a novel explicitly about Jewish identity. So were Anzia Yezierska and Edna Ferber.”51 She demonstrates the historical reality of Jewish American literary achievement by pointing to a long history of Jewish writers being considered “mainstream” literature in the United States; it’s the advent of multiculturalism, with its reliance on a “pernicious” “identity politics,” that is responsible for making Jewish writers a “minority” on English department syllabuses. But Ozick’s desire to ground the field unity and literary historical relevance of Jewish literature in something other than ethnicity’s “demographic” criterion even while insisting that Jewish American literature is a representational system integrable into multiculturalism’s ethnicitybased value system may be troubled. It’s one thing to hold that we need a concept of covenantal chosenness rather than a concept of traumatic ethnic victimhood to administer literary value in the field, but it’s another thing entirely to demonstrate that Anzia Yezierska or Henry Roth or Saul Bellow translated a belief in Sinai into literary value. At the end of the day, neither Furman nor Dickstein (nor anyone else in the field for that matter) is arguing for anything other than the ability to say, with Ozick, that Jewish literature—at least, a categorization of the canon worthy of the name—is “explicitly about Jewish identity”; the important point is that few have been able to locate and read that “Jewish identity” anywhere but in already recognizable Jewish populations. For Ozick the problem with ethnicity, race, and their conceptual ilk is that they ignore the literary register in the interest of a “demographic” register they hold in higher esteem. But Ozick herself imagines literature to be at the service of a more primary historical reality, as well—one that is arguably functionally cognate with these demographic registers to the extent that it ends up reinscribing the same self-evidence of population.

Unlike what New Criticism allows one to say of the poetic text, Jewish writing that is “centrally Jewish” echoes with a historical sense in speaking for the Jewish ideas and beliefs that have historically unified the Jewish “communal voice.” This is why Ozick in the “New Yiddish” essay worries about Philip Roth’s refusal of the term “Jewish writer,” and why she rhetorically wonders whether, seven years later, and after the Six Day War, he would maintain his refusal—and it’s a worry that easily evolves into her canon-wars-era resentment about the devalued place of Jewish American literature under the reign of multiculturalism. But it’s hard to miss the fact that Ozick’s manifesto in favor of Jewish “ideas” rather than “ethnicity” is organized around the deployment of images of Jewish peoplehood, especially Jewish peoplehood in peril. My goal here is the opposite of normative; it’s well past time for Jewish American literary study to contest the temptation to have yet another bite of the ethnicity-is-relevant-to-literary-study apple, a professional performance that has tried repeatedly to normalize the field’s refusal to theorize its own ground and labor by naturalizing the self-evidence of population.52 I’m hoping rather to take Ozick’s complaint about ethnicity and multiculturalism seriously, but that means refusing to take for granted— as I worry Ozick herself may have approached taking for granted in her neocon-y remarks in the 1995 symposium, and indeed as other culture wars–situated conservative attacks on multiculturalism then and since have taken for granted—a reactionary and simplistic Manichean alternative between believing a concept of cultural identity is useful for literary study and believing a concept of ethnicity displaces or ignores aesthetic standards. It’s an opposition that repeats and reinscribes the old midcentury modernist cliché of a structuring and hierarchical opposition between aesthetic and political value, between disinterested inquiry and agenda-driven advocacy, between literature and propaganda, and between liberalism and leftism on the foundation of which literary study was professionalized in the postwar United States.53 It is what lies behind the polemical ease of Ozick’s complaint that “numbers, not words, have won.” And most significantly, it’s an opposition that distracts attention from her own reinvestment of a deep biologistic foundation for Jewish literature. Ozick’s critique usefully exposes the critical shortcomings of the historicist ethnography to which scholars like Furman and Dickstein (and the many others who have followed in their wake) seem to want to sell out Jewish American literary study for an academic legitimacy it will never confidently claim—the Jewish studies scholar in me wants to liken it to a mess of pottage—but her hierarchical dualism can explicitly reject the value of a culturalist concept of ethnicity for the project of representing Jewish literature on the grounds that such a concept is inevitably structured by a political agenda only by reinscribing the self-evidence of Jewish population—precisely what she rightly accuses the concept of ethnicity of doing. Just as the authoritative hold the breakthrough critics exercised over the field was beginning to wane, Ozick renews breakthrough’s intellectual project of regrounding Jewish American literature in the recognizable Jewishness of its authors by closing the critical gap between Jews and Jewish literature, naturalizing the link between population and its self-evident representation in the literary field. And yet before she succumbed to neocon resentment, Ozick disclosed the possibility of an escape from the Manichean trap. Though Jewish

American literary study may not quite know what to do with her—indeed, though she herself surrendered her critical insights in reactionary resentment—Ozick offers critical Jewish studies an alternative to the self-evidence of population.

Was John Updike a Jewish American Writer? The postbreakthrough Jewish American literary field marks its diminished prestige as a problem, registered variously in Ozick’s 1995 resentment, Furman’s disquiet, and HarrisonKahan and Lambert’s MELUS-bound consternation (see Chapter 1), among other symptomatic expressions. This problem is often registered in concern about the “relevance” of Jewish American writers, texts, and literary historical study, a term that’s hard to imagine meaning anything outside the context of a defensive maneuver, with this “relevance” remaining to be secured in some way. At the spring 2016 meeting of the American Literature Association, for another recent example of postbreakthrough anxiety, the Philip Roth Society sponsored a roundtable discussion on “Roth and Relevance,” with presentations arguing for examining Roth in the context of a variety of legitimized humanistic inquiries, a project allied to Harrison-Kahan and Lambert’s MELUS issue. Think about it: what debasement a field must experience to stage a panel like that—and I pose this in bald admission that I know about this panel because I was one of the speakers. One may indeed be excused for wanting to ask why we have to prove Roth’s relevance, but the more critically important question to ask is: in what terms has this defense been pursued? Jonathan Boyarin sagely warns us that “we’re accustomed to answering a question in the form of ‘what does x mean?’ with a solution in the form of ‘x is…’”—which is to say, he continues, “we describe x.”54 While this hegemonic maneuver is discursively powerful, such professional projects of description necessarily proceed by taking for granted and reproducing the established terms of debate, terms premised on the self-evidence of the field of objects to be described. It’s hard to imagine a circumstance in which trying to demonstrate Roth’s relevance—or Jewish American literature’s relevance—does not operate on a similar basis, taking for granted the idiom of the representational project of academic ethnological pluralism. And it necessarily naturalizes the historical structuring of the field in which professional discourse about Jewish American literature takes place. Accordingly, if the assumption, in Sollors’s terms, “that experience is first and foremost ethnic” has helped suppress critical analysis of the history of the professional common sense that organizes the Jewish American literary field as, fundamentally, an ethnological history of the Jewish subject, Ozick might help the field reorient itself away from the biologistic historicism that has reigned in the Jewish American literary field, and that takes form in envious or resentful projects to demonstrate the relevance of Jewish American literature, in order to authorize, cultivate, and concede new thought. What would it mean to pursue a Jewish American literary criticism without recourse to, without taking for granted, a historicist concept of ethnological representation? One route to envisioning such a practice might travel, indirectly, to be sure, through a witness to breakthrough who was nonetheless free of the autoethnographic imperative—expression of Kramer’s “narcissism”—that breakthrough exercised on so many of its intellectuals. By

contrast to Roth and the other breakthrough writers, John Updike is a writer who’s in no danger of being refused his American bona fides. As Ozick suggested in her 1995 attack on multiculturalism’s deleterious effect on the English department curriculum, there are few writers who can claim more than Updike to represent American literature’s WASP establishment. No one’s going to say that he needs to prove his relevance.55 And yet.… Updike had his own perceptions of the Jewish American literary “breakthrough,” most insistently and visibly in his stories about Henry Bech, a Jewish writer Updike started writing about in the mid-1960s and returned to off and on for nearly forty years. These stories were collected in three books—Bech: A Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1982), and Bech at Bay (1998), with The Complete Henry Bech coming out in 2001. To read the Bech stories is continually to recognize variations on breakthrough writers—in both characterization and style. The Henry Bech of the stories from the 1960s, for example, is often very much a Malamudian schlemiel: as he runs across the tarmac to get to an airplane in one story, his cheap valise breaks open and he barely makes the plane, hugging the overflowing suitcase closed in both arms.56 Bech is perennially blocked, like Henry Roth, the prebreakthrough writer who was rediscovered during breakthrough and reinscribed as part of the narrative of breakthrough. And we find a lot of Philip Roth in Bech, too. After a successful first book, Bech writes a sensational follow-up—intimations of Portnoy’s Complaint—after an uninspired phase. Perennially worried about whether he’s equal to his literary reputation, midcareer Bech inevitably recalls for the Roth critic the sustained engagement with literary history of what the Philip Roth Society now often calls Roth’s major phase—that is, the thirty-year period beginning with The Ghost Writer and the emergence in revised form of his recurring character, the writer Nathan Zuckerman. As with Zuckerman (and I guess Roth, too!), Bech’s friends, acquaintances, and lovers find hostile representations of themselves in his books. Bech: A Book, comprising stories released between 1965 and 1970, begins with a preface by Bech, addressed to Updike, very meta—Bech compliments Updike on “this little jeu of a book”—that’s a dead ringer for the framing structure of Roth’s “Novelist’s Autobiography,” The Facts. All of this could be nicely contained by an easy literary historical account of Updikean resentful parody if these Rothian moments always followed after Roth’s presumed originals. In fact, just as often they precede the relevant Rothian texts: the first Bech stories were published fifteen years before The Ghost Writer, the preface to Bech: A Book eighteen years before The Facts. A reckless scholar might even want to argue that in copying Updike, Philip Roth, like the Jewish American literary tradition he synecdochically figures, was seeded by Updike’s WASPy lewdness. But even I’m not that reckless, and in any case I’m not really concerned with charting biographically administered lines of literary influence—just pointing out how easily literary historical scholarship can fall under the professional sway of the promise of representational accuracy and descriptive truth. Given that according to such eminences of the Jewish American literary field as Irving Howe and Cynthia Ozick a writer’s being Jewish does not guarantee that writer’s status as a Jewish writer—even though Philip Roth made this precise point in 1963, Howe likely imagined himself landing a zinger when

he accused Roth of it in 1972 with his “thin personal culture” comment-ary—I’m tempted to turn the tables and ask promiscuously here whether there’s a universe in which the literary critical utility of the question “Is John Updike a Jewish American Writer?” would not be dismissed out of hand. In posing this question I elliptically nod to Leslie Fiedler, who asked in the title of one of his essays, “Why Is the Grail Knight Jewish?” I hope at least that my query does not seem too intolerable or unreasonable, if perhaps it may be a bit improbable. Or perhaps I hope to smoke out the arguments of those who do find it intolerable. In my defense, I can again cite Fiedler, who once described Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin as “two black writers who had first defined themselves and their themes for the overwhelmingly Jewish readers of Commentary and Partisan Review, and thus could be considered JewishAmerican writers once removed.”57 Like so many others who circulate around and respond to the Jewish American “breakthrough,” Updike couldn’t help but appreciate the magnitude of this transformation of U.S. culture. And accordingly, one way to look at Bech is certainly to say that in the stories— especially those in the first volume, whose plots so often circulate around Bech performing readings, at home and abroad—Updike was simply doing his part to suggest that a Jewish American novelist (blocked or not) had become a prototypical literary figure in the United States. In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories of the Century (2000), Updike looked back and exclaimed, “Jewishness! What would post-war American fiction be without it—its color, its sharp eye, its colloquial verve, its comical passions, its exuberant plaintiveness?” But needless to say his observation wasn’t exclusively celebratory, and certainly neither value-neutral nor free of stereotype; in the essay Updike also had this, from the thanks-for-the-compliment file, to say about Stanley Elkin’s “Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers,” first published in 1961, and appearing in Best American Short Stories 1962, for example: it “could be shorter, beginning with its title. But it gives us what seldom gets into fiction, the taste and texture of doing business, the daily mercenary pressures that compete with even the deepest personal grief for a man’s attention.”58 And indeed it is hard to believe that Updike did not start writing about Bech out of a kind of professional resentment —organized under the sign of ethnic resentment—in response to the shifting center of literary gravity in the ’60s. Early Bech can never evade or avoid his own Jewishness; the early stories can’t resist egregious references to the Jewish nose, for instance.59 And one could add that Bech is often also shown to be envious of Gentile competence and confidence; regarding the young Wendell Morrison (what a name!) in “Bech Takes Potluck,” Bech thinks, “The boy had that Wasp knowingness, that facility with things: he knew how to insert a clam knife, how to snorkel (just to put on the mask made Bech gasp for breath), how to bluff and charm his way onto private beaches” (67). I have little doubt that Updike wrote about Bech out of resentment because Updike is pretty up-front about it: Bech: A Book was attended by a bibliography of Bech’s writings that Updike admitted was a way of “working off various grudges, a way of purging my system. I’ve never been warmly treated by the Commentary crowd—insofar as it is a crowd—and so I made Bech its darling.”60 Adam Kirsch points out that Updike’s often-just-a-little-too-conspicuously-Jewish author

Henry Bech “occupied Updike’s imagination for as long, if never as deeply, as his greatest creation, Rabbit Angstrom”; more relevantly for our purposes, he situates the Bech stories, predictably, in a resentful symptomology of breakthrough.61 In writing the Bech stories, Kirsch’s Updike understands breakthrough much as Irving Howe did, though from the other side, and with a dollop of envy. For Kirsch, the Bech stories testify to how surprising the Jewish American literary emergence must have seemed to status quo observers and intellectuals, and how threatening this new reality must have seemed to an American writer like Updike; writing about Bech afforded Updike an opportunity to explore an “uneasy mixture of emotions” that stirred close to his own identity, the “fascination and alienation of a Gentile writer in a literary milieu dominated by Jews.…Reading the Bech stories is a useful reminder of how unexpected, how sheerly unlikely, this Jewish moment must have seemed to a Protestant writer of Updike’s generation.”62 Note how the narrative of ethnic resentment is immediately available to Kirsch as the key to the stories. Conspicuously, Kirsch begins his consideration of Bech by citing Ozick’s story “Levitation,” a story published in 1976, about ten years after Updike started writing about Bech; the story, in Kirsch’s summation, “deals with a pair of married writers—the husband Jewish, the wife Christian—who throw a party for their literary friends. The party turns out to be as middling as their careers,” as all the literary celebrities they invite—in a hyperrealist gesture, Ozick names Howe, Susan Sontag, Kazin, and Fiedler among the invitees—inevitably don’t show up, “and the star attraction turns out to be a professor who is a Holocaust survivor.” By the end of the evening, all the Jewish guests have gathered around this one professor, listening to him relate stories of his survival, while the Gentile hostess watches from the doorway, feeling increasingly alienated, to the point of watching “the room full of Jews,” including her husband, “float into the air,” leaving her behind. Kirsch sees Ozick in this story seriocomically attempting “to imagine what it might be like to be a Christian in a midcentury New York literary world largely populated by Jews.” In this world, as Kirsch sees Ozick “sardonic[ally]” imagining it, Jewish American literature’s mainstreaming breakthrough is ironically exaggerated in the scene of Jewish writers and literary folk sharing a sense of belonging that is denied their Gentile coprofessionalists. The Holocaust has come to stand as the fundamental signifier of Jewish differentiation and indeed chosenness, “an obsession and a badge of authenticity that the Jews, despite themselves, hold over the non-Jews.” It’s also what protects the exclusivity of postwar Jewish American achievement from the calumny of mere tribalism: Jewish intellectuals haven’t merely gamed the system, Jewish culture isn’t being unjustly elevated, and Jews shouldn’t inspire Gentile bitterness: “Jewishness and Jewish suffering become a kind of club to which outsiders would not necessarily want to belong, except for the nagging realization that they never can.” Thus Kirsch casts “Levitation” as “Ozick’s coded response to her contemporary John Updike”: it’s a story about, and justifying, Gentile exclusion, a defense of whatever privilege others might enviously perceive in American Jews. Which is to say that Kirsch reads Ozick’s story as being just a bit unfair to Updike’s Bech stories, and he wants to recover Updike from the hit he received—at least to a degree. If Ozick’s story registers some reservations about

breakthrough—the story’s Jews are able to experience their bond only after a kind of debasement (the party isn’t making it onto Page Six), and the specter of the Holocaust haunts everything—Kirsch notes a similar ambivalence in Updike’s portrait of Henry Bech, emphasizing its “unmistakable edge,” and at times “its pointed embrace” of “stereotypes,” but he also suggests that on balance the Bech books can be seen “as Updike’s good-humored, essentially benevolent, but still curious and awkward attempt to figure out what was going on in the lives and minds of his Jewish peers,” who now incontrovertibly belong in and to American literature—a belonging that, under the banner of Ozick’s story, Updike views with envy. Obviously, it’s not that Updike provides any particularly accurate portrait of Jews or Jewish writers that makes the Bech stories literarily valuable for Kirsch; it’s rather the portrait he offers of his own ethnic imagination at work that does. Jewish literature as phenomenon, not as ethnological technology. Kirsch continues, “What is genuinely illuminating in the Bech stories is not what Updike knows about Jewishness, which is not very much, but what he imagines about the way Jews think and feel.” And then Kirsch instrumentalizes this humility in the interest of Jewish exceptionalism. Which is to say that, performing a characteristic ideological maneuver, Kirsch repackages breakthrough for the Tablet crowd.63 It’s obvious to Kirsch that Bech is Updike’s “alter ego,” and so to him it’s key to the Bech stories that Updike has proceeded by “making his alter ego a Jew.”64 Kirsch reads Bech through a psychological lens, but one that refracts according to an ethnic principle of knowledge production: he deploys his alter-ego reading metonymically, as an indication of the response by the WASP literary establishment to the Jewish American literary emergence—and indeed to Jewish American integration and social success more generally. Bech can’t ignore or avoid Jewishness because Updike can’t. But what Updike can’t understand in Kirsch’s formulation is Jewish justification: Kirsch’s Updike ignores the fact that if U.S. literary culture seemed “dominated by Jews…it was because they loved the country and found it ready to reciprocate their love.” Kirsch’s examples are Kazin, whom Kirsch calls not without warrant his generation’s leading expositor of U.S. literature, and Bellow, who wrote the great American novel in Augie March. Indeed, Kirsch’s essay is in large part devoted to teasingly prodding Updike, rebuking him for his passively antisemitic “insinuation that the Jewish soul was at odds with the American soul,” his assumption of some naturalized barrier existing between Jews and the Anglo-American literary tradition, blind to the fact that so many Jews in the twentieth century dedicated themselves to teaching and explaining Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson, among others: “the continued vitality of the tradition is proved by the way it can be reinterpreted by each new generation that sees it with new eyes. The Bech books deserve to be read as a testament to the tensions that this process of reinterpretation can evoke—and to the power of imagination and humor that allow it to succeed.” Reading Updike’s Bech for a project of Jewish ethnic pride, Kirsch accomplishes the task that Furman, Dickstein, the MELUS special issue, and most postbreakthrough Jewish American literary history has organized itself around. Kirsch the pluralist understands Updike as a messenger—a reactionary and antisemitic

messenger who despite not fully understanding what’s going on faithfully carries a message nonetheless—heralding the Jewish American literary emergence and therefore evidence of the demographic fact of Jews’ participation in the diverse social and cultural fabric of the postwar United States, along with WASPs and even cultural conservatives. With “Levitation,” Ozick—the native informant—functions for Kirsch as his Jewish insurance policy in the essay, proof that Updike’s resentment is not the whole story, but, in a sense, an ancillary, epiphenomenal accompaniment to the accurate record he more primarily offers, a response to an actual ethnic fact. Updike’s attitude may have been inappropriate, but his response wasn’t without historical logic, and it is in any case valuable for the (ethnographic) literary historian, significant for its fundamental representation of breakthrough. Kirsch’s Updike’s envy and Kirsch’s own psychological method combine to demonstrate for a critical literary history how, through reproduction of the cliché of breakthrough or emergence, Jewish American literature comes to function as the historicist reification of a Jewish American demographic fact. The envy Kirsch locates as the motivating subtext of Updike’s Bech stories functions as the affective deputy for the normalized concept of population at the heart of the Jewish American literary field. No less than Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, or Saul Bellow, Updike stands as evidence of Jewish American cultural achievement. It’s the exceptionalist’s defense of exceptionalism—in the form of an ideological denial of exceptionalism. Kirsch’s interest in Ozick’s “Levitation” focuses the limits of criticism that orbits around the ethnicity of the author: his reading of the story as a tale of Gentile exclusion, a kind of nose-thumbing parody of Updike’s ironic representation of his own bitterness about breakthrough in the Bech stories (can I picture Ozick thumbing her nose? I’m not sure), tends to neglect Ozick’s complex representation of Jewishness, and accordingly her story’s significance in staging a critique of Jewish American literature. Ozick’s story is not simply about an American metropolitan cultural scene “largely populated by Jews,” even literary ones. In fact, the story offers us two different images of Jews. First are the literary intellectuals the couple invites, the marquee figures and big names who fill the pages of the high-visibility periodicals. These are, in a sense, the breakthrough Jews, who trade in easily consumable images of their cultural experience packaged for universal consumption, and whose fame is intimately linked to the ethnological presumption that they represent American Jews. But these Jews don’t show up to the party. The Jews who in fact do arrive may lack the ecumenical fame of Howe and Fiedler and Sontag, but they are bonded with each other, through history, memory, and covenant.65 This is authentic Jewishness for Ozick: restricted, yes, but also sharing a connection that’s deeper than fame and more profound than mere ethnic association. And the no-show Jewish breakthrough intellectuals—inscribed by a cultural desire for an easy ethnological recognition—miss out on this experience of deep Jewish community. At the same time, however, it’s hard to ignore a resurgence here of the “New Yiddish” essay’s investment of images of population: we cannot avoid how Ozick’s story focuses its imaginative orbit around the Jews’ bond—memory, covenant—through the Holocaust,

through the genocidal destruction of bodies. Jewishness is more profound and complex than the demographic simplifications of ethnicity, but this covenantal bond is necessarily anchored in, and legible through, bodies, and through those bodies’ ethnologically signifying transubstantiation into population. Judaism, Jewish culture and ideas, Jewishness: if what makes Jews Jews originates and operates in a register other than demography for Ozick, it necessarily reproduces itself through bodies, and whatever else they are, Jews are Jewish bodies. For whatever else it is, for whatever else Ozick might want, after breakthrough Jewish American literature inevitably comes down to a story of population set in the liberal pluralist state. I don’t think Kirsch gets Ozick’s complexity, but his tendentious simplification in pursuit of a triumphalist, Jewishist66 recuperation of Updike’s Bech can operate as a leverage point for criticism. Rather than starting from an assumption that they stand simply as a datum reconfirming a narrative—what, following Kramer, we might call a narcissistic narrative—about Jewish American achievement that the Jewish studies complex doesn’t really challenge, the Bech stories can be read for what happens when a concept of ethnic identity comes to take hold of and administer a dominant narrative of literary politics. The Bech stories are certainly not about specific Jewish writers or Jewish American literature more generally; but through their ironic performance of Jewish American literature’s selfevidence as the representation and representative of a Jewish American subject they can be put to work by a critical effort—via precisely their repetition of the specter of Jewish American infringement on the precincts of normative American privilege—to understand how the field of Jewish American literary study was able to consolidate. We can value the Bech stories not for their descriptive narrative about Jewish Americans or Jewish American literary history but for an analysis of how the Jewish American literary field takes hold of its objects—and of the disciplinary labor of Jewish studies. Around the time she was proposing a New Yiddish, Cynthia Ozick also complained specifically about the Bech stories, calling Bech a “caricature” of a Jew, unrealistic and hollow, and accused Updike of failing to understand Judaism. Much of the meat in Ozick’s argument is intimated in the title, “Bech, Passing,” of a review that originally appeared in response to the first Bech book in Commentary in November 1970, but to which she added a “Postscript,” twelve years later, after the appearance of the second Bech compilation, for publication in her collection Art and Ardor. Passing is of course a term that derives its utility or functional meaning, and its logic, from the presumption of an ontology of identity—often in the form of a concept of race or racialized ethnicity or gender or sexual identity, or at least some concept of naturalized authenticity or essentialism: it is used to describe a member of one population being mistaken for, or trying to be mistaken as, a member of another population, taken to be what one is not. Ozick includes “Bech, Passing” in a part of Art and Ardor she titled “Cultural Impersonation” (which also included a 1971 review of Mark Harris’s 1970 novel The Goy). In the brief introduction to this part, she writes that Bech pursues a strategy that “touches on cultural impersonation, on ‘ethnicity,’ while neglecting, in a setting where it would surely be pertinent, the sacral imagination.” She goes on to assert that Bech is the “type”—a “type” with which we savvy readers and scholars might assume

we are quite familiar—of a “fully secularized Jewish writer who is himself an impersonation of a fully secularized (if one could credit this) John Updike.”67 There’s no actual Jewish substance to Bech, as Updike has founded him on no actual historical ground of Jews or Judaism, but rather only a de-Christianized version of himself, which, Ozick argues, can only take (or be read as having) positive form via habits of ethnic thinking. We hear echoes here of her (roughly contemporary) critique of the dehistoricizing dangers of experimental fiction and of her later critique of multiculturalism—but we also suspect that she can see Bech in terms only of passing because she cannot imagine Jewish literature outside the biologistic field of Jewish population. For the Ozick of the 1995 symposium on multicultural literature, we recall, “ethnicity” was the lever of multiculturalism’s program of “deceit”: it devalues all the historically specific ideas that have defined Jewish identity and existence in favor of an abstract and empty demographic difference. In the Bech essay, Ozick indicts the concept of ethnicity for reducing all that is significant about identity to easily observed and described informational terms—to two dimensions, as it were. Under its sway, Updike, “our most theological writer” (“next to Frederick Buechner”), “portrays Bech, his Jew, as theologically hollow” (113). “Sacral” is her term for the deep foundation of identity, below the surfaces of ethnicity, that touches the covenantal heart of Jews’ relations to each other, and it’s impossible to understand Jewishness without appeal to what she calls here the “sacral imagination,” or what in “Toward a New Yiddish” she called more generally “Jewish ideas”; and in fact Ozick is explicit in arguing that Bech makes a “curious contribution (if only through the provocation of contradiction) to the liturgical language I have described elsewhere in this volume: New Yiddish” (113). For Ozick, “being a Jew” consists “simply” in the state “of being covenanted; or, if not committed so far, to be at least aware of the possibility of becoming covenanted; or, at the very minimum, to be aware of the covenant itself” (123). Indeed, a “truthfully” rendered Jew is necessarily for her a theologically rendered one (121). Updike’s Bech, however, is the result of a social-scientific pursuit of observable “data” or “sociological thereness”—in the brief preface to this “Cultural Impersonation” part she indicts Updike for “rest[ing] on sociology as raw source” (113)—that is “beside the point” to any of the “theological” “ideas” that define the possibility of being Jewish (123): “It is as if he cannot imagine what a sacral Jew might be” (122). Unable to “theologize the Jew in Bech” (121), Updike misses the mark of “the historical Jew” (122). Ozick finds it conspicuous that Updike, who “theologizes everything,” “does not theologize the Jew in Bech” (121). “In the case of Bech—and only in in the case of Bech—Updike does not find it worthwhile to be theological” (121). She finds it conspicuous (her word is “queer”) that Updike, who is “always so inquisitive about how divinity works through Gentiles, has no curiosity at all about how it might express itself … in a Jew.” Instead, “as Jew,” Bech is “all sociology”; “Updike comes and goes as anthropologist, transmuting nothing” (122). “Ethnicity” cannot approbate anything it can’t recognize on the surface or as data, and at the close of the Bech essay she refers to “the ethnic Bech” as the author without anything particularly Jewish about him (125). Ozick’s Bech is an inhabitant of the same universe that

allows Roth’s distinction between “Jewish writer” and “writer who is a Jew.” Absent any theological interest, Updike’s Jew lacks substance. “Bech-as-Jew has no existence, is not there, because he has not been imagined,” Ozick writes. “Bech-as-Jew is a switch on a library computer. What passes for Bech-as-Jew is an Appropriate Reference Machine, cranked on whenever Updike reminds himself that he is obligated to produce a sociological symptom: crank, gnash, and out flies an inverted sentence” (115). Ozick lists an array of reference categories—“vocabulary,” “family,” “historical references,” “nose,” “hair,” “sex” (her chart takes up a whole page!)—on which Updike relies in his effort to establish Bech’s Jewishness, but the problem for Ozick is that they ring hollow:68 “Being a Jew is something more than being an alienated marginal sensibility with kinky hair” (123). Updike reproduces only superficial ethnic allusions themselves cribbed from voguish Jewish American writers: “In search of a Jewish sociology, Updike has very properly gone to the, as Bech would say, soi-distant [sic]69 Jewish novel” and found a limited vocabulary (116). Updike’s epiphenomenal fabric of reference is insufficient to represent Jews because there’s no sacral reality lending substance and “truth” (122) to this sociological information, nothing that suggests “the historical Jew” or actual Jewish life: “one (affectionate) stereotype doesn’t make an anti-Dreyfusard” (117). Ozick’s Updike cannot “get beyond data to something like historical presence, and a living Bech” (124). All surface and no (historical) depth, “Bech has no Jewish memory” and so has “less than a fourth-grade grasp of where he is” (117). Magisterially, Ozick finds much in Bech’s name: “while none of Updike’s people has ever attained salvation, salvation is the grail they moon over. Bech’s grail is cut in half, like his name, which is half a kiddush cup: becher. Over the broken brim the Jew in Bech spills out” (120); “the Jewish Bech has no reality at all, especially not to himself: he is a false Jew, a poured-out becher, one who has departed from Jewish presence” (124). In fact, Ozick believes the Bech stories would likely have been fine absent a Jewish Bech: “Without Bech, Bech might have been small but sharp, a picaresque travel-diary wryly inventing its own compunctions. But wherever the Jew obtrudes, there is clatter, clutter, a silliness sans comedy. Bech makes empty data” (121). Updike’s Jew is illegitimate. Despite the title, “Bech, Passing,” however, it’s ultimately Updike, not Bech, whom Ozick holds accountable for trying to pass as a Jew—and not simply for doing a piss-poor job of it. Toward the beginning of the review she asks a decidedly rhetorical question. “Everyone knows,” she avers, that the Marranos in Spain perished at the stake (everyone “except possibly Bech,” so detached from Jewish history is his poorly drawn character); “so much for Jews posing” as Christians. But “what, then, of Christian posing as Jew? What would he have to take on, much less shuck off?” Ozick’s selfassured answer? “In the case of Updike’s habitation of Bech, nothing” (115). Why do the Bech stories constitute a case of “impersonation” or “posing”? Who is pretending to be someone he or she is not? Not Bech, certainly; Bech the schlemiel may be a lot of things, but he never pretends to be or poses as other than he is. No—for Ozick the Bech stories stand as evidence of Updike’s attempt to try on the identity of a Jew because he has tried to create a Jewish character in Bech. Bech is Ozick’s evidence that Updike is “posing as Jew”; Ozick cannot avoid seeing Bech as

Updike’s—albeit unsuccessfully attempted—proxy or, as he was for Kirsch, his “alter ego.” Which is to say that if Updike is a reverse Marrano, if he’s a “Christian posing as Jew,” then Ozick’s argument that Bech has been unsuccessfully imagined is a bit of a red herring: nothing could make Bech successfully imagined—a stylistic predicament—if the problem is that Jewish Bech has been imagined by a Gentile—an ontological predicament. This red herring was previewed when Ozick claimed that simply “to be aware of the covenant” qualifies one to be a Jew as much as does “being covenanted”: a Gentile can “be aware of the covenant” as much as a Jew can, but it’s only the Jew who can look forward to “being covenanted”—which is to say that there’s some identitarian bedrock below her “Jewish ideas” that Ozick is not being completely straightforward about. Ozick is quick to point out that missing the real Jew “is not Updike’s flaw exclusively; it is, essentially, the flaw of the Jewish writers he is sporting with” (123), like Philip Roth and others. But to succeed where he, and those writers, failed would have required Updike “to do what Vatican II fought against doing: forgive the Jew for having been real to himself all those centuries, and even now. And for that he would have had to renounce the darker part of the Christian imagination and confound his own theology” (124). If Jewish writers like Roth failed to represent real Jews because they were bad Jewish writers, Updike fails to represent them because, as a Christian writer (good or bad), he is incapable of recognizing Jews in their own terms in the first place.70 Thus the early-’70s protestations of folks like Howe and Ozick about Philip Roth, for example—that his literary Jews are “thin[ly]” drawn (to use Howe’s term), or that he’s “not much interested in Jewish ideas” and “speak[s] for a doom” (to use the language of Ozick’s apocalyptic grievance)—though they might seem cognate with Ozick’s complaint here about Bech’s “sociological” masquerade, are entirely incommensurate with that charge; unlike Updike, Roth cannot be accused of “passing,” even when he’s most annoying to Ozick or Howe. Updike’s desire to call Bech Jewish can never be sufficient to underwrite Bech’s Jewishness because it can only ever call forth an ersatz, counterfeit Jew; Bech’s original sin is that he’s not the real deal because Updike isn’t. Ozick’s albeit implied insistence that it is impossible for a Gentile author to create a Jewish character repeats the normative link between the identity of an author and the identity of a text that defines breakthrough’s discursive shift, a shift whose biologistic innovation was to productively constellate authors, identities, and texts in a kind of intentional fallacy. Bech’s Jewishness rings hollow because Updike himself can never be the appropriate, which is to say population-based, authority to vouchsafe Bech’s Jewishness. If her argument from sociological reference is a red herring, then in her argument for “Jewish ideas” Ozick is not admitting that those Jewish ideas need to be tied to Jewish bodies, that only Jewish authors can really vouchsafe Jewish ideas. Ozick does not question this formula in 1970 or in 1983, and her argument in 1995 is simply its intensified reactionary flip side. And the field of Jewish American literary history then and since has mostly kept her company in taking for granted this biologistic historicism underwriting the link between recognizably Jewish population and categorically Jewish literature; indeed, Furman’s nonchalant trouble defining Jewish American writing might be seen simply as a rare, beautiful moment when the taken-

for-granted becomes conspicuous as such. Ozick reads Bech as a case history of the dangers of a concept of ethnicity for literary history; and yet she ends up reinscribing the populational criterion of Jewish American literature that she later so vociferously attacks in the multiculturalist program.

Writing While Jewish “Imagination,” registered in her accusation that Updike’s “sociological” Bech “has not been imagined,” is Ozick’s key metonym for literature.71 While she complains that Updike’s portrayal of Bech “has no existence” and “is not there,” she insists that she does not mean that “Updike’s American Jew is false”; the problem, rather, “is that he is not false enough.” By which, she elaborates, she means “made up, imagined, mythically brought up into truthfulness.” Absent this “truthfulness,” composed of mere references (however “appropriate”) but with no reality, Bech as a Jew has no imagined coherence and no “truthfulness,” and therefore “is pathetically truncated, like his name” (122). But the ballast of an essentialized principle of recognizable population always already stabilizes this investigation for Ozick—at least in the case of Jewish literature. Sever the naturalized link between population and literature, Ozick fears, and literature is granted too much leeway and too much dangerous power—what worried her about experimental fiction. Illustrating something of the midrashic technique she designated in the “What Literature Means” essay— whereby our expectations about the unity and coherence of a text underwrite the interpretations we are able to produce—Bech’s name can operate as a perfect symbol for Updike’s failure, even if Bech himself cannot access the Jewish subject. Failing to actually be about Jews, Updike’s Bech stories offer not only the closed circle of literary invention but also a cautionary tale. In her argument against experimental writing, even as she celebrates the literary imagination for its ability to create, Ozick famously feared its ability to destroy the possibility of meaning itself by creating idols; indeed, this is a danger that will always attend literature for Ozick, the dark underbelly of her literary criticism and of the midrashic practice she acclaims: “An idol serves no one; it is served. The imagination, like Moloch, can take you nowhere except back into its own maw” (247). This is the danger in Updike’s Appropriate Reference Machine unmoored from the Jews: it turns more to mere craft and literary vogue than to any real objective foundation for an administering legitimacy. For Ozick, we need to fear a too-easy literary idolatry that aggressively disregards history: again, “literature for its own sake, for its own maw: not for the sake of humanity.” Bech is an idol, offered up to the altar of literary fashion.72 Just as, in the 1970s, Howe, Fiedler, Krasny, and many other breakthrough intellectuals were proclaiming that Jewish American literature was, in a sense, over, Ozick, who probably more than any other writer represents a kind of second iteration of breakthrough or, to import a term from Americanism, a second awakening of Jewish American writing, is becoming popular and well regarded, a marquee figure in her own regard, but precisely by revising what this category “Jewish American literature” means. In a kind of transvaluation of the paradigm instituted by Howe et al., Ozick diagnoses an isomorphism between “idols” and

“ethnicity”—a word so caustic she often feels the need to fence it off in scare quotes, as in her brief introduction to Art and Ardor’s “Cultural Impersonation” section, a prophylactic procedure she extends to the word’s adjectival cognates, including, for example, the “ethnic Bech” of “Bech, Passing” and the “‘ethnic’ writers” of her vituperative 1995 attack on literary multiculturalism. Ethnic culture, the discursive anchor of the representational historicism championed by Howe, his peers, and his heirs (like Furman and Dickstein), is simply insufficient for Ozick, a criterion outmatched by its appointed administrative task. She offers a revision of Howe’s definition of Jewish American literature, swapping out Howe’s fetish of cultural representation and replacing it with the “sacral” “ideas” of the Jewish “covenant.” If “idolatry” names the ethical crime of freeing the imagination from any responsibility to the ground Ozick labels, in the Bech essay, alternatively “historical presence” and the “sacral,” and in the “New Yiddish” essay “tradition,” “history,” and “humanity” (163), then “ethnicity” is the name under which Jewishness is imagined free of “historical presence” or indeed “humanity”—which is to say as population only, as the mere “demography” of the multiculturalism symposium. The two terms describe, in various ways, thought’s neoliberal seduction by legible surface, its reduction to a method of categorization, and to the investment of label as the primary site of significance and meaning. Were Ozick a different kind of thinker, one might even be tempted to say that for her ethnicity and idolatry name various forms of commodification—of identity in the first case, and of meaning in the second. Ethnicity is identity reduced to an informational, nationalized count, and a literary study based on its abstract logic trades humanism for statistics. Terms like the “sacral” or the “theological” name the experiential and existential depth that evades the reduction of identity to recognizable information. Orienting the search for Jewish knowledge around a concept of ethnicity as informational is for Ozick a loser’s game. Thought needs to be more than description. But there’s a great irony in Ozick’s making “impersonation” the crux of her reading of Bech. She reads the Bech stories as bad literature because lacking a covenantal relationship to and experience of Jews being Jewish, neither Updike nor his Jewish writer character succeeds at representing either Jewish writers in particular or Jews in general. Which is to say that Ozick neither succeeds at nor seems at all interested in disarticulating the aesthetic and political senses of representation—precisely the differentiation on which her 1995 takedown of multiculturalism pivots. Which is in turn also to say that she seems to repeat the error she finds so objectionable in the demographic reductionism of multiculturalists and in the envious literary presumption of Updike, for both of whom (according to her) ethnicity’s power as an anchoring concept is entirely a function of its descriptive capacities—of its power to collapse representation’s aesthetic capacities into its political modalities. It may be “no trick” for a Gentile to write “a genial novel about an uncovenanted barely nostalgic secular/neuter Bech,” as Updike has done (123), but what he has unequivocally failed at for her is capturing in his writing the real Jew—or whatever is not a “false Jew” (124)—a representation of what Ozick calls within three lines alternatively either “Jewish presence” or “historical presence,” a “living” Jew with a reality that is something “beyond the data.” Her

complaint about ethnicity in the 1995 symposium was that multiculturalism neglected literary criticism in favor of demographic accounting; in the case of Bech, she’s more specifically worried about allowing a Gentile to represent Jews, which for her is necessarily to pose— indeed, is precisely the same thing as posing—himself as a Jew. And yet, Ozick’s response to Bech stages a disciplinary opportunity: if Jewish studies wants to maintain as a normative standard for its practices of knowledge production something other than a historiographic idol of Jewish population, we might say that Bech provides an opportunity. For all her inability to imagine identity outside a naturalized concept of the recognizable Jewish body, Ozick also seems unable to limit the literariness of Jewish literature to simply a matter of bodies. For Ozick, the Bech stories are Updike’s “experiment” in response to, in what she calls “Bech’s selfsneering Gaulist phrase,” the “Jewish ‘domination of the literary world’” (124). In fact, the actual phrase, from Updike’s story “Bech Swings?” in Bech: A Book, doesn’t sound quite so menacing (and is in any case perhaps less Gaulist, if indeed one were willing to maintain that it’s possible to know what precisely that’s supposed to mean):73 “He said, then, that he was sustained, insofar as he was sustained, by the meaning of laughter, the specifically Jewish, sufficiently desperate, not quite belly laughter of his father and his father’s brothers, his beloved Brooklyn uncles; that the American Jews had kept the secret of this embattled laughter a generation longer than the Gentiles, hence their present domination of American literature” (122–123). But as Ozick sees it, the experiment has failed; pursued under the banner of ethnic legibility, it indeed had to fail, as the Gentile Updike necessarily lacks the ability to recognize, let alone draw upon, the real, which is to say covenantal and sacral, foundations of Jewish history and experience. Updike’s “experiment” has produced only “the Jews as theological negative and historical cipher,” the Jew as a “neuter,” as a “man separated from culture” (124). Thus one might want to say that, in a word, Ozick gets the significance of Updike’s stories all wrong, which are certainly reductively, and likely boringly, too, evaluated according to how Jewish they are.74 There’s something so conspicuous (to say nothing of boneheaded) about Ozick’s stubbornness on this point. Updike’s Bech stories attest not simply to American literature’s inability to ignore the Jewish American literary renaissance or breakthrough, but also, transversely, to the discursive scene of Jewish American literature’s invention—and in doing so to the machinery of knowledge production in the Jewish studies field. Ozick’s reaction to Bech, read in the context of Jewish American literary study’s establishmentarian attempt to make peace with multiculturalism, suggests that rather than read Bech into the hegemonic population-based historical narrative of Jewish American emergence—that is, as merely another epiphemonenal literary representation of breakthrough, albeit at one further remove, as an expression of Gentile literary reaction to a multigenerational assimilation story—Updike’s invention can be read obliquely for a critical exploration of precisely the persuasive power of this identitarian historical narrative. Above all, Ozick’s response to Updike’s Bech helps critics understand how the Jewish American literary field was able to consolidate in a very short amount of time, in just a couple of postwar decades, to the point that by the second half

of the 1960s it could be entirely normalized as a representation of Jewish Americans—even Ozick’s attempt to reestablish it on what she would insist were more legitimate covenantal grounds, what can be seen potentially as (at least ostensibly) something closer to the grounds it had lost in the consolidation of breakthrough, reinscribed Jewish American literature’s historicist dependence on the promise of population-based representation—one that at once could claim a long, specific history going back well into the nineteenth century and eventually even earlier,75 and to have become central to American identity, first as an image of the cultural mainstream, and then, in the next decades, as a constituent part of the multicultural United States. Bech backs her up. Toward the end of “Bech Swings?,” as he is taxying on a runway about to return to the United States from a publicity tour in London for his new book, Updike’s Jewish American author reads a review headlined “More Ethnic Fiction from the New World,” which “lumped The Best of Bech with a novel about Canadian Indians by Leonard Cohen and a collection of protest essays and scatological poems by LeRoi Jones” (143). He also reads an interview that offers up, rather than a faithful text of his conversation in his own words and with his own explanations, “an aggrieved survey of Bech’s oeuvre” that is “smudged by” his own “feeble rebuttals.” Reflecting his mood, “Bech let the paper go limp” in his hands (144). But he then finds in the paper a society column that tells of Bech’s visit to London, referring to the author’s “rabbinic curls” and offering that he was in London to “push” his new work (145). And his mood then lifts, as it will for the schlemiel he’s being pictured as: “Still gaining altitude, he realized that he was not dead; his fate was not so substantial. He had become a character by Henry Bech” (146). “Ethnic Fiction” is everything else; it is the empty negative, always ready to be filled, of that which can be simply called “fiction.” But Bech has become part of a more substantial and significant literature, a supplement to its own reduction to ethnic information. Ozick objects to ethnicity as a keyword for literary study because its overdetermined promise of meaning is nothing more than a reinscription of this emptiness. But through the lens of her own inability to resist the appeal of the naturalized Jewish body, Updike’s Bech shows how “ethnicity” becomes the field of a desire for cultural narratives. Rather than the self-evident explanation for the diversity of narratives of Jewish American literary history, “ethnicity” is better understood as the fulcrum on which the Jewish American literary field was able to consolidate. Jewish American literature understood under the banner of ethnicity cannot but be taken for granted as a representation of Jewish American history: every author a native informant for a historicist project to secure culture-as-information. This is what is exposed when Bech becomes his own character. This is what happens after Jewish American literature’s selfevidence.

Conclusion

The history of Jewish American literary history offers Jewish studies intellectuals stark evidence of the institutional and political differences between thinking about identity in terms of the epistemological methods of Jewish studies practice and thinking about identity in terms of the ontological objects of Jewish studies practice—and of the critical obligation to use the destabilizing powers of the former as a way to contest the establishmentarian privileges of the latter. Ironically, on one level seemingly the most bald kind of reaction to breakthrough, Updike’s Bech stories make available a reading for something other than breakthrough. In their repetition of a kind of literary historical desire, and, perversely, in alliance with Ozick’s impatience with them, the Bech stories serve as a kind of punctuation mark on the consolidation of breakthrough. And as such, they offer a scholarly warning about the seductions of an ethnic fallacy that reigns in Jewish American literary study and the danger it poses to thinking, specifically about culture, for an identity-based field like Jewish studies. Updike’s Bech stories can be read—obliquely, to be sure—for a critical exploration of precisely the discursive power of an identitarian narrative of Jewish history, of the field of knowledge production anchored by a historiographically coherent Jewish subject of history— and therefore for the deconstruction, as displacement, of identity. Instrumental in the consolidation of the Jewish American literary field was a double articulation that pivoted on the narrative of breakthrough: a specifically Jewish American history that capitalized the new postwar legibility of Yiddish and a representative subject of that history that would be recognizable primarily in terms of population. At the same time, as multiculturalist pluralism took hold of the concept of population and became increasingly hegemonic, in many cases by leveraging a concept of ethnicity, contemporary institutional Jewish studies could emerge by articulating itself as an exceptionalist discourse of Jewish identity, and by interpellating Jewish studies intellectuals as requiring—but also having—special perspective on its privileged archive. And accordingly, spanning pretty perfectly the period of multiculturalism’s ascendance, the Bech stories—again, obliquely, critically—draw a bead on the Jewish studies response to institutional claims of identity-based prerogative; indeed, Updike’s Bech stories, especially in Ozick’s reaction to them, provide as good an opportunity as we are likely going to get to critically understand the career, and hardened commonsense legibility, of an exceptionalist Jewish studies narrative about the adversarial relationship between Jews and multiculturalism. It’s now a well-established cliché that the particular social success of Jews in the United States led to a kind of Jewish ambivalence toward multiculturalism: able to reap most of the benefits of white privilege yet retaining a collective memory of diasporic

persecution that made them particularly sensitive to others’ histories of oppression, stilldominant formations of (particularly Americanist) Jewish studies discourse continue to organize thinking and scholarship around an image of U.S. Jews as ideologically suspended between integrationist and pluralist beliefs and practices. According to this exceptionalist self-understanding, while multiculturalism named the cultural and institutional legitimation of a variety of ethnic nationalist practices organized under the banner of diversity, Jews remained dedicated, albeit paradoxically perhaps, to a sociocultural concept of liberalism organized under the banner of unity. But a critical approach to the rise and fall of Jewish American literature offers an opportunity to contest this commonsense narrative of breakthrough.1 Bech allows us to study the Jewish American literary emergence not simply as a historical or cultural phenomenon, what in the era of biologistic thinking is always already overseen by an ethnologic of population (or, for Ozick’s pleasure, of demography; or, for Wisse’s, of polity), but as a textual and discursive phenomenon, and therefore to read for the ways in which culture is invested as a field of knowledge—as it is traversed by language, by desire, by the demand for legibility, by narratives of identity that exercise compelling epistemological force—and not merely as it serves as a demographic police technology. The career of the concept of ethnicity in Jewish American literary study discloses how humanistic cultural studies has largely imagined itself the disciplinary servant of social-scientific accountancy. The critical power of my use of the term Zionism to frame the Jewish studies enterprise in general and Jewish American literary field in particular is that it indicates— always indirectly, always inexplicitly—the existence, if only by way of absence or specters of reinscription, of alternative histories, narratives, possibilities, and itineraries.2 What, therefore, would it mean to imagine Jewish American literary study outside the gravitational field of a selfevident concept of Jewish population at its source, its logical beginning? What if Jewish studies were to imagine identity as something other than an ethnologically deputized proxy for people? What, in other words, if Jewish literary study—to perversely follow the direction of Ozick’s mid-1990s resentment—were to take a concept of literariness seriously? Paul de Man reminds us that “literary theory” comes into being when we approach “literary texts” outside the administration or control of “nonlinguistic” considerations, “when the object of discussion is no longer the meaning or the value but the modalities of production and of reception of meaning and of value prior to their establishment—the implication being that this establishment is problematic enough to require an autonomous discipline of critical investigation to consider its possibility and its status.”3 Once we consider language as a “system of signs and of signification rather than as an established pattern of meanings,” we must “displace” the “traditional” distinction between literary and what we might imagine to be nonliterary uses of language; indeed, literariness inheres in language’s “autonomous potential,” its freedom from “referential restraint.”4 De Man points us toward a critical promise that “literary theory,” however maligned or dismissed in contemporary Jewish studies, offers Jewish studies a critique of power and identity free of the demographic

oversight of history’s imperial recognition. “Literary history, even when considered at the furthest remove from the platitudes of positivistic historicism, is still the history of an understanding of which the possibility is taken for granted.”5 Historicist literary and cultural study blinds itself to the literariness of literature, literature’s unreliability about positivities (demographic or otherwise), about anything other than its own language.6 In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault appeals to Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical challenge to the pursuit of origins for its contestation of identity’s imperial sway over thinking. To search for the origin is to practice an essentialism, insofar as doing so amounts to an attempt to capture the fundamental nature of things, their “carefully protected identities.” It’s a search directed toward, oriented around, and administered by what’s already there, what’s already expected and anticipated; this kind of search is itself an effort to “carefully protect” through the historiographic project what’s already legible. The genealogical method Foucault prefers, however, expects not “inviolable identity” at the beginning of things—which is to say the recognized identity whose legibility presided over the search in the first place—but the “dissension of other things.” The genealogist finds “other things,” which is to say “disparity,” in place of the “chimeras of the origin” and, “free from the restraints of positive knowledge,” understands how “the origin makes possible a field of knowledge whose function is to recover it, but always in a false recognition due to the excesses of its own speech.”7 Organizing itself under the sign of comprehensiveness as a search for the unimpeachable origin, always “historical,” of Jewish American literature—as the field in the image of such projects as the Norton Anthology or the Posen Library does— Jewish American literary study sacrifices its own disciplinary prerogative and force. We recall that in the beginning of Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes his historical method, clarifying that his “interest in the past” takes form precisely not in a desire to write “a history of the past in terms of the present,” but instead in an attempt at “writing the history of the present.”8 The recognizable population-anchored fact of Jewish American experience does not self-evidently secure Jewish American literary history at its origin. Instead, the postwar invention of Jewish American literature was part of an ensemble of humanistic technologies that allowed Jewish American experience to become an ethnological object of knowledge. Scholars interested in a critical Jewish studies should take seriously Foucault’s talk of a “political anatomy” as the study of the investment of a body politic, of its subjugation, as an object of knowledge. A critical history of Jewish American literature makes a case for reorienting Jewish studies–allied literary scholarship around an analysis of how a concept and archive of culture gets yoked to, as the expression of and means to recognize, a population as object of epistemological desire—a process that is activated by fundamentally (which is to say inevitably, despite what those seduced by the chimera of “Jewish peoplehood” might protest) racialist modes of thinking—and thus around an analysis of how a concept of Jewish population or “Jewish people” operates as a kind of metaphysical deputy, or policing mechanism, that invests and administers a field of knowledge. The lesson of the history of Jewish American literary study is that it is impossible to imagine Jewish American literature after ethnologic. Which is therefore also to say that it

should be impossible to imagine Jewish American literature’s ethnologic without irony. Bech’s becoming “a character by Henry Bech” positions Updike’s Bech stories as one coordinate by which to map the fall of Jewish American literature, but I concede it’s a difficult data point to justify to those still compelled by the dominant vocabulary and technologies of ethnological reference through which the Jewish American literary field continues to hegemonically imagine its labor. So here’s a second: it’s becoming harder and harder to take “Jewish American literature” for granted as a coherent or stable disciplinary object. If no one seemed particularly interested in taking Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, or Bernard Malamud seriously when, lifetimes ago, they pushed back against the obligations attendant upon the native informant role foisted on them in the form of the label “Jewish American writer”—against the ideological consequences of the fact that institutionalization almost always imposes legibility in the form of one-dimensionality on historical differences and disruptions that are necessarily multidimensional, multiple, and also arbitrary—the latterday inheritors of that blithe institutional disinterest, those who now celebrate, almost always (necessarily) by means of the methodologies of multiculturalism, the “diversity” of Jewish American literature, may in fact be heralding the dissolution of the category. At the very least, such facile boosterism forces those interested in the field to question in what, precisely, the field inheres other than the critic’s desire for the identity category; that is, if “Jewish” literature is increasingly all sorts of other things too, such as scholars like Dickstein celebrate —feminist, gender nonconforming, counter-Ashke-normative, and/or/etc.—it’s unclear what the “Jewish” of it is other than a biologistic abstraction invested by the scholar’s desire. Perhaps nothing makes this point more insistently than the current vogue in what many scholars find to be more or less unproblematically called “Jewish American literature” to focus on writing—not only writers per se, or scenes of writing in particular, but also (and maybe more significantly for my purposes) the disciplinary phenomenon of writing, and specifically that of Jewish writing: of the signifying fact, institutional situation, and overdetermined possibilities and itineraries of Jewish writing. One thinks of Philip Roth, certainly: not only his role editing the Writers from the Other Europe series for Penguin, but more pointedly his two-thirds-of-a-career-long focus on writer Nathan Zuckerman, including several books that very explicitly perform their writtenness. And of course Cynthia Ozick, particularly in The Messiah of Stockholm (and no one reading this book needs anyone to tell them that Bruno Schulz has himself spawned a whole cottage industry of his own latter-day literary repetitions), but also in “Envy, or Yiddish in America,” which represents thinly veiled portraits (we’ve all been told) of Bashevis and Jacob Glatstein. Indeed, postwar Jewish American literature boasts a long line of portrayals of actual Jewish writers, both veiled and not: Delmore Schwartz plays a lead, if shadow, role in Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift; Der Nister is a supporting character in Dara Horn’s The World to Come; and Abraham Abulafia figures in Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season. The Jewish importance of the fact of writing figures prominently in the sadly unsung single novel by Jerome Badanes, The Final Opus of Leon Solomon. Geraldine Brooks’s novel People of the Book uses the Sarajevo Haggadah to talk about Jewish communal historicity. And so it goes.

But more recently—specters of Bech’s becoming his own character—a version of this tendency has intensified, in the form of high-prestige Jewish American authors featuring themselves as Jewish American authors in their texts. We see it in Jonathan Safran Foer, in Everything Is Illuminated (2002), which famously inaugurated Jonathan Safran Foer’s public preoccupation with himself as Jewish writer, and Here I Am (2016), which, coordinated by its Foer-like protagonist (who won the National Jewish Book Award at age twenty-four, like Foer himself) and by a fascination with the Jewish American literary tradition and its— Foer’s book’s—relation to it, as figured most conspicuously in the synecdoche of Philip Roth, more complexly and interestingly represents this Jewish writer’s self-obsession as such; in Nicole Krauss, in The History of Love (2005), in Great House (2010; a desk, for god’s sake), and Forest Dark (2017), which latter book earnestly links a Jewish writer named Nicole to the possibility of new writings by Franz Kafka and the problem of the extent to which Israel and Jewish identity can claim each other; and Gary Shteyngart, who in Absurdistan, the follow-up to his debut novel The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, features the hack writer Jerry Shteynfarb, author of The Russian Arriviste’s Handjob, “an uppermiddle-class-phony who came to the states as a kid and is now playing the professional immigrant game” and who thinks he’s the “Jewish Nabokov.”9 These authors ironically depict not simply their own roles as Jewish American writers (and famous ones, to boot), but also their positions vis-à-vis the Western and Jewish literary traditions in general, drawing attention to the disciplinary practices and institutional expectations by which Jewish American authors and texts become meaningful as such. This reflexive literary structure reveals a great deal about its own force and function and also about its social and institutional role and responsibility as a mode of representation, but as a mode of access to an ethnologically coherent object of representation it is perhaps more dubious. These maneuvers —indeed, these disciplinary or field developments—destabilize these books’ status as ethnologically compelling objects of knowledge, precisely insofar as the ethnological scholarly paradigm demands the suppression of the de Manian insight about the reliability of literary language in the interest of the reproduction of an image of intellectual innocence on the part of the professional operative (whether “scholar” or “critic”) standing at its lever point. If a literary historian might be tempted to account for Roth’s and Ozick’s interest in the writing of Jewish literature in terms of a generalized postmodern focus on representation’s practices and sites, such easy narrative literary historicism becomes more difficult with Foer, Krauss, and Shteyngart, whose books perform their own origin and intention, staging the disciplinarily disruptive fact that they were written expressly to be Jewish American Literature, to circulate precisely as disciplinary objects.10 Speculatively, we might also ask whether books like these don’t so much represent a material, chronological development in Jewish American literary history as much as, more generally, they simply objectivize the ironic rupture latent in the moment Jewish American literary field-logic inscribes itself into a text it takes to be proper to it. Jewish American literary history turns in on itself in this crystallization of field self-satire. One wonders—well, this book is testimony to the fact that I wonder—if the field in its

current form is in a position to adequately face the implications for its ethnological assumptions and historicist practices when its disciplinary objects—so-called Jewish American texts—become more insistently about themselves as such than about Jewish American experience. To read this autodiscursivity as autobiography is the very epitome of an abdication, but this temptation’s ready availability discloses how ethnologic operates as a powerful intellectual evasion for Jewish studies and the forms of literary study it houses. Critics like Kramer and Furman are without a doubt correct when they impugn the shortsightedness of predecessors like Howe and Guttmann for assuming that Jewish American literature was done for because the social world these generationally bound critics took for granted as its only possible context and representational object was dissolving; but the ethnological field-sanguinity of critics like Dickstein or Furman or of ventures like The New Diaspora, the 2012 MELUS special issue, or the Posen Library seems decidedly outmatched by an emerging corpus of work that is so declaratively aware—and performative —of its desire to be that field’s object. What happens when the Jewish American literary field finds at its foundation not the self-evident bedrock of recognizable population, but the irony of a mischievous historicist mise en abyme? Once this destabilizing question insinuates itself into the field’s foundational ethnological expectations, can field-intellectuals any longer take their disciplinary labor more generally for granted? What does scholarship desire from Jewish identity? What does it expect? This has to be a primary question for a critical Jewish studies. The critique of identity needs to be liberated from the assumption that thought is primarily descriptive, anchored by the ethnological selfevidence of a historical subject. The Jewishness of a text is not a stable, coherent, and signifying phenomenon, underwritten by the legibility of population, that humanistic scholarship brings into the light through a project of disclosure, but rather the dynamic, contested product of a struggle. M. H. Abrams spoke of the mirror and the lamp; I’d like to add to our stock of visual metaphors (albeit negatively) that literary and cultural study shouldn’t take for granted the lens. Identity is not a positivity, something we find already given, already legible, already meaningful—something that self-evidently anchors and unifies a process of knowledge production by, say, being detectable in Talmud and Cynthia Ozick and The Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature, but not in John Updike. That’s our disciplined scholarly desire talking, but not necessarily anything else. Edward Said asserted that the critic stands between the persuasive power of a dominant culture and the attractions of a system of disciplines and methods, a formulation that cannily describes the situation (or predicament) of the insiderist Jewish studies intellectual; the critic’s responsibility is to evade the linked normative temptations of naturalizing the former and instrumentalizing the latter. Said writes: “in order to specify the possibilities for genuine knowledge in a field, we must be able to specify not only what that knowledge is or might be but where it might be inscribed, what it might do with reference to everything that has preceded it (revise it, confirm it, modify it), what is contemporary with it, what is related to it in other fields, what its relationship would be to what comes after it (will it enable further discovery, inhibit it, close the field down, create a new field?), how it will be transmitted or

preserved, how it will be taught, how institutions will accept or reject it.” But the immediate question, he insists, is what the role of the critical consciousness will be in these matters. Is it principally to “deliver insights about writers and texts, to describe writers and texts (in critical biographies, commentaries, explications, specialized scholarly monographs), to teach and disseminate information about monuments of culture?” Or, as Said prefers, “is it to occupy itself with the intrinsic conditions on which knowledge is made possible?”11 This book doesn’t promote a normalized alternative Jewish American literary history so much as it critically contests the only normative mode of Jewish American literary history commanding any hegemonic legitimacy. The rupturing ironic self-relation of Jewish American literariness illuminates a disciplinary displacement: the future of the field lies in not taking texts as the (inevitably representative) prestige-objects of Jewish American literary practice. Jewish American literary study can no longer defensibly pretend to naively assume that Jewish studies is authorized by Jewish populations whose history it is the duty—an obligation overseen by an unhealthy helping of reverence—of Jewish studies intellectuals to uncover, archive, and narrate. The postwar institution of Jewish American literature—as a cultural event, a literary historical phenomenon, and a scholarly field—needs to be understood as a technology that contributed to the discursive invention of the Jewish American subject and that itself has a history, not as a field of knowledge whose own selfevidence is dependent on the selfevident reality of that subject. If Jewish American literary study has a future, it is to unstably occupy the deconstructive ground in which “its” texts call into question, precisely in performing, their Jewish American categoricalness. The only Jewish American literature worthy of the name might be that which is about that name. A critical Jewish studies needs to concern itself not so much with the production of knowledge about an already approved Jewish canon, but with the problem of knowledge, with the question of how we know what we know—a problem that necessarily takes form in a critical contestation of the encounter between exceptionalist privilege and its biologistic archive. Which is to say that the rise and fall of Jewish American literature necessarily offers an opportunity for Jewish studies to critically imagine its own end.

Notes

Introduction Epigraph: Michel Foucault, “Practicing Criticism,” Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977– 1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 154–155. 1. On my linking assimilation with pluralism: it’s important to avoid the temptation to understand the concept of assimilation as the devalued binary pairing to cultural purity. See Michael P. Kramer’s essentially career-long engagement with the term for the most sophisticated critique of the literary historical meaning of assimilation I know, especially in “The Conversion of the Jews and Other Narratives of Self-Definition: Notes Toward the Writing of Jewish-American Literary History,” Ideology and Identity in Israeli and American Literature, ed. Emily Miller Budick (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001): 177–196; “The Art of Assimilation: Ironies, Ambiguities, Aesthetics,” Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries, ed. Sheila Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, and Scott Lerner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 303–326; and “Acts of Assimilation: The Invention of Jewish American Literary History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 103.4 (Fall 2013): 556–579. 2. I discuss this in The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 7–8. 3. Michael P. Kramer, “Critical Narcissism and the Coming-of-Age of Jewish American Literary Studies,” Jewish Quarterly Review 94.4 (Fall 2004), 684, 683. 4. Noam Pianko, Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 7. Pianko argues, “By paralleling the structure of nationhood without explicitly connecting itself to nation, the addition of the suffix -hood provided a bridge between the denationalized connotations of people in the American context and trends in European nationalism and Zionism that influenced American Jewish perspectives on collectivity.…The supporting abstract noun peoplehood, then, constructs and gives credibility to a radically new vision of collectivity, by underscoring the historical roots, timeless existence, and essential nature of what is ultimately an innovation” (8). Pianko points out that both Wise and Kaplan had close ties to the Zionist movement, generally defined. 5. Kramer, “Critical Narcissism,” 681. 6. Leslie Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity (Boston: David R. Godine, 1991), ix, xv; emphasis in original. 7. Indeed, Pianko points out that the concept of peoplehood often serves affective ideologies of exceptionalism insofar as the term tends to encourage an understanding of Jews as not exactly or perfectly fitting into broader categories of modern group identification in Western political and social thought like race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion (Pianko, Jewish Peoplehood, 9). 8. On this point we should keep in mind Jacques Ranciere’s distinction between politics and the police in “Ten Theses on Politics,” the first chapter of Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. Stephen Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010). If “the essence of politics is dissensus”—which Ranciere insists is not a “confrontation” between already recognized “interests or opinions,” but rather “the demonstration of a gap in the sensible itself. Political demonstration makes visible that which had no reason to be seen” (38)—then the “essence of the police lies neither in repression nor even in control over the living” (36), but rather in the taking for granted what is already recognizable and in excluding the possibility of what is not. He adds, “Political dispute is that which brings politics into being by separating it from the police, which causes it to disappear continually either by purely and simply denying it or by claiming political logic as its own. Politics, before all else, is an intervention in the visible and the sayable” (36–37). Recalling Louis Althusser’s famous formulation, Ranciere proposes the example of “police interventions in public spaces,” clarifying that such interventions consist “primarily not in interpellating demonstrators, but in breaking up demonstrations.” Circumventing Althusser’s “Hey, you there!,” Ranciere explains that the police consists not in “the law which interpellates individuals,” but, “before all else, in recalling the obviousness of what there is, or rather of what there is not, and its slogan is ‘Move along! There’s nothing to see here!’ The police is that which says that here, on this street, there’s nothing to see and so nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space for circulating is nothing but the space of circulation. Politics, by contrast, consists in transforming this space of ‘movingalong,’ of circulation, into a space for the appearance of a subject: the people, the workers, the citizens. It consists in reconfiguring space” (37). 9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 22. She titled her introduction “Axiomatic.”

10. Thanks go here to Chris Castiglia, who has more or less patiently listened to me for a decade complain about my field, for suggesting Sedgwick’s introduction as a model for an activist way of emphasizing the polemical center of my argument. 11. Michael P. Kramer, “Race, Literary History, and the ‘Jewish’ Question,” Prooftexts 21.3 (Fall 2001), 336–337. 12. Kandice Chuh, “It’s Not About Anything,” Social Text 32.4 (Winter 2014), 127–128. 13. Julian Levinson, Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 18. 14. Kramer, “Race, Literary History, and the ‘Jewish’ Question,” 289. 15. Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 203. Oddly, Levinson adds that it’s not just the Jewish parentage of authors that contributes to defining the category Jewish American literature but also potentially the Jewish parentage of “characters” in the texts those authors write; I note in passing that this particular aside of Levinson’s is frustratingly, and possibly destabilizingly, half-baked—insofar as it’s out of accord with the comment in the main text to which it is appended by a note —and I would have liked Levinson to face in a deliberate and concerted manner the possibility of Jewish literature written by people who “are” “not” “Jewish” (given, that is, that he opens himself to precisely this possibility with this aside). 16. Hana Wirth-Nesher, ed., What Is Jewish Literature? (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994); Hana WirthNesher, ed., The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). WirthNesher mentioned in an informal conversation at the Association for Jewish Studies conference in Boston in December 2010 that she’d like to put together a sequel or new edition of What Is Jewish Literature?; ever since she started putting together the Cambridge History a couple of years later, I have thought of it as that sequel, if an unofficial one. 17. Anita Norich, “Under Whose Sign? Hebraicism and Yiddishism as Paradigms of Modern Jewish Literary History,” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010), 775–776; further citations will be made parenthetically in the text. See, as Norich instructs us, not only Wirth-Nesher’s What Is Jewish Literature? but Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and Kramer, “Race, Literary History, and the ‘Jewish’ Question.” 18. Kramer, “Critical Narcissism,” 680. 19. Kramer, “Critical Narcissism,” 680. 20. Michael A. Meyer, “Two Persistent Tensions Within Wissenschaft Des Judentums,” Modern Judaism 24.2 (May 2004), 105. 21. Meyer, “Two Persistent Tensions,” 110–113. 22. Gershom Scholem, “Reflections on Modern Jewish Studies,” On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time and Other Essays, ed. Avraham Shapira, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997), 54. 23. Meyer, “Two Persistent Tensions,” 116. I will discuss this in more depth in Chapter 1. 24. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 5, 4; emphasis in the original. 25. Jonathan Boyarin, “Reponsive Thinking: Cultural Studies and Jewish Historiography,” Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives, ed. Christian Wiese and Andreas Gotzman (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 476. 26. Boyarin, “Reponsive Thinking,” 487. 27. Boyarin, “Reponsive Thinking,” 493. 28. Though the Boyarins don’t really name or describe this “crisis,” it has elsewhere been variously narratively inscribed under the sign of “poststructuralism,” “decolonization,” and more recently “neoliberalism.” See, for a few very selectively iconic examples, Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), and perhaps most notably Jacques Derrida’s essay “Structure, Sign, and Play,” which appeared in it; Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271– 313; and Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 29. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Introduction: So What’s New?,” Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, ed. Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), vii. 30. This reduction was already at work—often explicitly and deliberately, and on the surface—in some of the contributions in David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, eds., Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), one of the pioneering works of the “new Jewish cultural studies.” I can’t imagine it’s a good idea to name names here, and I sincerely feel the point stands as is for anyone willing to entertain its critical stance, but I guess I also feel duty bound to offer at least some specific cases to illustrate what I’m talking about to those who might otherwise tend to dismiss my claim here. So, at the risk of losing friends, I might point (at some level arbitrarily) to the first, successful books of three leading scholars of “my,” more or less “younger,” generation of Jewish American literary critics (I confine myself to my own field so no one will accuse me of poaching): Rachel Rubinstein’s Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,

2010); Joshua Lambert’s Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013); and Jennifer Glaser’s Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2016). 31. Jeffrey R. DiLeo, “Understanding Affiliation,” Affiliations: Identity in Academic Culture, ed. Jeffrey R. DiLeo (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 5. 32. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980), 59. 33. Boyarin and Boyarin, “Introduction: So What’s New?,” viii. 34. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 77–78. 35. Williams does point out, however, that the notion of “civilizing,” as incorporating people within a social organization, had been known already, resting on the terms civis and civitas, and aligned with our current adjective civil, as in orderly, educated, or polite, and extended in our term civil society (Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature [New York: Oxford University Press, 1977], 13). 36. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 14–15. 37. Williams, Keywords, 79. 38. Williams, Keywords, 80–81. For what it’s worth, Williams also notes that hostility toward culture, likely arising with hostility toward Arnold’s views, arises in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century; almost always, this hostility is connected to classed uses involving claims of superior knowledge and a distinction between high and popular art. 39. It may be important to note here, perhaps only as an aside for now, that the link Williams points out in allied senses of the word culture as it emerged in the eighteenth century—between an achieved state, opposed to barbarism, and an achieved state of development, process, or progress—has become in our own age of identity also a tension or site of friction, insofar as in some situations we have a hard time thinking about becoming what one can be; few people would want to claim that a Jewish American of European origins could learn how to become Chinese or African American, for example, by gaining expertise in Chinese or African American culture. One might think of Vanilla Ice in this context. And it is a problem that a phenomenon like Jewish conversion, for example, makes conspicuous. For what it’s worth, queer theory is obviously a field where some of the most interesting work to the contrary is taking place. 40. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 49. 41. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 8–9; further citations will be made parenthetically in the text. 42. Paul Bové, In the Wake of Theory (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 27. 43. And while we’re at it we should also guard against the conservative impulse to get defensively hung up on this term “reverence.” Forgive the obvious example, but the relatively narrow liberal-Jewish critique of the Israeli occupation, and indeed the broader left-Jewish critique of Zionism more generally, relies in significant part on precisely this mode of identificatory esteem: to support the occupation, etc., is to contravene Jewish ethics. 44. It was in an August 18, 2000, interview in Haaretz with leading Hasbarist Ari Shavit, in a discursive scene I will admit to finding difficult to pin down ideologically. 45. We should recall the final sentence of Foucault’s “Truth and Power,” where he discusses the productively contentious role of the intellectual—that is, as a figure always situated in real struggles: “Hence the importance of Nietzsche” (Power/Knowedge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon [New York: Pantheon, 1980], 133). 46. In The Impossible Jew I diagnose this institutional move as the “brilliant but flawed” conceit. 47. If I will be allowed to wax anecdotal, I wonder if this is a delusion from which liberal scholars may suffer more than rightist scholars do. When I became editor of the journal Studies in American Jewish Literature and began inviting people to serve on a new editorial board, a scholar of American Hebrew literature whose right wing politics are well-known and proudly avowed turned down my invitation, explicitly citing his nationalist scholarship in the Wisse mold. I wish I still had the e-mail, but I swear: he really did use the words “Wisse” and “nationalist.” And there I thought I labored in obscurity. 48. For a similarly self-justifying exceptionalist intellectual mechanism, cf. Zionism, American Liberal. 49. Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (2000; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 24.

Chapter 1 1. Some of the books published in the field in the last fifteen or so years: Eric Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Dean Franco, Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,

2005); Ross Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Hana Wirth-Nesher, Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Anita Norich, Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture During the Holocaust (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007); Maeera Shreiber, Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007); Jonathan Freedman, Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Julian Levinson, Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Warren Hoffman, The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2009); Rachel Rubinstein, Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010); Lori Harrison-Kahan, The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011); Dean Franco, Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature Since 1969 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012); Joshua Lambert, Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Leah Garrett, Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2015); Hana Wirth-Nesher, ed., The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Jennifer Glaser, Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2016). 2. See, for example, Victoria Aarons, Avinoam Patt, and Mark Shechner, eds., The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of Jewish American Fiction (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015). 3. As I’ll discuss in more depth in Chapter 3, there’s a link here, insofar as ethnic studies has often theorized itself through critical race methodologies and accounts of colonial and postcolonial trauma, and has in any case deliberatively labored to denormalize links between identity and bodies, while Jewish studies—certainly American Jewish studies—has often refused to think about the Jewish subject in these terms. Incidentally, one might call this refusal ironic, given that so much American Jewish Zionism, particularly in the form of either explicit support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine on the part of right-wing American Jews or de facto support of occupation, Jim Crow, the ideal of nationalistically cleansed ethnostates, etc., on the part of less right-wing American Jews, is framed, often explicitly, by a deliberate stance vis-à-vis the traumatic Jewish history of the Holocaust. But I suppose that’s an argument for another day. 4. See my The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (New York: New York University Press, 2015). 5. For what it’s worth, that first article to appear in Prooftexts on specifically Jewish American literature was about Philip Roth; see Hana Wirth-Nesher, “The Artist Tales of Philip Roth,” Prooftexts 3.3 (September 1983), 263–272. 6. Lori Harrison-Kahan and Josh Lambert, “Guest Editors’ Introduction: Finding Home; The Future of Jewish American Literary Studies,” MELUS 37.2 (2012), 5. 7. Harrison-Kahan and Lambert, “Introduction,” 7. 8. The role of whiteness in the breakthrough narrative, and indeed the relationship of Jews to whiteness more generally during this period, is a significant part of this story. Much has been written about how Jews became identifiable as, and became able to identify themselves as, white over the course of the twentieth century, and particularly in the postwar period, a symbolic shift that served to set them apart from many other ethnic groups and undermine their relationship to the multicultural project—a development that became increasingly consequential in the post-Vietnam ascendency of ethnicity and multicultural thinking. See, for some prominent examples, Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Karin Brodkin, How Jews Became White and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Eric J. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008). On this note I’ll merely say that, while I’ll return to this problem, I’m not going to venture much further into the relationship of Jewish legibility to discourses of American whiteness in Jewish American literary history, both because there have been a number of recent books analyzing it—including, for a few examples, Sundquist’s Strangers in the Land, Franco’s Race, Rights, and Recognition, and Glaser’s Borrowed Voices—and because I want to focus on factors that yet another iteration of this now-well-rehearsed history would likely overshadow. 9. There’s a lot of scholarship, of course, on the problem of postmodern Jewish identification; see, for example, the nowstandard Laura Levitt, “Impossible Assimilations, American Liberalism, and Jewish Difference: Revisiting Jewish Secularism,” American Quarterly 59.3 (2007), 807–832. 10. In this context the immigrants from the ex–Soviet Union become particularly interesting, with their DIY forms of Jewish identification that often stand in marked opposition to established forms of U.S.-based Jewish identification. 11. MELUS misspelled his name “Krasney.” 12. Irving Howe, introduction, Jewish-American Stories, edited by Irving Howe (New York: New American Library,

1977), 16. If the field had a nickel for each time this line was cited, we’d have so much money that I wouldn’t care what anyone thought of Jewish American literary study. 13. Dan Walden had a hand in this one, too, as he tells it in his 2004 appreciation of Katharine Newman, who organized what would become the first meeting of the MELUS society, at the 1973 MLA conference (Daniel Walden and Evelyn Avery, “Katharine Newman, Mother of MELUS,” MELUS 29.3–4 [2004]: 526). 14. This data comes from PMLA, which pretty early on started publishing a devoted convention program issue. A restrained disclaimer: one has to improvise a bit when compiling and presenting this data. I have counted not only those papers whose topics are unequivocally about Jews and Jewishness, like 1998’s “Jewish American Mothers of AfroAmerican Children in American Jewish Literature,” but also papers both about what we’d now easily call Jewish American authors even if the topic isn’t particularly Jewy, on the grounds that the field is currently very much organized (at least in part) around authorial identity—like 1964’s “The Thematics of French Modern Humanism in the Works of Arthur Miller”— and also papers about non-Jewish American authors but whose topics are Jewy, on the grounds that the field is currently very much organized (at least in part) around identity as an object—like 1966’s “Mencken and Semitism.” I have counted papers on Yiddish when the topic or author considered had a substantial American relevance, but not otherwise; so, for example, as a rule I counted papers about Isaac Bashevis Singer or Abraham Cahan, or about the American Yiddish stage, but not about Mendele Mocher Sforim absent “American” content. And, especially early on, some of what was called “immigrant” fiction would in some circumstances be called “Jewish American” nowadays, and in those circumstances I counted it. A more explicit disclaimer: these numbers have to be taken as a rough estimate, at least to an extent; neither the MLA nor any other institutional body, of course, regulates the term “Jewish American literature,” and (of course) this entire book is an extended argument that the designation “Jewish American literature” is not self-evident and has a history. But again, I do believe that most of what I’ve counted would without too much controversy be considered “Jewish American” by our current standards. And in any case, a couple of ticks up or down in any given year does not affect the legibility of the historical phenomenon I want to showcase here. One last note: the 1918, 1942, and 1943 MLA conferences were all canceled (though the planned proceedings for 1943 are available for the record), and the 1888 proceedings have been lost. Thanks very much to Jessica Klimoff for collecting and compiling all this data. 15. Telling in this context is a panel at the December 1978 Modern Language Association conference, chaired by Keith Opdahl and with papers by Leslie Fiedler, Daniel Walden, and Bonnie Lyons, titled “BELLOWMALAMUDROTH: The Death or Life of a Genre.” 16. It’s probably only in the last couple of decades—thanks to the increasing institutional profile and activist branding efforts of the AJS—that scholars have been willing or even able to declare unequivocally that “Jewish studies” is what they “do.” There’s a story to be told—too long to get into here—about a shift from “Judaic studies,” rooted relatively more philologically securely in a restrictive canon of classical texts, to “Jewish studies,” rooted relatively more expansively in culturalist methodologies oriented explicitly around a concept of identity, that the AJS, with its inclusionary, and indeed incitational, choice of “Jewish” over “Judaic” participates in; see Leslie Morris, “Placing and Displacing Jewish Studies: Notes on the Future of a Field,” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010), 768, for a bit on this. 17. Kristen Loveland, “The Association For Jewish Studies: A Brief History,” report presented at the fortieth annual conference of the AJS, 2008, . 18. Judith R. Baskin, “Jewish Studies in North American Colleges and Universities: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” Shofar 32.4 (2014), 9, 15. 19. James Young, “Introduction to the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization,” The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 10, 1973–2005, ed. Deborah Dash Moore and Nurith Gertz (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012), xxvii–xxviii, xxx. 20. Deborah Dash Moore and Nurith Gertz, eds., The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 10, 1973– 2005 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012), xxxiii. 21. As a side note, I might add that it’s telling that one of the most recent synoptic considerations of Jewish American literary history appears as a special issue of the history-situated journal American Jewish History (101.1 [2017]) on “New Literary Histories,” edited by Joshua Lambert. 22. “From the Editor,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 1.1 (Spring 1975), 2. Walden was speaking for an editorial board that in those early years counted among its members scholars like Sarah Blacher Cohen, Leslie Fiedler, Allen Guttmann, Irving Howe, Sanford Pinsker, and Moses Rischin; while some of those figures (including Walden himself) may not be known outside narrow Jewish American literary circles, others, including Fiedler and Howe, and maybe also Rischin, certainly are. It wasn’t until 1985 that the MLA debuted a formal Jewish American Literature Discussion Group (now called a Forum)—ten years after both Walden’s founding gesture and the MLA’s division and discussion group format was introduced, in the 1974–1975 year. Incidentally, Harrison-Kahan and Lambert point to this MLA group’s status as (then) a discussion group, rather than a higher-status division, as further evidence of the field’s “marginalization” (15); I don’t find

this claim a particularly rewarding argumentative vector (a division? Really?), and in any case the MLA’s new forum-based organizational structure makes the issue moot, but it’s certainly worth pointing out—again—how a dominant strain of thinking about Jewish American literary history reproduces itself in articulation with a vocabulary of social minoritization and cultural marginalization. 23. Michael P. Kramer, “Acts of Assimilation: The Invention of Jewish American Literary History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 103.4 (Fall 2013), 559. Wissenschaft literary historiography produced works like the turn of the twentieth century’s Jewish Encyclopedia and then, later, Meyer Waxman’s History of Jewish Literature (1930), and also anthologies like Joseph Leftwich’s Yisroel: The First Jewish Omnibus (1933) and Leo Schwartz’s The Jewish Caravan: Great Stories of Twenty-Five Centuries (1935). 24. Kramer, “Acts of Assimilation,” 561. 25. Loveland, “The Association For Jewish Studies.” 26. Of which the journal itself was not simply an indication but a self-conscious manifestation: at the 1986 MLA conference, Walden gave a presentation titled “Getting into the Mainstream: Publishing and Selling the Jewish Academic Journal” as part of a panel discussion on “Editing the Jewish Publication: Special Needs and Problems” that was arranged by the American Association of Professors of Yiddish and chaired by Ben Siegel. (Incidentally, Ben Siegel was hyperpresent as a chair and, to a lesser extent, presenter—probably more than any other single literary intellectual—on MLA panels that covered Jewish American writers and texts from the late 1970s through the 1990s.) 27. For more on the concept of biologism, see my “Literary-Historical Zionism: Irving Kristol, Alexander Portnoy, and the State of the Jews,” Contemporary Literature 55.4 (Winter 2014), 760–791. 28. Note that for Bellow and Malamud these were not their first works; the very issue is that it was these works in this moment—unlike Dangling Man (1944), The Victim (1947), or The Natural (1952)—that were able to center and organize a new form of literary historical imagination that articulated the recognizability of ethnic particularity with the expansive reach of Americanist humanism. (I suppose an argument could be made about The Natural’s coupling of the particularism of a Jewish author with the “universalism” of the Christian grail legend as, perhaps, preparatory to breakthrough, but I will leave it to someone else to make that argument; that someone should certainly consult Leslie Fiedler on the topic in “The Christian-ness of the Jewish American Writer,” Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity [Boston: David R. Godine, 1991], 59–71.) 29. This is a process I’ll concentrate on in Chapter 2. Four of the six stories gathered in Bellow’s 1968 collection Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories were published during this period as well; but one might want to argue that unlike Malamud, Paley, and Roth, Bellow’s literary historical prestige does not really derive from his short stories—certainly not as significantly as it does from his novels. 30. Leslie Fiedler, To the Gentiles (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), 56; this is a collection of Fiedler’s writings on Jewish literature from the 1950s and ’60s, and all further references to it will be cited parenthetically in the text. 31. Leslie A. Fiedler, “The Breakthrough: The American Jewish Novelist and the Fictional Image of the Jew,” Midstream 4.1 (Winter 1958), 15–16. 32. Fiedler, “The Breakthrough,” 15, 18. 33. Fiedler, “The Breakthrough,” 17–18. Incidentally, for Fiedler the proletarian novel had itself been able to rise into ascendency with the “break-up of the long-term Anglo-Saxon domination of our literature” that began with pre–World War I writers like Theodore Dreiser, “the first novelist of immigrant stock to take a major position in American fiction” (16). 34. Fiedler, “The Breakthrough,” 25. I don’t have the space to adequately address Fiedler’s argument here, but a proper genealogical analysis of Jewish American cultural nostalgia needs to look closely here. 35. Fiedler, “The Breakthrough,” 35. 36. Malin was the inaugural book review editor of Studies in American Jewish Literature. 37. Irving Malin, Jews and Americans (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 5, 3; emphasis in original. 38. Alfred Kazin, “The Jew as Modern Writer,” Commentary (April 1966), 41, 37. 39. Allen Guttmann, The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 226. 40. Sheldon Grebstein, “Bernard Malamud and the Jewish Movement,” Contemporary American-Jewish Literature, ed. Irving Malin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 175–176. 41. Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof, xv. 42. Joshua Lambert, “American Jewish Literature,” Oxford Bibliographies, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199840731/obo-9780199840731–0113.xml. 43. Norman Podhoretz, “The Adventures of Philip Roth,” Commentary 106.4 (October 1998), 26. 44. Roth went to Maine; Fuchs went to Hollywood; Miller “took to pretending, by giving the characters in his plays Waspy names like Biff or ethnically ambiguous ones like Loman, that these people, whose Jewishness was obvious to

anyone with eyes to see, were undifferentiated Americans”; and Hellman was wary that “the Jewishness of The Diary of Anne Frank would limit its appeal on Broadway,” and so advised that the playwrights she proposed adapt it for the stage “de-Judaize” it (Podhoretz, “Adventures of Philip Roth,” 26–27). 45. Kramer, “Acts of Assimilation,” 562. The publication arm of the Theodor Herzl Foundation, the Herzl Press had been launched just the year before; its initial offering, interestingly enough, had been the rightwardly migrating James Farrell’s chronicle of Israel, It Has Come to Pass. I wonder if we can see in this conspicuous fact a preview of our own era’s conspicuous disclosure that many of Zionism’s most militant defenders have become evangelical Christian theocrats rather than Jews. 46. The Jew in the American Novel (New York: Herzl Press, 1959) is one of the essays collected in To the Gentiles. This sounds in part quite similar to Fiedler’s vocabulary in the 1958 Midstream “Breakthrough” essay; indeed, he seems to have repurposed large parts of that piece for The Jew in the American Novel, published the following year. 47. Kazin, “The Jew as Modern Writer,” 39. 48. Sanford Pinsker, “Sitting Shiva: Notes on Recent American-Jewish Autobiography,” Contemporary AmericanJewish Literature, ed. Irving Malin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 101. 49. Fiedler, “The Breakthrough,” 25. 50. Irving Malin and Irwin Stark, eds., Breakthrough: A Treasury of Contemporary American-Jewish Literature (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 1. 51. Kramer argues that Harap’s The Image of the Jew “is not a work of Jewish American literary history at all,” so little do “Jewish writers” appear in it (Michael P. Kramer, “Critical Narcissism and the Coming-of-Age of Jewish American Literary Studies,” Jewish Quarterly Review 94.4 [Fall 2004], 689). 52. I can’t go into this here, but I think this represents a productive avenue for further research. See Michael Maguire’s book-in-progress, “Now Then: A History of Contemporary Literature in the University.” 53. An outlier, Fiedler used “Jewish-American” as early as the fifties. 54. Grebstein, “Bernard Malamud,” 179. 55. Following World War II, “the Jewish-American writer feels imposed on him the role of being The American, of registering his experience for his compatriots and for the world as The American Experience. Not only his flirtation with Communism and his disengagement, but his very sense of exclusion, his most intimate awareness of loneliness and flight are demanded of him as public symbols” (To the Gentiles, 58). 56. This latter comment comes in reference to Malamud’s The Magic Barrel, out just the year before, which indicated that the author of The Natural and The Assistant had “finally arrive[d].” 57. Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof, x. 58. Malin and Stark, Breakthrough, 1–2. 59. Katherine Anne Porter, “A Country and Some People I Love,” Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations, ed. Joan Givner (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 110, 134. One wonders if one is supposed to catch here an echo of Henry Adams’s disgust at hearing “a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow … a furtive Yacob or Yssac, still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officer of the customs”—the Jewish interloper, the alien trying to gain admittance (Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2007], 186). Ben Siegel, powerfully reiterating the breakthrough thesis, cites Porter’s outburst as evidence that she was “clearly stung” by Bellow’s winning the National Book Award for Augie March (Ben Siegel, “Bellow as Jew and Jewish Writer,” A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria L. Cronin and Lee Trepanier [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013], 37). 60. Truman Capote, “Playboy Interview: Truman Capote,” Truman Capote: Conversations, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 158. 61. Gore Vidal, “The Thinking Man’s Novel,” New York Review of Books (December 4, 1980). One notes McCarthy’s use, and Vidal’s ratification, of “always”: breakthrough’s consolidation of persuasive power cannot be separated from the rapidity with which it could be taken for granted, with which it achieved a kind of ahistorical facticity, and appeared as a claim to be describing simply the way things are. 62. Josh Lambert, American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2010), 95. I will have much more to say about Updike and Bech in Chapter 3. 63. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, October 27, 1963, The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 438. See Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 143–144. 64. Quoted in “Second Dialogue in Israel,” Congress Bi-Weekly: A Review of Jewish Interests 30.12 (September 16, 1963), 35. Cynthia Ozick quotes this line (but not its source) in her famous essay “America: Toward Yavneh” (What Is Jewish Literature?, ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994], 23), and most who cite it reference only this secondary source. 65. Quoted in Israel Shenker, “After ‘Portnoy,’ What?,” New York Magazine (May 12, 1969), 46.

66. Saul Bellow, “A Jewish Writer in America,” New York Review of Books (October 27, 2011), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/27/jewish-writer-america. 67. Bernard Malamud, Conversations with Bernard Malamud, ed. Lawrence Lasher (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), 63. 68. Cynthia Ozick, “Judging the World,” New York Times Book Review (March 16, 2014). 69. Robert Alter, After the Tradition: Essays on Modern Jewish Writing (1969; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971), 9. 70. Allen Guttmann, “The Conversions of the Jews,” Contemporary American-Jewish Literature, ed. Irving Malin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 57. It’s worth pausing over the conspicuous gendering of Guttmann’s complaint: though his chief example of middlebrow mediocrity is the male Wouk, the insulting categorical label is provided by the female Ferber. More obviously needs to be said about this; suffice it to say that I know that most of my examples are male. Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out that Jewish feminists in the ’70s and ’80s had a more complicated relationship to American intersections between Jewishness, ethnicity, and whiteness. 71. Shenker, “After Portnoy,” 46. 72. Howe, Jewish-American Stories, 16. In fact, one might say that Howe understands the entirety of American literary history through the breakthrough thesis: the story of American literature is the story of successive regional, subcultural, and ethnic groups of writers “break-[ing] into the national literature” (1). 73. Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof, xii. 74. Michael Krasney [sic], “The Death of the American Jewish Novel,” MELUS 5.4 (Winter 1978), 94–95. 75. In a December 1966 piece in Midstream, Fiedler spoke, in terms not easily distinguished from those of, say, Capote and Porter, of a “Jewish Literary Establishment” (To the Gentiles, 168; originally published as part of a symposium called “Negro-Jewish Relations in America” in Midstream 12.10 in December 1966). 76. Gordon Hutner, in a December 2015 conversation, suggested it was the early 1970s. In 2004 Dan Walden claimed to have “started to teach American Jewish literature in 1970” (Walden and Avery, “Katherine Newman,” 526). 77. Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 149, 155. 78. Kenneth Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2, 4, 9. 79. Robert Alter, “What Jewish Studies Can Do,” Commentary 58.4 (October 1974), 71–74. 80. Alter, “What Jewish Studies Can Do,” 74–76. 81. Alter, “What Jewish Studies Can Do,” 76. 82. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, “Why Ethnicity?,” Commentary 58.4 (October 1974), 33–35, 39. 83. Thanks to Dean Franco for insight here. 84. Howe, Jewish-American Stories, 10.

Chapter 2 Epigraph: Philip Roth, “Yiddish/English,” Why Write? Collected Nonfiction: 1960–2013 (New York: Library of America, 2017), 329. 1. This is of course an unmeasurable; that said, I think we can approximate something close to a measure of it by way of registers like accolades, prizes, “best-of” lists, etc., as opposed to mere references or what end up being at the end of the day the “I remember” claims that underwrite so much Jewish American literary study–based consideration of other wellremarked Jewish American texts, including by Roth (according to which alternative register Portnoy’s Complaint would of course shoot to the top, at least for critics of a certain age). 2. Irving Howe, “Philip Roth Reconsidered,” Commentary 54.6 (December 1972), 73; Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (1976; New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 596. 3. Julian Levinson, Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 187. 4. It’s entirely arguable that he was already something much more than a Yiddish writer long before his trip to Stockholm, even back to the 1960s. Indeed, see Saul Noam Zaritt’s forthcoming book Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody: Jewish American Writing and World Literature (Oxford), which argues this point. 5. I say this tongue in cheek, as no nation-state called “Ukraine” existed for Sholem Aleichem. But you get my point. 6. Anita Norich, “Poetics and Politics of Translation,” The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature, ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 501. 7. The Jewish PR Man line comes from his New York Times obituary, published on June 6, 1977, 32; Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 172. The story of how this collection came about has been well documented: Howe had written a review of a

new translation of Sholem Aleichem’s novel Wandering Star in 1952 that caught the eye of Greenberg, who had been looking for allies in a campaign to bring Yiddish, which he saw to be in a critical state in the wake of the Holocaust, into English; see for example Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 179. 8. In a 1960 review of Singer’s The Magician of Lublin, Howe would refer to Peretz, for example, as a “cultural ‘spokesman’” of the classic Yiddish literary canon (“Demonic Fiction of a Yiddish ‘Modernist,’” Commentary 30 [January 1960], 351). 9. David Roskies, “Inside Sholem Shachnah’s Hat,” Prooftexts 21.1 (Winter 2001), 39. 10. Howe, World of Our Fathers, xix. 11. David Roskies, “The Treasuries of Howe and Greenberg,” Prooftexts 3.1 (January 1983), 109, 110. 12. Anita Norich, “Yiddish Literary Studies,” Modern Judaism 10 (1990), 299. This issue of Modern Judaism, by the way, marking the journal’s tenth anniversary, was dedicated to “tak[ing] stock of where the various fields that comprise modern Jewish studies presently stand,” and it enlisted “twenty one experts in various disciplines to review the main work done in their areas of expertise over the past decade as it coincides with the life-span of this journal” (“Editor’s Introduction,” Modern Judaism 10 [1990], n.p.). There’s probably room to condition Norich’s claim, insofar as Yiddish persists as a language of Hasidic life and study outside this kind of memorializing framework. But then again, there’s good reason to claim that Norich (and Roskies to a possibly lesser extent) is dealing specifically with secular, professional contexts. For what it’s worth. 13. Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 172. 14. David G. Roskies, “Jazz and Jewspeech: The Anatomy of Yiddish in American Jewish Culture,” Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature, ed. Emily Miller Budick (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 135. 15. Howe of course published a number of anthologies of (mostly) Yiddish writing during this period, some with Greenberg, some with Ruth Wisse, and some on his own. These include Selected Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1966), A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (1969; with Greenberg), Voices from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries (1972; with Greenberg), Yiddish Stories, Old and New (1974; with Greenberg), Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet Yiddish Writers (1977; with Greenberg), The Best of Sholem Aleichem (1979; with Wisse), and The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (1987; with Wisse and Chone Shmeruk). My point in concentrating on only two of these books—the original 1954 Yiddish stories collection and the 1977 Jewish American collection—is to focus specifically on the ideological distance between them and on the development of a disciplinary entity that was specifically Jewish American, and also because they are the most widely known and referenced now, at least in the Jewish American field. 16. Irving Howe, “On the Horizon: An Unknown Treasure of World Literature,” Commentary (September 1952), 271, 273. 17. Howe, “On the Horizon,” 273. 18. Roskies, “Jazz and Jewspeech,” 138, 140, 141. If one might want to argue that the specific reference to Sholem Aleichem is possibly Roskies’s own eccentric view, one certainly doesn’t have to go far to find examples of critics arguing that the great achievement of Bellow’s and Malamud’s styles is their masterful rendering of a kind of translation of Yiddish syntax into English, or that Philip Roth and Grace Paley were able to produce pitch-perfect representations of native Yiddish speakers making their way in English. 19. Cynthia Ozick, “Sholom Aleichem’s Revolution,” Metaphor and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1989), 174–175. 20. Ruth R. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (2000; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 64. 21. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon, 36. 22. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon, 42, 35, 63. 23. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon, 42. This focus on autochthonous discursive territory represents the ideological elaboration of an argument Wisse made a couple of decades earlier, in “Sholem Aleichem and the Art of Communication,” the B. G. Rudolph Lectures in Judaic Studies, Syracuse University (March 1979), 1–31. 24. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon, 10. 25. Ruth R. Wisse, “The Yiddish and Jewish-American Beat,” Prooftexts 21.1 (Winter 2001), 135–136, 143. 26. I mentioned Singer above, and it might seem that he is the more important writer to focus on in the context of an examination of how Yiddish literature became a hot literary topic in postwar America. Indeed, Howe opens the 1960 review of Singer’s The Magician of Lublin I cited above by asserting that “Isaac Bashevis Singer is the only living Yiddish writer whose translated work has caught the imagination of the American literary public,” and he goes on to say that the “contemporary reader” (at least the contemporary reader “for whom the determination not to be shocked has become a point of honor”) “is likely to feel closer to Singer than to any, or most, of the other Yiddish writers.” But Howe then admits that Singer is a bit anomalous among Yiddish writers, as with his “distinctively ‘modern’ sensibility” he has “cut himself off from some of the traditional assumptions of Yiddish literature,” and Howe admits that it’s “hardly a secret that in the Yiddish

literary world Singer is regarded with a certain suspicion or at least reserve” and that “Yiddish literary people, including serious ones, seem to be uneasy about him” because of this “modernism”: the “heavy stress upon sexuality, a concern for the irrational, expressionist distortions of character, and an apparent indifference to the more conventional aspects of Jewish life.” Or, as Howe summarizes, as a “truly ‘modern’ writer,” Singer “is not quite trustworthy in his relation to his culture.” So, while Howe wants to say that even as a modernist Singer is still “profoundly related” to the Jewish tradition (“Demonic Fiction,” 350–352)—and indeed, his defense of Sholem Aleichem will fundamentally turn on his ability to read Sholem Aleichem (and his branch of the Yiddish literary tradition) into his definition of modernism—his implication is that Singer’s American popularity is of a different sort than, say, the popularity of Sholem Aleichem, who was more securely of the Yiddish literary tradition and respected for, and within, it. More than a generation later, Ronald Sanders makes a similar point about Singer. Tracing the “Americanization” of Singer (Sanders charts a four-step process: step one was the publication and popularity of “Gimpel the Fool,” and particularly Bellow’s translation of it, in Partisan Review and then Howe and Greenberg’s collection; step two was his finding a major press in Noonday and its parent, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and also his focus on short stories after the ho-hum reception of novels like The Family Moskat; step three was Singer’s mastery of English and his becoming his own translator, or at least a collaborator on the translations of his works, which were more like revisions tailored to an American audience; and step four was the increasingly American setting of his novels and stories, which was related in part to the Holocaust becoming a key theme in his work, and which happened to coincide with the Holocaust becoming a major preoccupation in America cultural life more generally, part of the discursive transition that came to be called the Americanization of the Holocaust), Sanders argues that Singer has become “a major American author, regularly taught in American literature courses throughout the country,” but that he has often been “little respected” in the “Yiddish literary world” (“The Americanization of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” the B. G. Rudolph Lectures in Judaic Studies [Syracuse University, 1989], 1; emphasis in original). Thus to massage Howe here into a form that explicitly suits my purposes, the point is not that Singer is unimportant, but that Sholem Aleichem is the more important writer to examine for my project because while Singer was the Yiddish writer for American literary people focused on current trends in American and world literature, Sholem Aleichem was the Yiddish writer for the Jews. Or as Leslie Fiedler put it in his characteristic style, Singer was “an e´migre´ rather than an immigrant or child of immigrants—which is to say, an AmericanJewish writer rather than a Jewish-American one, like Malamud or Bellow, who much admired him but whom he, apparently, has never read” (Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity [Boston: David R. Godine, 1991], xv). 27. Dan Miron, “The Literary Image of the Shtetl,” Jewish Social Studies 1.3 (Spring 1995), 5,4. 28. Miron, “Literary Image of the Shtetl,” 38. 29. See on the point of the ideological image of an organic Yiddish vernacular Jerold Frakes’s The Politics of Interpretation: Alterity and Ideology in Old Yiddish Studies (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989); thanks to Saul Noam Zaritt for pointing me there. 30. Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 31. All that said, I will, to cover my ass, cite David Roskies, who admitted in 1983—just a handful of years after the publication of Howe’s Jewish-American Stories collection—that it is justifiable “to think of postwar America as another… watershed … of [a] larger cultural movement of internal renewal” within Yiddish, and that “the critical assessment of Jewish culture has finally become part of the national agenda” (“The Treasuries of Howe and Greenberg,” 110, 114). 32. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 585, 587. 33. Irving Howe, ed., introduction, Jewish-American Stories (New York: New American Library, 1977), 2–3. If Howe specifies that Jewish American writing is properly “not part of Hebrew or Yiddish literature,” Wendy Zierler, recently recuperating Howe’s fundamental historiographic maneuver, wants to clarify that it is certainly a “Yiddish-derived” literature (Wendy I. Zierler, “The Caravan Returns: Jewish American Literary Anthologies, 1935–2010,” The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature, ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016], 479). 34. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 597. 35. Howe, introduction, Jewish-American Stories, 12. 36. Irving Howe, introduction, Jewish-American Stories, 12–13. 37. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Problems of Yiddish Prose in America (1943),” trans. Robert H. Wolf, Prooftexts 9.1 (January 1989), 11. As he writes a little later, in closing, “Our mother tongue has grown old. The mother is already a grandmother and a great grandmother. She wandered with us from Germany to Poland, Russia, Rumania. Now she is in America, but in spirit she still lives in the old country—in her memories. She is beginning to forget her own language, mixing in many corrupted English words, making comical mistakes and confusing one language with the other” (12). My point is not that Singer’s Yiddish is entirely incommensurable with Howe’s—for both writers Yiddish represents the past, and indeed both want to present themselves as masterful figures—but the tone is different. Part of this difference should

probably be chalked up to considerations of audience. As Saul Noam Zaritt suggested in a personal communication (June 7, 2018), part of Singer’s project is to demonstrate and preside over the death of Yiddish in order to himself claim a kind of authority over its burial and memorialization. Singer desires this authority for a contest with other Yiddish writers. Howe on the other hand is perhaps more interested in weaponizing Yiddish for his project to produce a definitive literary history of Jewish American writing—in order, among other things, to exert mastery over some particular Jewish American writers with their “thin” cultures. 38. Norich, “Yiddish Literary Studies,” 298, 300. 39. See John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987). 40. David Suchoff, “Irving Howe, the Cold War Canon Debate, and Yiddish, 1954–1992,” Living with America, 1946– 1996, ed. Cristina Giorcelli and Rob Kroes (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1997), 211–12. 41. Suchoff, “Irving Howe,” 213. 42. Suchoff, “Irving Howe,” 214. 43. Hana Wirth-Nesher, “Language as Homeland in Jewish-American Literature,” Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 219. I suspect that Wirth-Nesher’s “Jews” here is a concept grounded in circular logic, dependent on precisely the coherent, population-based concept I’m interested in critically historicizing. That is, Jewish Americans’ difference from, say, Sicilian Americans here in Wirth-Nesher’s formulation is presumably that while the latter group’s ethnic self-awareness is based on a shared history of familial immigration from Sicily, Jewish immigrants to America came from all over, and so came to rely on a linguistically derived sense of ethnicity rather than a geographically derived one. But this implies that all Jewish immigrants in the United States already identified with all other Jewish immigrants in the United States, at least potentially and/or prospectively, and that whatever ethnicity work needed doing (and that would be done, presumably, by language) was in fact already done. That all said, Wirth-Nesher dialed back this problematic line of argument eight years later in Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). 44. Wirth-Nesher, “Language as Homeland,” 221. Wirth-Nesher’s “mythical reconstruction of a Yiddish folkloristic world that has no manifestation in contemporary life” (219) never really aspires to “legitimacy” (222), a word that should likely be considered a cousin of Shandler’s counterterm, vernacularity. 45. Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 28. See also Miron, “The Literary Image of the Shtetl,” for more on Sholem Aleichem’s construction of a literary persona. 46. Miron, A Traveler Disguised, 29. Thanks to Saul Noam Zaritt for clarifying this for me (personal communication, September 29, 2017). 47. The declaration of grandfatherhood came in Sholem Aleichem’s dedication of his novel Stempenyu (1888), a dedication Dan Miron calls “one of the most important documents in the history of modern Yiddish literature.” The “fabrication” “took root immediately. What was unimaginable in 1885 was taken for granted in 1895.…This sudden emergence of self-consciousness is perhaps the most important factor in the change that took place in modern Yiddish literature during the 1890s” (A Traveler Disguised, 31). Miron explains its significance: “The legend of Abramovich as the ‘grandfather’ of Yiddish letters, which Sholem Aleichem launched when Abramovich was fifty-two years old (he himself was then twenty-nine years old) can be considered the basis of our conception of modern Yiddish literature as a historical institution.…By the adoption of Abramovich as a ‘grandfather’ … he gained for Yiddish literature much more than the dignity of old age; he supplied it with a living symbol of authority and legitimacy. The grandfather myth obviously involved myths of a grandson and of an inheritance, in short, a dynasty. Once Abramovich was accepted as a reigning sire, it went without saying that only his legitimate progeny were to inherit the kingdom; moreover, it also became evident that a kingdom did exist; a kingdom which had a past and was looking toward a future” (A Traveler Disguised, 30–31). 48. This hegemonic account had been fully in place even by the 1910s, when Yiddish fiction writers were trying to establish themselves by explicitly writing against their predecessors. In fact, it’s harder to claim that Abramovich and Sholem Aleichem had literary heirs in any obvious sense; it’s easier to place Peretz, more assimilable to the ways in which intellectuals were thinking about literary modernism, in a continuous tradition (thanks yet again to Saul Noam Zaritt for pointing this out). 49. Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 182. 50. Wirth-Nesher, Call It English, 38. 51. About YIVO: we should be careful to not overemphasize its role, as it represents one, fairly limited, tradition. It’s convenient for scholarship because it exists, but it doesn’t represent anything like a “normative” Yiddish outside its own aspirations. 52. Avraham Novershtern, “From the Folk to the Academics: Study and Research of Yiddish After the Holocaust,”

Encyclopedia Judaica Yearbook 1988/89 (Jerusalem: Keter, 1989), 14. 53. Novershtern, “From the Folk to the Academics,” 18. 54. Concomitant with this professionalization was the imagination—one that has been reproduced far beyond the postwar moment—of a transvaluation between Hebrew and Yiddish as languages of the Jews that took place after the Holocaust and the founding of Israel: while before the war Yiddish was the vernacular and Hebrew the venerated object of scholarship, after the war Hebrew became the live, spoken vernacular while Yiddish was revalued as the high-prestige object of scholarship. Norich, for example, in 1990: “One of the ironies of Yiddish is that as its popular use had declined its status has risen. It has long been clear that Yiddish has become virtually enshrined as an academic study at the same rate as its native speakers have diminished. Hebrew and Yiddish have all but changed roles as Hebrew has become a spoken, accessible language and Yiddish has become the language that is primarily read by scholars and students” (“Yiddish Literary Studies,” 300). It’s worth noting that this binary is likely not as definitive as Norich makes it seem; one might note on the one hand the staying power of Yiddish vernacularity in parts of the United States long after the end of the war (persisting to this day, though admittedly largely limited to Hasidic contexts) and on the other hand the continued veneration of Hebrew as an object of scholarly specialization in Jewish studies contexts. In any case, I’d be willing to propose that Yiddish’s repackaging as a discursive object in the academy supported the ideological project that made it part of the apparatus of Jewish American history. 55. As I discuss in Chapter 1, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, published in 1969, was a signal text in this regard, spurring many to opine that the genre of the Jewish American novel had blown its wad and had nothing more to look forward to than a decline into selfparody. 56. Zierler, “The Caravan Returns,” 472, 473, 474. 57. Jeffrey Shandler, “Anthologizing the Vernacular: Collections of Yiddish Literature in English Translation,” The Anthology in Jewish Literature, ed. David Stern (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 313. 58. Shandler, “Anthologizing the Vernacular,” 304. 59. Shandler, “Anthologizing the Vernacular,” 314, 315–316. 60. A compliment that Howe repaid by insisting seventeen years later that “despite his use of Jewish settings,” Roth was “cut off from any Jewish tradition”! (Howe, World of Our Fathers, 596). 61. Philip Roth, The Counterlife (New York: Vintage, 1986), 145. 62. I pose this as an alternative to the Wisse paradigm’s subordination of knowledge production to the imperial oversight of a toxic nationalism—in two senses. First, Jewish American literary study can indeed sometimes contest the nationalist project Ruth Wisse so aggressively takes for granted. And second, there’s a history to our ability to engage in the kind of author-based literary study that dominates the field today and without which her project is impossible. 63. See, for example, Robert M. Seltzer and Norman J. Cohen, eds., The Americanization of the Jews (New York: New York University Press, 1995). 64. See, for example, Isaac B. Berkson, Theories of Americanization: A Critical Study, with Special Reference to the Jewish Group (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1920); thanks to Sarah Imhoff for guidance here—and for the reference. 65. Michael P. Kramer, “Acts of Assimilation: The Invention of Jewish American Literary History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 103.4 (2013), 559–60. 66. Kramer, “Acts of Assimilation,” 561. 67. Robert M. Seltzer, introduction, Seltzer and Cohen, The Americanization of the Jews, 10, 4; that final ellipsis in the second quote is in the original text. 68. Kramer, “Acts of Assimilation,” 578. 69. The alienated Jewish intellectual type would be cemented into place as social “fact” within a decade, becoming a cliché by the early ’60s; and indeed it’s still got legs. 70. Kramer, “Acts of Assimilation,” 578. 71. Kramer, “Acts of Assimilation,” 578–579. 72. Well, except for Trilling; a Jewish affiliation is the affiliation he wouldn’t be caught dead embracing. 73. “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews,” Contemporary Jewish Record 7.1 (February 1944): 3–36. For example, Kazin insists that when he thinks of the Jews “for whom the word meant and means something” he thinks of the likes of Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, Marc Chagall, Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, and Rosa Luxemburg, “but I have never seen much of what I admire in American Jewish culture, or among Jewish writers in America generally” (9–10). Ben Field offers a paean to the great advantages of being a Jewish writer in America, “suckled by two great breasts”: Walt Whitman and Sholem Aleichem, neither of whom we would now tend to identify as a specifically Jewish American writer (19). Rosenfeld argues that Jews in America are “marginal men,” and that the Jewish writer is a “specialist in alienation,” but suggests that those writers who are worth taking seriously as Jewish writers “retain

more than a little of European culture” (34–36). 74. Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, 106–107. Incidentally, in a review of Samuel’s book, Isaac Rosenfeld, ever the contrarian, but supporting Kramer’s argument, describes Sholem Aleichem’s style as characterized by “alienation” (Isaac Rosenfeld, “The Humor of Sholom Aleichem” [review of Maurice Samuel, The World of Sholom Aleichem], Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader, ed. Mark Shechner [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988], 112). 75. Alfred Kazin, “Sholem Aleichem: The Old Country,” American Scholar 25.3 (Summer 1956), 273, 275. Kazin’s introduction to the Modern Library edition was initially published as this essay in the American Scholar. 76. I’m hedging a bit in referring to both “Howe” and “their concern” because, like many before me, I assume that Howe is, more or less, the sole author of the introduction. I don’t really have any solid evidence, but the essay certainly seems his speed; also he reproduced portions of it in later essays that he published under his name alone. Jeffrey Shandler has confidently asserted that “scholars attribute the authorship of this introduction … to Howe,” referring to David Roskies’s frequently cited Prooftexts omnibus review essay of Howe and Greenberg’s many anthologies and to Edward Alexander (Shandler, “Anthologizing the Vernacular,” 322). I might meekly gesture to the authority of at least two other scholars, Sheldon Grebstein (in “Singer’s Shrewd ‘Gimpel’: Bread and Childbirth,” Recovering the Canon: Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. David Neal Miller [Leiden: Brill, 1986], 58–59) and Julian Levinson (in Exiles on Main Street, 172), in further defense of this assumption. 77. Irving Howe, introduction, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Penguin, 1954), 71. 78. Incidentally, as an aside: second-generation neocon Edward Alexander reports that in a 1973 phone conversation, referring to what he perceived as a new trend among metropolitan U.S. Jews to return to Yiddish, Howe wondered, dismissively I gather we’re supposed to think, “How long will this fad continue?” (Edward Alexander, Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998], 168). 79. The quote, though Howe doesn’t fully attribute it, comes as many readers will know from “An Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” with which Kafka introduced a dramatic reading (in Yiddish) by the actor Yitzhak Lowy at the Jewish Town Hall in Prague on February 18, 1912—before a largely assimilated crowd, as Norich reminds us. Those who haven’t read the text will be unsurprised to learn that Kafka isn’t exactly straightforward in the talk, which comes in at under four printed pages. This line is Kafka’s opening, seemingly disarming, offering to his audience, but he pretty quickly suggests that Yiddish in fact can’t really be translated and that German speakers, especially, can’t really hope to understand Yiddish. But he then moves to reassure everyone that in fact Yiddish is sort of intuitively available to everybody. Norich opens her own summary of where Yiddish literary studies lies at the dawn of the 1990s with a discussion of Kafka’s line, though she doesn’t discuss Howe’s use of it. She argues that Kafka’s suggestion that Yiddish reveals itself as enduringly contemporary, and that his auditors, regardless of what they may think, have “an intuitive and natural predisposition” to the language, is an “untenable” concept that has nonetheless persisted into our own age (“Yiddish Literary Studies,” 297). I’m all for arguments for untenability, but it’s worth wondering whether Norich’s specific claim here is grounded in a normative view of Yiddish vernacularity, or at least acquisition—that is, that only those born into Yiddish, or those who pursue disciplined Yiddishist study, can hold a proper claim to the language—that fundamentally dismisses what we might want to cast as the “postvernacular” position on the language that Kafka might here be seen to be suggesting. 80. Howe, introduction, Treasury, 1. Miron shows that Sholem Aleichem himself beat Howe and Greenberg to this tack, that in comparing “our poor Yiddish literature” to Russian writers like Gogol and Turgenev in 1884, Rabinovich “was taking a revolutionary step. The ‘poverty’ and modest scale of Yiddish literature notwithstanding, it was pronounced a literature comparable to great literature and susceptible to aesthetic and literary categorizations” (Miron, A Traveler Disguised, 28). 81. Howe, introduction, Treasury, 2. Take that, Bellow of “Tolstoy of the Zulus” and “Proust of the Papuans” fame! 82. Howe, introduction, Treasury, 1. This largely reproduces the argument Howe made in his Commentary review of Wandering Star a couple of years earlier. 83. Howe, introduction, Treasury, 4. 84. Howe, introduction, Treasury, 46. Howe admits that “most Yiddish idioms, like most French or American idioms, are untranslatable,” but this fact does not keep Yiddish at a necessary remove from American readers. No translator, Howe avers, is under obligation “to try the impossible; he need only hunt for vivid equivalents” (46). 85. Anita Norich more or less validates and reiterates Howe’s attempt here to familiarize Yiddish-in-translation for the American reader (in part through citation of Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator” essay) in “Poetics and Politics of Translation.” Shandler also refers to Benjamin in this context (see Adventures in Yiddishland, 104). 86. Howe, introduction, Treasury, 46. 87. Howe, introduction, Treasury, 48–49. 88. Howe, introduction, Treasury, 25–26. 89. Howe, introduction, Treasury, 28.

90. Howe, introduction, Treasury, 33. 91. Howe, introduction, Treasury, 54. 92. Irving Howe and Ruth R. Wisse, introduction, The Best of Sholom Aleichem, ed. Irving Howe and Ruth R. Wisse (Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books, 1979), xi. The introduction comprises letters between Howe and Wisse, so a case can be made for attributing the various parts. 93. Uriel Weinrich, “A Story to Tell” [book review], New York Times Book Review (November 28, 1954), 22. 94. I suppose, were one so inclined, one (especially one demanding that literary and cultural studies remain innocent of “theory”; see, for example, David Brauner’s review of my last book in the Journal of American Studies 50.4 [November 2016]) could impugn my use of the term biopolitical here as tendentious. And I suppose I am being tendentious in using it, though I also believe the use is not at all inapt. All I really mean to indicate is the way in which culture is taken up, understood, and administered—by institutions like “literary studies” or “the humanities,” to say nothing of the institutions of Jewish self-regard—as a function of and handle on, and therefore a way to recognize, bodies and populations. In other words, I’m using it as a way to denormalize and denaturalize a word like heritage, which might otherwise allow one to swim irresponsibly in vast seas of reactionary silence, exceptionalism, and ignorance. 95. Norman Podhoretz, “Review of A Treasury of Yiddish Stories,” The Worlds of Irving Howe: The Critical Legacy, ed. John Rodden (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2005), 91–92. The essay originally appeared as “Jewish Culture and the Intellectuals: The Process of Rediscovery,” Commentary 20 (1955): 451–457. 96. Podhoretz, “Review,” 91. 97. This revisionary theme—the valuation of Yiddish in professionalized literary historical, which is to say nonparochial, terms—persists, essentially unabated, in fueling further critical reception of Sholem Aleichem: in her review of Howe and Wisse’s edited The Best of Sholom Aleichem, Hana Wirth-Nesher celebrates the new collection as “an important step in a revision of Sholom Aleichem,” a critical salvo with sufficient force to challenge the “nostalgic and sentimental expectations on the part of the American Jewish reading public.” She applauds Howe’s use of the term modern as a critical mode, “a necessary corrective”—and a means to liberate the author from the popular sentimental “ ‘fiddler on the roof’ stereotype that reduces his fiction to a good cry, albeit amid laugher.” Howe’s critical extraction allows us to see “lurk[ing]” behind Sholem Aleichem the “jovial folk hero” Solomon Rabinovich, “the sophisticated and self-conscious craftsman.” That is, Jews need to value Sholem Aleichem on literary, not Jewish, grounds (Hana Wirth-Nesher, “The Best of Sholom Aleichem [book review],” Notre Dame English Journal 11.2, spec. issue, “Judaic Literature: Critical Perspectives” [April 1979], 159). 98. Podhoretz, “Review,” 92. 99. One should note here (perhaps I should have mentioned earlier) an increasingly visible comparative literature– situated critique of the kinds of literary historical thinking and archival habits underlying this Americanism—a critique that uses a concept of “world literature” to challenge the mononationalism of Jewish literary study. See, for example, Lital Levy and Allison Schachter’s collaborations, both in “Jewish Literature/World Literature: Between the Local and the Transnational,” PMLA 130.1 (January 2015), 92–109, and in their more recent coedited special issue of Prooftexts, including their introductory essay, “A Nonuniversal Global: On Jewish Writing and World Literature,” Prooftexts 36.1–2 (2017), 1–26; and the work of Saul Noam Zaritt, for example in “Maybe for Millions, Maybe for Nobody: Jewish American Writing and the Undecidability of World Literature,” American Literary History 28.3 (September 2016), 542–573, and in his forthcoming book Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody: Jewish American Writing and World Literature (Oxford University Press). This is obviously an important avenue for scholarship on Jewish literary study, but I want to insist that the field needs to critically interrogate the patterns of nationalist desire threaded through its own history of exceptionalism, as well. 100. Podhoretz, “Review,” 92. 101. Podhoretz, “Review,” 94, 96. 102. Podhoretz, “Review,” 92. 103. Irving Howe, “Sholom Aleichem: Voice of Our Past,” Selected Writings: 1950–1990 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 13. As I said, large passages seem lifted from previously published essays—which certainly isn’t an exceptional practice for, really, any of the New York intellectuals—but I cannot find record of the essay as it stands having been published before the 1963 volume. 104. Howe’s term here is “Jewish intelligentsia,” which carries a certain European, or at least non-American, signification, an association he admits in his more famous essay from later in the ’60s, “The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle and a Critique,” Commentary 46.4 (October 1968), 29. 105. Howe, “Voice of Our Past,” 16. 106. Irving Howe, “Tevye on Broadway,” Commentary 38.5 (November 1964), 73. 107. Howe, “Tevye on Broadway,” 73. 108. Howe, “Tevye on Broadway,” 74. 109. Howe, “Tevye on Broadway,” 74. Here we again encounter the politics of Howe’s elevation of highbrow

modernism (signaled in his phrase “cultivated Yiddish reader”) over the lowbrow sentimentality of Broadway. 110. Howe, “Tevye on Broadway,” 75. 111. Howe, “Tevye on Broadway,” 75. 112. Howe, “Tevye on Broadway,” 75. 113. Howe, “Voice of Our Past,” 14, 16. 114. Howe, introduction, Treasury, 53. 115. Howe and Wisse, introduction, xi–xii. Even if by 1979, apparently, the term had lost its hyphen, we can still recognize this as an archetypical modernist trope, one that pertains to any number of modern writers, regardless of foreskin (thanks to Saul Noam Zaritt, once again, for relentlessly insisting I pay attention to the ways in which Howe’s defense of Sholem Aleichem pivots on Howe’s more general defense of modernism). 116. Howe is by no means alone in drawing a comparison to Dickens. Interestingly, in the Treasury introduction, Howe seems a lot more reticent about comparing Sholem Aleichem to Twain and Dickens—an indication that, despite Howe’s avowed aim in that essay, at the time of its publication Yiddish’s place had not yet been secured in the history of either world literature or Jewish American literature. 117. Howe and Wisse, introduction, vii. 118. Howe and Wisse, introduction, viii. 119. Howe and Wisse, introduction, viii–ix. 120. Incidentally, I think we’re safe in assuming that Singer—whom we may remember Howe described in his 1960 review of The Magician of Lublin as a “modern” writer “not quite trustworthy in his relation to his culture”—is probably not supposed to be considered a culture hero. What differentiates Sholem Aleichem from Singer is that while Singer’s modernism runs eccentric to the traditional Yiddishism that, to be sure, also characterizes his writing, what Howe recognizes as the former’s modernism never eclipses the strong claim the Yiddish tradition makes on readers of Sholem Aleichem. 121. Roskies, “Inside Sholem Shachnah’s Hat,” 39. 122. Roskies, “Inside Sholem Shachnah’s Hat,” 40. 123. Roskies, “Inside Sholem Shachnah’s Hat,” 40–41. 124. Roskies, “Inside Sholem Shachnah’s Hat,” 54–55. 125. Roskies, “Inside Sholem Shachnah’s Hat,” 54. 126. Roskies, “Inside Sholem Shachnah’s Hat,” 55. 127. In a rewarding polemic, Saul Noam Zaritt further unpacks the implications of Roskies’s own sense of implication: “Instead of a unified network of minor Jewish literatures that contributes to modernity while remaining separate from European centers, I am interested in outlining the double-bind of Jewish writing—its implication within local and global literary institutions and how it supplements and upsets those same institutions” (Zaritt, “Maybe for Millions, Maybe for Nobody,” 552). 128. Roskies, “Inside Sholem Shachnah’s Hat,” 39. 129. Roskies, “Inside Sholem Shachnah’s Hat,” 41. 130. Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, 3–4. 131. Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, 18, 20. This was a point that, as we saw, Norich had made fifteen years earlier. 132. Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, 22. 133. Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, 25. 134. Saul Noam Zaritt, “Yiddish Afterlives and Critical Jewish Studies” (paper presented at the AJS conference, December 2015, San Diego), 1. 135. Zaritt, “Yiddish Afterlives,” 5. If it were me, I’d replace Zaritt’s “modern nationstate” with “modern nation.” 136. Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, 7. 137. Ruth R. Wisse, “Yiddish: Past, Present, Imperfect,” Commentary (November 1997), 32. The bit about AIPAC is from 37. 138. Wisse, “Yiddish,” 34. 139. Wisse, “Yiddish,” 34–35. 140. Wisse, “Yiddish,” 38. 141. Wisse, “Yiddish,” 38. 142. Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, 4. 143. Wisse, “Yiddish,” 39. 144. Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, 4. 145. Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 180. 146. Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 181, emphasis in the original. Levinson mentions Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Earth Is the Lord’s (1949) and Marc Zborowski’s Life Is with People (1952) as works that flirt with the nostalgia that Howe

was careful to avoid. 147. Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 187. 148. Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 187–188. 149. Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 188. 150. Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 173.

Chapter 3 Epigraph: Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater (New York: Vintage, 1995), 368. 1. Barry Popik locates the first print citation of the joke in Herb Rau’s “Today’s Best Giggle” column in the Miami Daily News on June 28, 1956 (Barry Popik, The Big Apple [September 11, 2015], https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/where_did_you_find_a_chinese_waiter_who_speaks_yiddish/ [January 26, 2018]). See also Philip Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993; New York: Vintage, 1994), 382, 385. And if Roth isn’t good enough to establish the joke’s bona fides, the joke also appears in The Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature, ed. Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein (New York: Norton, 2001), 323; there it appears under the rubric “perennial” rather than “classic,” but you get the picture. 2. Thus I differentiate historically from two more popular terms. First, it’s not history, if this latter term is taken to mean record, even if only an ultimately or potentially retrievable record, a concept we inevitably think in alliance with such identitarian concepts as “narrative” or “account” of. And I don’t quite mean historicity either, which I tend to think carries a sense of being in history, of bearing historical authenticity. History and historicity circulate in the orbit of a project of description, if they don’t in fact function as forms of description themselves, and they labor primarily in the objective case, as it were. By contrast, I hope historicality applies more to the epistemological frame in which such a project operates, and carries with it a question about how. (And in the spirit of disclosure, I wonder if it helps to admit that I’m indebted here to 1990s-era debates within subaltern studies about the impossibility of capturing subaltern historical experience in statist histories oriented around the legibility of the nation-state.) 3. I adapt this formulation from Chip Rhodes, Structures of the Jazz Age: Mass Culture, Progressive Education, and Racial Discourse in American Modernism (New York: Verso, 1998), 3. 4. Timothy Parrish, “Roth and Ethnic Identity,” The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, ed. Timothy Parrish (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 136–137. In a remarkable performance of how an absolute incapacity for critical self-regard can deceptively appear as intellectual activity—even a stopped clock is right twice a day—Alana Newhouse, Tablet magazine’s editor-in-chief, recently accomplished a similar destabilization of a concept of authenticity. Newhouse, a cultural apparatchik with the ego of an anti-intellectual, appeared as a guest on an episode of Unorthodox, Tablet’s podcast, devoted to nose jobs (the episode, #117, aired on December 21, 2017). Describing her childhood in the Five Towns, Newhouse tells the hosts that “nose jobs were definitely a cultural thing that…for certain kinds of women or girls… was a cultural rite of passage” among the people with whom she grew up, a diverse Jewish community made up originally largely of people she describes as the “archetype of the aspirational New York Jew”: blue-collar Jews from the garment trades fleeing the city. “So for us,” she adds, “the nose job is only one signifier of the Jew becoming American. And doing so inside of being Jewish.” One will note odd syntax here; this is also where it gets interesting, as she reaffirms this conspicuous claim: “For us it was never ever about running away from being Jewish. Ever.” One of the three cohosts of the show then asks her whether she ever felt any feminist censure, or felt herself any shame, about her nose job, and Newhouse, deferring an answer to the question, doubles down: “My mother actually had a nose job. She had a nose job when she was nineteen. My mother was working in the garment industry, and her boss bought her a nose job.…She wanted it, and she worked the front desk, and he paid for her to have a nose job. So it never struck me as odd, or as a divergence from any [Jewish] values [the implication of specifically Jewish values—that is, forged in Jewish tradition pour soi—was established a bit earlier], to have one, right, because the values that were represented in the person that I was from, literally, were to have this. So in a funny way, this was me fulfilling my inheritance.” Newhouse reads her mother’s internalizing (or at least making peace with) her boss’s desire that she look less markedly Jewish for customers, his imposition of arguably nonJewish standards of aesthetic normality or appropriateness (if not beauty) on her—which he literally understands as part of the cost of doing business—as continuous with Jewish “values.” This ability to read the sublimation of Jewish conspicuousness as an expression of Jewish “values” is not nearly so remarkable (this we’ve seen before) as her rationale for doing do: because she and her mother—Jews—did this thing, it must be Jewish. This is fascinating, as it amounts to a conceptual reversal: the abstract identity category preexists any determinate content, marking the objects it contains as “Jewish” rather than, say, the individually identifiable objects contributing to the definition of the abstract category. Alana Newhouse is apparently no realist—though she certainly looks a lot like a social scientist. Moreover, her ability to read her nose job in this way is entirely a function of her narcissistic self-regard: neither her mother’s boss’s demand nor her mother’s

nose job, nor even her own nose job, ever seem even remotely capable of being an object of opprobrium or even simply criticism, insofar entirely as having one was her experience, and thus, necessarily, normative. I’m fascinated by this logic. And indeed, here, puzzlingly, she finally gets around to addressing the question of feminism. She admits that she did in fact, for a period, regret having had a nose job, particularly in her twenties, when her feminism “really took root.” But she realizes now that she was mistaken back then, “because I was applying objective principles to my specific life.” As she characterizes her mid-twenties feminist self, she got upset because “I had done this thing that objectively one shouldn’t do. Except that’s really not actually how identity or life works. It’s supposed to be specific, and it’s supposed to be about you and your emotional ties and the ties that run through your family. And these are the ties that run through mine. Now I love the fact that I have a nose job that is the same as my mother’s who got one because some garmento bought it for her.…It literally roots me more than anything else [in authentic Jewish identity].” One first notices, certainly, the friction between her claim that identity is “specific,” “about you and your emotional ties,” and her claim to be talking about Jewish values, which are nothing if not general or collective. But more significantly, for Newhouse “identity” names the normalization, rendered as “love”—i.e., historical recuperation as affirmation and embrace—of one’s own actual experience as what should be one’s experience. Thus, fittingly, she can compare the expectation that a young Jewish woman will get a nose job to having a bar mitzvah: “It’s just in the atmosphere. Everyone does it. That’s what everyone does. In my family, the idea that I was going to have a nose job was so obvious it was almost never discussed” (“The Nose Job Episode,” Unorthodox podcast, episode 117 [December 21, 2017]: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/251417/unorthodox-episode-117jewish-nose-jobs). 5. Jonathan Freedman, Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 267, 279. 6. Freedman, Klezmer America, 282. 7. Freedman, Klezmer America, 285. Freedman cites the example of Eric Liu, who (perhaps infamously) appealed to the U.S. imagination of Jewishness as a model for Asian American culture work because “dominant white culture has assimilated to Jews rather than the other way around.” 8. Quoted in Freedman, Klezmer America, 286. 9. Freedman, Klezmer America, 6–7. 10. Freedman, Klezmer America, 9. 11. Freedman, Klezmer America, 10. 12. Freedman, Klezmer America, 12. 13. Gregory S. Jay, American Literature and the Culture Wars (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 25. 14. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55–56. 15. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 56. 16. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 60. 17. “ ‘Making Our Way Back to the Mother Ship’: Three Novelists Have a Hyphenated-Identity Crisis,” Forward (November 17, 1995), 11. 18. This resentment frames the remarks of all three panelists, though it is most ridiculously expressed in the remarks of Johanna Kaplan, who, seeing the identity of a literary text as a zero-sum game a Jewish author is bound to lose every time, self-righteously (and selfdeceptively, which is to say erroneously) claims to refuse the category of Jewish literature at all, along with all “categories,” whether of “ethnicity” or anything else, because “I don’t believe in prescriptions or proscriptions,” even while she begins by asserting that she has “no quarrel with” being called “a Jewish writer.” The third participant on the 1995 panel, Norma Rosen, evinces a more pragmatic ease: while recognizing for herself that Jewish themes are essential to her writing (and not nearly as hostile to multiculturalism as Ozick or, if we can extract a serviceable idea from her remarks, Kaplan is), she doesn’t really care how publishers market her writing or why readers buy it, just as long as they do. She ends by quoting the old Borscht Belt joke, “Call me this, call me that—just don’t call me late for dinner” (“‘Making Our Way,’” 12–13). 19. Ozick, in “Making Our Way,” 11. 20. Ozick, in “Making Our Way,” 12. 21. Ozick, in “Making Our Way,” 12–13. 22. Ozick, in “Making Our Way,” 12–13. 23. For both Jewish studies (especially American Jewish studies) and Jewish community professionals, the 1990s were marked by debates about American Jews’ relationship to multi-culturalism. It’s now a well-established cliché that the particular social success of Jews in the United States led to a kind of Jewish ambivalence toward multiculturalism: able to reap most of the benefits of white privilege yet retaining a collective memory of persecution that made them particularly aware of others’ histories of oppression, so this narrative goes, U.S. Jews are ideologically suspended between integrationist

and pluralist beliefs and practices. The landmark book Insider/Outsider, published just a few years after the Syracuse University Press symposium featuring Ozick’s complaints about multiculturalism, organized itself around precisely this exceptionalist “special ambivalence,” leveraging the Jews’ “anomalous status” as “insiders who are outsiders and outsiders who are insiders” as a technology for resolving Jewish identity. See David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, introduction, Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 4–5. 24. Cynthia Ozick, “Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means,” Art and Ardor (New York: Knopf, 1983), 239, 241; further citations will be made parenthetically in the text. The essay published in Art and Ardor combines three separate previously published articles, from 1971, 1978, and 1982. 25. Ozick might not welcome the comparison, but her complaint here runs parallel to Fredric Jameson’s critique of postmodern historicist pastiche as “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion,” in which “the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts”; see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 18. 26. The chief value of polemics doesn’t have to be referential accuracy. I wonder if Ozick would be surprised by how strikingly similar she sometimes sounds, as in her elevation of the power of imagination, to postmodernist metafictionalists like Raymond Federman, who famously rejected the term metafiction, along with experimental fiction, but who praises as “the only fiction that still means something today…that kind of fiction that tries to explore the possibilities of fiction…the kind of fiction that constantly renews our faith in man’s imagination and not in man’s distorted sense of reality—that reveals man’s irrationality rather than man’s rationality. This I call SURFICTION. However, not because it imitates reality, but because it exposes the fictionality of reality”; see Raymond Federman, “Surfiction—Four Propositions in Form of an Introduction,” Surfiction: Fiction Now…and Tomorrow, ed. Raymond Federman (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975), 7–8. 27. Ozick, “Toward a New Yiddish,” Art and Ardor (New York: Knopf, 1983), 152; further citations will be made parenthetically in the text. 28. Dean Franco, Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature Since 1969 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012), 61, 70. 29. Her singling out Roth here is of course ironic, as they would become great admirers of each other’s writing. 30. Ozick’s avowed antagonist in the essay is George Steiner’s celebration of Diaspora and exile as the heart of “essential” Jewish being; her point is that Jewish culture can only survive in Diaspora under very limited and, frankly, militant, conditions. Steiner celebrates figures like Franz Kafka and Sigmund Freud, but Ozick wonders about less celebrated figures, “those who are less than giants”; her counterexamples are, first, Isaac D’Israeli, a contemporary of Charles Lamb and as charming, a “gifted minor writer” who was “not notably Jewish in his concerns” and, despite being a “perfect English man-of-letters,” is now historically invisible, “does not exist, even as a document,” except possibly, at the far margins of scholarly regard, only as Benjamin Disraeli’s father (166–167), and, second, the “German Jews,” who made the pursuit of assimilation a virtue in the generations leading up to the Holocaust. Ozick’s point is that only Jews who made the explicit (and I guess differential) pursuit of Jewishness a cultural virtue have contributed to Jewish culture and survived as specifically Jewish historical figures. “So we have a clear choice,” she adds, “to take up an opportunity or reject it. We can do what the German Jews did, and what Isaac D’Israeli did—we can give ourselves over to Gentile culture and be lost to history, becoming a vestige nation without a literature; or we can do what we have never before dared to do in a Diaspora language: make it our own, our own necessary instrument, understanding ourselves in it while being understood by everyone who cares to listen or read” (176–177). Incidentally, Ozick compares D’Israeli to Lionel Trilling (167), suggesting that she sees this discussion as more than historically idle. 31. Though Ozick would move away from the liturgical model later on, she did not fundamentally revise the underlying emphasis on particularity rather than universality. 32. Andrew Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: The Return of the Exiled (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 2–3. 33. Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers, 3, 10–11, 3–4. Ozick herself wonders about the causes of Jews’ exclusion. But in addition to suspecting, as Furman does, that Jews are now considered part of the “mainstream,” she also proffers as neoconservative identity-political intensifications of this line the possibility that “Jews themselves, despite the experience of this cruelest and most brutal of European centuries, nevertheless decline to be identified as victims,” and perhaps “decline also to play the rivalrous game of identity politics” (Ozick, in “Making Our Way,” 11). It’s worth pondering the possibility that for Ozick it is precisely these refusals that qualify one, in the regime of multiculturalism, for “mainstream” status. 34. Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers, 8; incidentally, we can see this as a version of Howe’s argument from the introduction of Jewish-American Stories about American literary history generally, that it repeatedly follows a

pattern of, essentially, breakthrough. 35. Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers, 4. See also Leslie Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity (Boston: David R. Godine, 1991), xii. 36. Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers, 17. 37. Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers, 20. 38. We might see his own migration away from Jewish American literary history and toward memoir and fiction in the last decade as a sign of his appreciation of this fact. 39. Morris Dickstein, “The Complex Fate of the Jewish American Writer,” Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature, ed. Emily Miller Budick (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 58. Following the lead of many of the New York intellectuals, in whose final, waning generation he can arguably be counted, Dickstein got a lot of mileage out of what was essentially one essay. This article seems to have been recycled as the entry on “Jewish-American Fiction” (under the larger group heading “North American Literature”) in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Literature (oxfordre.com/literature) in July 2017, albeit with the addition of some new section headings. A slightly different version of the essay appeared the same year the essay in the Budick book came out, as “Never Goodbye, Columbus: The Complex Fate of the Jewish American Writer,” Nation (October 22, 2001): 25–34. 40. Dickstein, “Never Goodbye Columbus,” 25. 41. Indeed, in its Oxford Research Encyclopedia iteration, the essay features subheadings—“The Postwar Generation,” “The Young Iconoclasts,” etc.—that very explicitly tell a chronological story of historical development. 42. Dickstein, “Complex Fate,” 59. 43. Werner Sollors, “Ethnicity,” Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 289. For what it’s worth, Leslie Fiedler anticipated agreeing with Sollors on at least one of these points: “thanks in large part to Hitler,” “blood” and “race” are now “taboo words” (Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof, xviii). 44. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 25. This is of course the history that supports Ozick’s complaints about ethnicity-oriented literary study’s overinvestment in marginality and minority status and about certain in-vogue contemporary “representative” literary surveys’ lack of interest in WASP and Jewish writers. 45. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 14–15, 19–20. For what it’s worth, Omi and Winant’s usage of “biologism”/”biologistic” is more narrowly restricted to a biological essentialism than is my own use, which I hope explicitly displaces the self-evidence of biology. 46. Sollors, “Ethnicity,” 288. 47. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 12. 48. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 216. 49. Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 12–13. 50. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things, 13. 51. Ozick, in Making Our Way, 11. 52. I have labeled this hegemonic project “biologization” in previous work. There’s been a steady stream of scholarship situated in and adjacent to Jewish American literary study for the last twenty years that attempts to perform the functional power and historical selfevidence of a concept of ethnic identity for literary study, often by way of focusing on what Omi and Winant specify as “cultural attributes” (Racial Formation in the United States, 56) while insisting that there’s nothing essential about them. What’s most irritating—and pernicious—about this trend is a kind of Marie Antoinette eagerness to assume (and rely on) the epistemological anchoring power of racial and ethnic categories even as these critics proclaim the social-constructivist mantle. See, for a theoretically engaged attempt, Freedman, Klezmer America, or, for a more recent example interested in big claims about currently familiar narratives in Jewish American studies, Jennifer Glaser’s Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2016). For the rare work that critically treats ethnicity as the concept it is rather than the biologistic reality it purports to name, see Franco’s Race, Rights, and Recognition. 53. And on the foundation of which neoconservatism tells its origin story. 54. Jonathan Boyarin, Thinking in Jewish (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 191. 55. In hindsight, we might conclude that all he was in danger of was being consigned to the formidable pile of midtwentieth-century middlebrow American writers. An investigation of this category needs to tarry with Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), but it’s a project for another day. 56. John Updike, “Rich in Russia,” Bech: A Book (1970; New York: Random House, 2012), 16–17; all further citations to Bech stories will be made parenthetically in the text.

57. Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof, xiv–xv; this is also the volume in which one can find the “Grail Knight” essay. 58. John Updike, Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism, ed. Christopher Carduff (New York: Random House, 2011), 101. 59. In “Bech in Rumania” (1966), one of the earliest stories, Bech with free indirect style “crooked a forefinger beside his heavy Jewish nose, to represent a horn,” in trying to bridge the linguistic divide and sign Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros to one of his Romanian hosts, and then, a bit later, following a similar translational failure after he tries to explain to someone that she has (in English) a cold, “He touched his own nose, so much larger than hers. ‘Un rhume’ ” (22, 35); at the opening of “The Bulgarian Poetess” (the first Bech story, published in 1965), he is described as “a writer, this fortyish young man, Henry Bech, with his thinning curly hair and melancholy Jewish nose” (42); in “Bech Takes Potluck” (1968), after he arguably Judaicizes a young Gentile’s name as “Morris” in introducing him to his (Gentile) girl-friend, Bech is corrected: “ ‘Morrison,’ the boy said, and reached in past Bech’s nose to shake Norma’s hand” (64); in sizing up a young Jewish faculty member at a southern college where he has been invited to speak in “Bech Panics” (published for the first time in Bech: A Book), Bech, in cataloging her appearance, fixates on a predictable feature, noting that “her nose was too long, with something hearteningly developed and intelligent about the modulations from tip to nostril wing” (104); in “Bech Swings?” (1970), he is transfixed when he looks in the mirror: “His nose with age had grown larger and its flanges had turned distinctly red” (125); and in “Bech Enters Heaven” (also published for the first time in the book), he notes that he is “rather short for his age, yet with a big nose” (147) and then is characterized by a philosemite: “You keep your nose in your books” (151). 60. John Updike, Picked-Up Pieces (New York: Random House, 1966), 483. Certain data can in fact support a claim that Jewish literature’s move into the American mainstream might indeed have been closer to a zero-sum game than one such as myself might want to acknowledge, at least over the long term: a quick search a couple of years back using the MLA bibliography’s “Author as Subject” function revealed 224 hits for “Updike, John” vs. 620 for “Roth, Philip” since 2000 (thanks to Mike Maguire for the research). But then again, this would challenge the anxious “relevance” narrative. For what it’s worth, Sanford Pinsker, really the only critic to give sustained attention to Updike’s Bech stories in the context of Jewish literature, opines that Updike began to actually like Bech after a while, despite having begun to write about him as a way to “tongue a vaguely aching tooth, and better yet, to do it in someone else’s mouth.” It’s certainly true that on balance Bech becomes less conspicuously Jewish in the late stories. What’s more, Pinsker suggests that Updike’s resentful pique was likely not that sharp in any case: “Given Updike’s long and mutually beneficial relationship with The New Yorker, rancor about the Establishment probably has better—or at least angrier—spokespersons elsewhere” (Sanford Pinsker, “John Updike and the Distractions of Henry Bech, Professional Writer and Amateur American Jew,” Modern Fiction Studies 37.1 [Spring 1991], 99). 61. Adam Kirsch, “John Updike the Jew,” Tablet (June 27, 2012), http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-andculture/books/104616/john-updike-the-jew. Kirsch seems to have published essentially the same essay in the New Republic a week or so later, under the title “The Imaginary Jew” (https://newrepublic.com/article/104621/the-imaginary-jew). If one cares to, one can see my remark about Dickstein and the New York intellectuals in note 39, above; in any case, Kirsch seems to want to project a certain New-York-intellectual-y-ness. 62. Kirsch, “John Updike the Jew.” Further citations in the text are from the same online source. 63. What I mean by this arguably snarky comment is that Kirsch’s essay’s celebration of Jewish cultural achievement is colored by a boosterish (and nationalist) claim of Jewish superiority, but it tempers the jingoism of such a move by signaling the fact of Gentile acquiescence in that claim of superiority. That is, it’s not inappropriate to say Jews are better than other people if it’s true, and if at least some of those others agree. We should note in this context Tablet’s para-academic form: its essays and features ring with an intellectual tone that sounds like it could pass muster in the academy, all the while making an end run around professional academic practices of rigor and defenses against bias that might otherwise expose those essays’ agenda. Thus does Tablet’s para-academic form whitewash its Jewish nationalism. I have given a lot of thought to what Tablet represents, the kind of knowledge machine it is, over the past few years, after I finally noticed what was in fact plain to see all along: an apparent mismatch between the liberality of some of its culture writing and the reactionary paroxysm of its Israel writing. To bluntly state this conspicuous inconsistency in terms of a particularly high-visibility debate: how come a lot of the culture writing gets to engage with criticism of Israeli policies while so much of the Israel writing advocates a brutal doctrine of Jewish preemption? The solution lies in the fact that this apparent divergence is reconciled by a deeper, more fundamental Zionism: cultural on the one hand, taking form in affirmative celebratory narratives of Jewish accomplishment, and political on the other hand, taking form in nasty militant denials of any but Jewish claims to disputed territory accompanied by nasty militant assertions of the Jewish right to deny non-Jewish rights. Cultural Zionism, after all, even when it’s “liberal,” is still Zionism. And so Tablet’s Tikvah Fund–related overlords can countenance Tablet’s circumscribed criticisms of Israel: because those criticisms are in fact epiphenomenal, symptomatic of a more profound Zionism, what for purposes of selfbranding I might as well call “Deep Zionism.” 64. To the professional or semiprofessional reader of Jewish American literature, this conceit recalls how Nathan

Zuckerman is so often taken for granted as Philip Roth’s alter ego. If it can sometimes be a helpful literary historical tool, biography is so often the death of literary criticism in its ability to quash reading. Someone should write an affective history of the concept of the “alter ego” in literary study. 65. Thanks to Dean Franco for clarifying this for me and convincing me of the complexity of Ozick’s thought here. 66. My gut tells me there’s no amount of explicit groundwork I could lay here that would allow me to use “Zionist” in the theoretical way I nod toward in the Introduction without incurring the indignation of a certain class of reader, so I’ll just leave this here in the notes. 67. Cynthia Ozick, “Bech, Passing,” Art and Ardor (New York: Knopf, 1983), 113; all further citations will be made parenthetically in the text. 68. Adding insult to injury, Ozick notes that Updike doesn’t even get his “appropriately” Jewish references right all the time: at one point Bech thinks of his progenitors’ “stuffy back rooms,” where they keep “all the furniture they had brought with them from Europe, the footstools and phylacteries.” Ozick: “Footstools in steerage? From out of the cemeteries on Staten Island, ten thousand guffaws fly up” (118). (I will admit that I have long stumbled over this line, along with the line in Puttermesser about Uncle Zindel lying “under the earth of Staten Island,” as associations between Jews and Staten Island do not come easily to me; I guess as the home of the first Jewish cemeteries in New York, Staten Island is the ancestral and authoritative homeland of New York Jews’ dead.) For what it’s worth, Kirsch joins in the fun, and has his own go at pointing out Updike’s sometimes-infelicitous clichés: “Often, Updike’s attempts to mark Bech as a Jewish writer feel pro forma, and slightly off. Bech grows up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and goes to a public school in the east 70s, but Jewish writers of his generation were more likely to come from the Bronx or Brooklyn; it wasn’t until rather later that the West Side became a bourgeois Jewish neighborhood. At one point Bech’s father is said to have been a diamond merchant from Amsterdam—again, not an impossible background, but statistically quite unlikely for an Ashkenazi Jew like Bech” (“John Updike the Jew”). And so it goes. 69. I’m assuming this is a typo; I’ve toyed with the idea that Ozick is making some kind of clever joke here, but I suspect not. Granted, I have basically no French, but if there’s a double entendre lurking about I can’t imagine what it might be. In other news, I feel obligated to admit that Ozick’s comment here, “as Bech would say,” is one of the reasons she makes me so angry. I mean, I love her fiction, but stuff like this—shades of “freedom fries”—is just so reactionary. What, Jews can’t learn foreign languages and pretentiously use Frenchisms to impress? Come on. Unless her point is that Bech doesn’t know French. In which case, never mind. 70. We could be excused for suspecting that Ozick charges Updike with antisemitism for assuming that unlike Christians, Jews can be represented in terms of, described as, and therefore reduced to, data. That said, it’s ethnicity as a term of literary practice that enables this reductive assumption. 71. It’s hard these days not to hear an echo here of Baldwin’s Trillingian claim, from 1949’s “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” that “literature and sociology are not the same,” a position on the basis of which Irving Howe would later criticize Baldwin and Ellison for what he tendentiously saw as their shared apostasy against Richard Wright (James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Notes of a Native Son [1955; New York: Bantam, 1964], 14). Far be it from me to insist that the ease with which one can hear this citation proves Ozick intends to recall either her mentor’s argument or Baldwin’s iteration of it, more than two decades distant from the scene of her own writing, but Howe’s loudly taking it to task in 1963’s “Black Boys and Native Sons” (Dissent 10 [Autumn 1963], 353–368) was only a handful of years earlier than her essay; in any case, the New York intellectual argument against collapsing literature into sociology was certainly ready to hand for Ozick. It can be fun to play six degrees of separation with midcentury intellectual culture. 72. As any reader of Ozick will attest, this is a frequent theme in her fiction as well, where characters who value the aesthetic elegances of literature and creative vision over the moral complexities of history and real life often find themselves cannibalizing their own imaginative powers and virtues; The Puttermesser Papers and The Messiah of Stockholm present two excellent examples. Franco points to a “critical consensus” about the “decades-long consistency of Cynthia Ozick’s commitment to Jewish moral concerns.” The lesson in a lot of Ozick’s fiction is that “identifying with history—rather than studying history or respectfully mourning history—turns history’s subjects, people, into things and identities into idols” (Dean Franco, “Rereading Cynthia Ozick: Pluralism, Postmodernism, and the Multicultural Encounter,” Contemporary Literature 49.1 [2008], 56, 59). 73. See the second half of note 69. I mean, she sounds like such a boorish jerk—and a know-nothing nativist ignorant of her own perspicacious challenge to linguistic nationalism—when she says things like this. 74. To be fair, a reader inclined to be sympathetic to Ozick might be inclined to argue that Ozick was in essence gesturing precisely to this point when she imagined how much better the Bech stories would be without a Jewish Bech; but I’m not sure I’m capable of being that generous to her. 75. We should note how this intellectual articulation created a foundation for further elaboration: by 2001, the Norton Anthology would be able to trace Jewish American literature all the way back to the middle of the seventeenth century.

Conclusion 1. I hate to have to keep doing this, but again: I use this term commonsense in the Gramscian sense. Also (again), see Dean Franco, Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature Since 1969 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012) for a productive critique of this cliché. 2. That is, much as the logic of political Zionism manifests precisely (at least in part) in suppressing the compelling force of non-Jewish territorial and national claims—whether we’re talking about Jewish Zionism or, increasingly more importantly, evangelical Christianist Zionism (or Zionist Judaism putting ever more of its identitarian eggs in the basket of imperial-revanchist Christianist Zionism, as becomes ever more common in Trump’s America; but that’s perhaps a matter for another day). 3. Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory,” The Resistance to Theory, foreword by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 7 4. De Man, “Resistance,” 9. 5. De Man, “Resistance,” 7. 6. De Man, “Resistance,” 11. 7. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 78–79. 8. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 31. 9. Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan (New York: Random House, 2006), 81, 63. 10. Dean Franco, in an informal conversation in early 2019, suggested—archly, and hilariously—of Forest Dark that it can read as though it were written to get on Jewish American literature course syllabi. For the record, the remark wasn’t meant primarily as a complaint. 11. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 181–182.

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Index

The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. Aboutness Abramovich, Sholem. See also Mendele Mocher Sforim Abulafia, Abraham Adams, Henry African American literature African American studies AIDS AIPAC (American Israel Political Action Committee) Alexander, Edward Alter, Robert American literature American studies Anderson, Benedict Antisemitism Archive; “culture,” as naturalized concept of; subordinated to Jewish history and political identity Arendt, Hannah Arnold, Matthew Ashkenazim “Asian American,” category of Assimilation; as addressed by Jewish studies; as cliché; Gentile reaction to Jewish; Jewish American, narrative of; as precondition for Jewish American literary breakthrough Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) Autobiography; and metafiction; as normalization of autodiscursivity Autocritique, Jewish American literary study as. See also Exceptionalism; Narcissism, critical Autodiscursivity Babel, Isaac Badanes, Jerome Baldwin, James Baskin, Judith R. Bech, Henry (character). See Updike, John Bellow, Saul; The Adventures of Augie March; Humboldt’s Gift; on Jewish literary parochialism; translation of “Gimpel the Fool” Benjamin, Walter Biale, David Bialik, Hayyim Nahman Biopolitics; and concept of identity; in Jewish literary studies; and Zionism Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. See also Cultural studies Bishop, Elizabeth Bové, Paul Boyarin, Jonathan; and Daniel Boyarin Breakthrough narrative; as autocritique; as cliché; as coinscribed with ideology of ethnological pluralism; critical approaches to; exceptionalism of; as formative event in Jewish American literary discourse; Gentile responses to; as historical blindness; intellectuals of; Jewish American literature and literary criticism prior to; legitimation crisis of; literary representations of; as normalization of Jewish American difference; and postbreakthrough Jewish literary

criticism; as received narrative for current Jewish American literature; and whiteness Brecht, Bertolt Broadway; spiritual anemia of Brooks, Geraldine Buber, Martin Cahan, Abraham Canon; as anchored by a concept of identity; Jewish American literary; Jewish American texts in multiculturalist; Wars (see Culture wars); Yiddish literary Capote, Truman Cather, Willa Chagall, Marc Charlottesville Chin, Frank “Chinese Waiter Joke” Chuh, Kandice Class: socioeconomic; professional Clinton, William Jefferson Cohen, Larry Cohen, Leonard Cold War Columbia University Commentary (magazine); Contemporary Jewish Record Commonsense. See also Gramsci, Antonio Communism Community, Jewish. See Jewish community Contemporary literature studies Conversion Counterhegemony. See also Hegemony Covenant (as in Jews). See also Sacral imagination Cranks, reactionary. See also Wisse, Ruth Critical Jewish studies. See Jewish studies: critical Criticism; secular criticism. See also Literary criticism Cuddihy, John Murray Cultural studies; Jewish. See also New Jewish Cultural Studies Culture; critical concept of; culture expert (or professional); as discursive machine; ethnic, as intellectual dodge; ethnic, as made coherent by concept of population; as field of knowledge; as moral authority; and nationalized thinking; “our” as lever of exceptionalist privilege; subcultures; as used in Jewish studies Culture hero Culture wars Czernowitz Conference Dante (Alighieri, Dante) De Man, Paul Decolonization Demography: as discipline; as paradigm of thought; as polemically opposed to “literature” Der Nister (Pinchus Kahanovich) Derrida, Jacques Diaspora Dickens, Charles Dickinson, Emily Dickstein, Morris DiLeo, Jeffrey Disciplinarity; disciplines D’Israeli, Isaac

Disraeli, Benjamin Dissent Diversity; multiculturalist discourse of; as object of desire in Jewish studies Dreiser, Theodor Eliot, George Eliot, T. S. Elkin, Stanley Ellison, Ralph Emerson, Ralph Waldo Engels, Friedrich English department (as institution) Episcopalians Essentialism; of breakthrough narrative; as conceptually laundered in concept of “ethnic culture”; ethnic studies’ move away from; search for origins as form of Ethnic cleansing Ethnic literary studies Ethnic studies; Jewish studies in relation to; and move away from essentialism Ethnicity; as centered on population; conceptual ambivalence of; as enabling the conflation of culture and history; as epistemological technology; ethnic culture or subculture; ethnic rights movements; as heritable birthright of American Jews; in Jewish studies; Cynthia Ozick’s rejection of; shifting vocabularies of. See also Panethnicities Ethnologic; in Jewish studies Exceptionalism; and American liberal Zionism; Americanist; of breakthrough narrative; and insiderism in Jewish studies; Jewish; as narcissism Faulkner, William Federman, Raymond Ferber, Edna Ferguson, Roderick Fiddler on the Roof. See Sholem Aleichem Fiedler, Leslie; central role of, in establishing breakthrough narrative; on defining the Jewish Novel; occasional pluralism of Field, Ben Foer, Jonathan Safran Foucault, Michel Frakes, Jerold Frankel, Zacharias Freedman, Jonathan Freud, Sigmund Fuchs, Daniel Furman, Andrew Galchinsky, Michael Garlic (on the breath; i.e., too Jewy!) Gatekeeping Gentiles9; in etymology of ethnic. See also WASPs Gertz, Nurith Glaser, Jennifer Glatshtein, Jacob Glazer, Nathan Gold, Mike Goldberg, Myla Gramsci, Antonio. See also Commonsense Grebstein, Sheldon Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, Eliezer; A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (co-editor with Irving Howe) Greenwich Village

Group survival, as intellectual virtue Guttmann, Allen; as sexist Hall, Stuart. See also Cultural studies Harap, Louis Harrison-Kahan, Lori Hart Schaffner Marx Hassan, Ihab Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hayot, Eric Hebrew University Hecht, Ben Hegemony; of ethnological historicism in Jewish literary studies; of multicultural pluralism; of U.S. Cold War culture. See also Counterhegemony Hellman, Lillian Heritability Heritage Herzl Press Heschel, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Susannah Himmelfarb, Milton Hollywood Holocaust; Americanization of; as signifier of Jewish difference Holocaust literature Horn, Dara Howe, Irving; as advocate for Yiddish; Jewish-American Stories; A Treasury of Yiddish Stories; World of Our Fathers Howells, William Dean Humanism Hutner, Gordon Identity: as concept; critique/theorization of; as disciplinary anchor; essentialist concept of; ethnic studies and; ethnological concept of; categorical, of Jewish literature; and Jewish studies; and nationalism; not as object or “stuff”; and rejection of ethnicity; scholarly desire for coherent; Yiddish literature anchoring Jewish ethnic Identity politics Idolatry Ignorance, privilege of Imagination, as “literary” faculty; sacral Immigration; literature of Insiderism; exceptionalism of; as political project; strategic Intellectuals; “breakthrough”; literary; Jewish; Jewish Studies. See also New York Intellectuals Interdisciplinarity; as legitimized within identitybased fields Israel; imaginary Jewish link with James, Henry Jameson, Frederic Jay, Gregory Jewish American literary criticism Jewish American literary studies; challenge in defining; consensus in; as constituted by breakthrough narrative; as ethnographic; exceptionalism in; pre–World War II history of; professionalization of; as representational history; and the separation of scholarship from politics; status within English departments and the humanities; subordination to history of Jewish American literature; as contemporary self-satirical ethnic genre; as cosmopolitan; in relation to ethnic literature; genre categorization within U.S. literary history; as parochial; postwar critical popularity of; predicted end of; as privileged record of Jewish life in America; Yiddish as usable past of Jewish American writers; as focus of literary critical arguments over multiculturalism; resistance to ethnic particularity of; second wave of; twenty-first century Jewish community (whatever that means)

The Jewish Encyclopedia Jewish legibility, categorical fact of “Jewish Literature,” category of Jewish peoplehood Jewish studies; ability of, to face itself in mirror; Americanization of; authority of; critical; as historiographic enterprise; magical thinking of; professionalization in academic institutions; Wissenschaft heritage of Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) “Jewish writer,” category of Jews, Americanization of; as object of disciplinary desire; as object of knowledge; as represented by Jewish American writers; representation(s) of Johnson-Reed Act Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka) Jospe, Rabbi Alfred Kafka, Franz Kant, Immanuel Kaplan, Johanna Kaplan, Mordecai M. Kazin, Alfred Kirsch, Adam Klein, Marcus Knowledge; institutional history of; practices; production; regime of Kosher (Kashrus) Kramer, Michael P. Krasny, Michael Krauss, Nicole Kronenberger, Louis Lamb, Charles Lambert, Joshua Lansky, Aaron. See also National Yiddish Book Center Laundering of thought Lauter, Paul Lazarus, Emma Levinson, Julian Levitt, Laura Levy, Lital Lewisohn, Ludwig Liberalism, American Liptzin, Sol Literary criticism. See also Criticism Literary history; American; Jewish; Jewish American; Yiddish Literary study Liu, Eric Lowell, Robert Luxemburg, Rosa Mailer, Norman Malamud, Bernard Malin, Irving Mandel, Robert Marginality; center-margin metaphors Marginalization: narrative of; Jewish American literary, narrative of, as symptomatic canard Marranos Marx, Karl McCarthy, Mary

McGurl, Mark MELUS (scholarly journal) Melville, Herman Mendele Mocher Sforim. See also Abramovich, Sholem Meyer, Michael A. Midrash Miller, Arthur Minoritarianism “Minority writers,” category of Mintz, Alan Miron, Dan Moby Dick “Model minority” (cliché) Modern Language Association (MLA) Modern literature Modernism Modernity Moloch Moore, Deborah Dash Moynihan, Daniel P. Multiculturalism; as a literary keyword Narcissism, critical; as exceptionalism. See also Insiderism; Kramer, Michael P. “Nation” as keyword National Yiddish Book Center. See also Lansky, Aaron Nationalized thinking; cultural nationalism; in Jewish literary studies Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei Native informant (intellectual function) Neoconservatism Neoliberalism New Criticism New Jewish Cultural Studies. See also Cultural Studies New York Intellectuals. See also Intellectuals New York magazine New York Times Newhouse, Alana, as apparatchik Nietzsche, Friedrich Norich, Anita Normalization, discursive processes of; denormalization; normality Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature Novershtern, Avraham Omi, Michael Ozick, Cynthia; Art and Ardor; “Bech, Passing”; “Envy, or Yiddish in America”; “Levitation”; “Making Our Way Back to the Mothership”; The Messiah of Stockholm; The Puttermesser Papers; “Toward a New Yiddish”; “What Literature Means” Palestine Paley, Grace Panethnicities. See also Ethnicity Parrish, Timothy Partisan Review Passing Peoplehood, Jewish. See Jewish peoplehood Peretz, Isaac Leib Pianko, Noam

Pinkser, Sanford Playboy magazine Pluralism Podhoretz, Norman Polemic; rhetorical usefulness of Polity, as ideological keyword. See also Nationalized thinking Popik, Barry Popular Front Population, logic of, as literary historical technology Porter, Katherine Anne Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization Postcolonial studies Postmodernism Poststructuralism Postvernacularity Pottage, mess of Power, as alternative to representation Prestige, professional Proletarian novel Prooftexts (scholarly journal) Publishers Weekly (magazine) Queer studies Rabinovich, Solomon. See Sholem Aleichem Readings, Bill Regionalism Representation Representativity; authorial representativity Resentment Responsibility: historical; intellectual Rhodes, Chip Rosen, Norma Rosenfeld, Isaac Rosenzweig, Franz Roskies, David Roth, Henry Roth, Philip; The Anatomy Lesson; The Counterlife; The Facts; The Ghost Writer; Goodbye, Columbus; Nathan Zuckerman (character); Operation Shylock; Philip Roth Society; Portnoy’s Complaint; Sabbath’s Theater; Writers from the Other Europe (book series) Rubinstein, Rachel Rukeyser, Muriel Sacral, the. See also Imagination: sacral; Ozick, Cynthia Sadan, Dov Said, Edward; as “last Jewish intellectual” Samuel, Maurice Sanders, Ronald Schachter, Alison Scholem, Gerhom Schulz, Bruno Schwartz, Delmore Schwartz, Leo Secular criticism. See Criticism; Said, Edward Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky Seltzer, Robert M.

Shakespeare, William Shandler, Jeffrey Shechner, Mark Shenker, Israel Shmeruk, Khone Sholem Aleichem, Fiddler on the Roof; Tevye (character) Shtetl Shteyngart, Gary Siegel, Ben Singer, Isaac Bashevis; “Gimpel the Fool” Sollors, Werner Sontag, Susan Soviet Union Spivak, Gayatri Stark, Irwin Steiner, George Stereotypes Studies in American Jewish Literature (SAJL) Subaltern studies Suchoff, David Symptomatic thinking Tablet magazine Talmud “Theory” Thoreau, Henry David Tikkun Olam Tolstoy, Lev Tradition Trauma Trilling, Lionel Trump, Donald Twain, Mark Unorthodox (podcast) Updike, John; Henry Bech (character) and Bech stories Urban fiction Vanilla Ice Vernacular (i.e, as nationally conceived language) Vernacularity Vidal, Gore Volksgeist Walden, Daniel Warren, Kenneth WASPs. See also Gentiles Weinreich, Max Weinreich, Uriel West, Nathanael Whiteness; Jews as “white”; white supremacy Whitman, Walt Williams, Raymond Winant, Howard Wirth-Nesher, Hana Wise, Stephen Samuel

Wisse, Ruth; Manicheanism of; perverse liberal scholarly love of Wissenschaft des Judentums; cultural nationalism of; heritage of Jewish studies Women’s studies World War II Wouk, Herman Wright, Richard Yezierska, Anzia Yiddish; as agency of transmission of Jewish identity and past; Americanization of; as anachronistic; as birthright of American Jews; as disciplinary object; as folk literature, ideology of; literary seriousness of; postvernacularity of; as proxy for Jewish people; as scholarly field; as a vernacular Yiddishkeit YIVO (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut) Young, James Zborowski, Marc Zierler, Wendy Zionism; as critical lever; probably more important to consider as a Christian than as a Jewish phenomenon Zunz, Leopold

Acknowledgments

This book germinated—though I didn’t know it at the time—when Hana Wirth-Nesher approached me some years ago to write a chapter for The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature. It was the first time I really thought about the central historical cliché presiding over the Jewish American literary field. I’d therefore first like to acknowledge Hana for providing me the initial opportunity to start thinking along lines that would eventually lead to this book. After finishing that piece I realized I wanted to know more about the history of the field—not the “Jewish studies”–coded history the field narrates in performing its own self-evidence, but the institutional history of the field’s own logic and account-making techniques. Though the essay I eventually wrote for that book does not appear in any real way in this book, my work there eventually led to “The History of Jewish American Literary History: A Critical Genealogy of Emergence,” American Literature 91.1 (2019): 121–150, an earlier and unexpanded version of what would become Chapter 1 here. So thanks also to Duke University Press for allowing me to reprint the parts of that article that reappear. While I’m on the topic, a few pages of my Introduction appear in an earlier form as part of “A Polemical Confession,” Shofar 37.2 (2019): 107–121, and I thank Purdue University Press for allowing me to reprint that here (and I also thank Mira Sucharov for editing the special unit on “Narrative Writing in Jewish Studies” in that issue). Before that American Literature article was completed, Dean Franco invited me to give a talk on my developing thinking about the history of the Jewish American literary field at Wake Forest University in March 2016. Dean has encouraged me and challenged me since I started working in the field; he was my semiofficial mentor at one of my first jobs, and he has remained my chief interlocutor, my best critic (always constructive!), and a great friend ever since. He’s my aspirational model for the “mentschlekh Jewish studies scholar.” For almost as long, Laurence Roth has been similarly pushing me toward better work and classier bars than I would otherwise tend toward. He’s my aspirational model for the “well-dressed Jewish studies scholar.” I find it difficult to express fully how much I appreciate their comradeship. Sunny Yudkoff and Tony Michels invited me to present at a symposium they organized at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in November 2017 titled “The Highs and Lows of Sholem Aleichem: Yiddish Literature and the Pursuit of Popular Writing”; though I continue to feel like I was the odd person out among all those Yiddishists, the paper I gave, “Yiddish and the Postwar Invention of Jewish American Literature,” became a piece of Chapter 2 here, and I am grateful to Sunny and Tony for their invitation, vision, and wonderful hospitality. That conference came during a sabbatical (my first) from Pennsylvania State University; a day doesn’t go by that I don’t inwardly thank Penn State and the College of Liberal Arts for providing the institutional support a humanist needs to get work done. Thank you to Jerry Singerman and the University of Pennsylvania Press for having confidence in this book. Thanks also to Zoe Kovacs, to Noreen O’Connor-Abel who so

smoothly conducted this book through the production process, and also to Robert Milks for careful and thoughtful copyediting. Once again, I find myself grateful to Ryan Marks for compiling the index. I have since learned that the two readers the press commissioned to review my manuscript were—alḥamdulillāh—Dean Franco and Hana Wirth-Nesher. In reinforcingly various, incisive (cuttingly so), and productive ways they were at once sympathetic to my argument and suspicious of my methods, and they forced me to face where I was phoning it in while making clear great ideas for revising what was, in hindsight, an underrealized draft. Also in hindsight, I’m hard pressed to imagine two better analysts of my work. I owe gratitude to Holli Levitski, Ezra Cappell, and Monica Osborne for organizing the annual Jewish American and Holocaust Literature Symposium; over the years I’ve given a number of papers there that have provided me an opportunity to think through various aspects of this book. It’s held in Miami Beach, so I’d go anyway, but I’m thankful for their hospitality and hard work in any case. Thanks to Mike Maguire and Jessica Klimoff for some excellent research and analysis. Among their many intellectual virtues, they have convinced me that spreadsheets can be an important part of humanistic thinking. A number of people have shown me the way, listened to me rant, answered my illeducated questions, or watched crappy movies (and/or Nicolas Cage’s Mandy) with me at various points while I worked on this project, and I’d like to thank them: Jonathan Abel, Jessamyn Abel, Sa’ed Adel Atshan, Joel Beinin, Lila Corwin-Berman, Jennifer Boittin, Robert Caserio, Christopher Castiglia, Kelso Cratsley, Muriam Haleh Davis, Nathanael Deutsch, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Matthew Ellis, Sam Frederick, Jonathan Freedman, Sarah Ghabrial, Jeff Gonzalez, David Gooblar, Karen Grumberg, Jens-Uwe Guettel, Aaron Hahn Tapper, Christian Haines, Anne Halsey, Eric Hayot, Jeff Helgeson, Susannah Heschel, Gordon Hutner, Sarah Imhoff, Daniel Itzkovitz, Brett Ashley Kaplan, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Ari Y. Kelman, Jacob Labendz, Jessica Lang, Neil Levy, Zachary Lockman, Shaul Magid, Jonathan Marks, Adam Zachary Newton, Daniel Purdy, Elliot Ratzman, Christopher Reed, Shira Robinson, Laura Robson, Michael Rothberg, Tracy Rutler, Emily Sharpe, Maeera Shreiber, Chloe Silverman, Scott Smith, Naghmeh Sohrabi, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Lior Sternfeld, Lisa Sternlieb, Robert Tally, Bob Vitalis, Anthony Wexler, and Saul Noam Zaritt (Saul very helpfully read an early draft of Chapter 2—as anyone reading the notes will fast be able to figure out). I’m sure I’m forgetting people and I’m sorry. David Greven and Alexander Beecroft are so dear to me that they get their own line! Josh Schreier, in addition to being my brother, is a perfect scholarly companion, and nothing I do professionally or unprofessionally would be possible without him. To my family more generally—Sarah, Ava, and Reuben, and also my parents, my sisterin-law and my niece and nephew, and my mother-inlaw: among their many gifts they show, in different ways, that the crucial thing isn’t whether one is a good or bad Jew, but how, via various arts of the self, one finds it either easier or more difficult to call oneself a Jew. And I

love them all. Finally: there are a number of intellectuals operating in and around the Jewish studies complex who provide eloquent embodiments of that species of thinking about Jews, Jewishness, identity, and history whose active contestation is the struggle of our age if humanistic inquiry has any hope of being something other than an instrument of nationalistic reaction. I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank them for the important part they have played in helping me form the specific critique of intellectuality I present in this book. Prudence suggests I thank these people with my inside-the-mind voice. But they probably already know who they are anyway, insofar as their professional profile inheres in proud proclamation of precisely the ideologically obfuscating dualities and platitudes in which reactionary privilege reproduces itself. In fact, a dazzling manifestation of this kind of unthinking presented itself as I was revising the book: the expression of professional concern about the use of terms like concentration camp to describe methods the U.S. government is deploying to manage nonwhite people attempting to enter the country. Such exceptionalist handwringing, coarticulated with a multilateral institutional effort to render visible and unimpeachable a presumed Jewish right of first refusal on response to certain technologies of ethnic cleansing and certain representational paradigms for signifying suffering and its attendant prerogatives, is inherently linked—in its discursive DNA, as it were—to a more fundamental program to protect the privilege of habits of thinking of Jewish coherence under an often implicit (though sometimes glaringly explicit) sign of nationalism, often including efforts to underwrite the self-evidence of Jewish affiliation with the Israeli state; both the handwringing and the institutionality are related manifestations of a more fundamental conceptual dispensation I have attempted—undoubtedly incautiously—to make conspicuous in this book as a generalized “Zionist” paradigm, a discursive project that takes form substantially in endeavors to suppress or delegitimize its alternatives, but which can therefore be critically repurposed to help retrieve those other narratives and possibilities from the silences of institutional interdiction. And double-plus finally: I dedicate this book to Michael P. Kramer. I don’t think any scholar has done more to make the field of Jewish American literary study an academically and critically serious endeavor than Michael. He and I don’t always agree—indeed, I wonder how much he will endorse in this book—but anyone thinking about working in the field has him and his extraordinary corpus of work to thank for what can be an intellectually challenging, which is to say hospitable, home.