Chapter 4 takes a new perspective, relating the representation of masculinity to issues of race and identity in novels written from Jewish American perspectives. Considering masculinity from this perspective, and then from the point of view of African American writers in the following chapter, emphasises the point that male identity takes multiple forms and that hegemonic masculinity may be open to contestation from different cultural traditions. Jewish American fiction of this period is of intrinsic significance because it gave voice to second-generation East European immigrants whose work became central to American literature. For example, the critic Ruth R. Wisse argues that Saul Bellow demonstrated ‘how a Jewish voice could speak for an integrated America’ (Wisse 205). The four novels considered in this chapter all articulate issues around Jewish American identity in ways that also involve gender. Saul Bellow's third novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), opens with the straightforward claim of Augie March: ‘I am an American, Chicago born’. Augie March's maleness is an essential element of his claim to an American identity, but Bellow's novel continues an interrogation of the expectations of men in American society. The other novels, all published earlier, in the 1940s, explore issues of anti-Semitism and assimilation in relation to American culture. Arthur Miller's Focus (1945) deconstructs the logic of anti-Semitic racism and explores how it recruits individuals, but shows that it can be defeated through masculine resistance. Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions (1948) articulates an idealised Jewish American masculinity within the context of American anti-Semitism, Nazism and the Second World War. Jo Sinclair's Wasteland (1946) focuses on close relationships within a Jewish family and the problems of assimilation, while radically challenging gender roles through the presence of a lesbian character.

The context for the emergence of a Jewish American literary voice was a change in legal and cultural circumstances. This change can be explored through the notion of ‘whiteness’, which has been developed as a critical concept through which the ideologies of ‘white’ identity can be interrogated. Like masculinity, whiteness has protean characteristics, constantly being adapted to changing cultural circumstances. As Valerie Babb argues in Whiteness Visible: ‘[W]hiteness is not a term describing an immutable biological content, but rather a term reflecting mutable relationships of social power’ (1998: 13).