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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature
  • Cited by 2
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
December 2015
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781107261341
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781107261341
Subjects:
Literature, Judaism, Area Studies, American Literature, American Studies, Religion
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Literature
Information

Book description

This History offers an unparalleled examination of all aspects of Jewish American literature. Jewish writing has played a central role in the formation of the national literature of the United States, from the Hebraic sources of the Puritan imagination to narratives of immigration and acculturation. This body of writing has also enriched global Jewish literature in its engagement with Jewish history and Jewish multilingual culture. Written by a host of leading scholars, The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature offers an array of approaches that contribute to current debates about ethnic writing, minority discourse, transnational literature, gender studies, and multilingualism. This History takes a fresh look at celebrated authors, introduces new voices, locates Jewish American literature on the map of American ethnicity as well as the spaces of exile and diaspora, and stretches the boundaries of American literature beyond the Americas and the West.

Reviews

'… a masterly work of synthesis … marks a milestone in [the] institutionalization [of] Jewish-American writing …'

Morris Dickstein Source: The Times Literary Supplement

'From a variety of perspectives, The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature provides an illuminating analysis of [the] points of intersection, a vibrant cultural landscape that has enriched America and invigorated Jewishness. This collection is a logical starting point for anyone interested in exploring this history.'

Jarrod Tanny Source: The Review of Rabbinic Judaism

'… an unexpectedly coherent mosaic that stands as close to a complete picture of the history of Jewish American literature as we can imagine at this point in the early twenty-first century.'

Joe Kraus Source: MELUS

'In the face of the multifarious creativity so richly documented in this expansive volume, no reasonable person could hold on to his or her skepticism. I use the term multifarious on purpose to underscore what I regard as one of the key choices in the conception of the volume: to go wide and eschew canonicity.'

Alan Mintz Source: Studies in American Jewish Literature

'… we have in hand a Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature that embraces, with exquisite critical attention and traditional scholarly values, such diverse phenomena as the graphic novel, stand-up comedy, film and video, gender-bending performance art, and popular music …'

Esther Schor Source: Studies in American Jewish Literature

'… this is a wonderful collection of essays, which extends our understanding of, and at times redefines, the field of Jewish American literature. The editor, Hana Wirth-Nesher, has done a fabulous job, assembling a stellar list of contributors and ensuring that … they engage afresh with their material, producing genuinely original work, rather than rehearsing previous research or living off former glories.'

David Brauner Source: Journal of Modern Jewish Studies

'The volume is certainly rich and varied and expansive. To be sure, its thirty-one chapters treat familiar subjects like immigrant writing, Jewish American fiction at mid-century, Yiddish literature, New York City as a site for creative expression, overviews of Jewish American poetry, drama, popular culture, and humor. But not only. There are also sections that invite re-thinking of the geographic and linguistic boundaries of the field, thus expanding our idea of what 'Jewish American literature' (each term also under interrogation these days) represents as a subject of academic inquiry. In this respect the Cambridge History begins an important remapping of the field.'

Donald Weber Source: Studies in American Jewish Literature

'… a study like The Cambridge History has the opportunity both to re-shape the canon of Jewish American literature and to offer readers new historiographical lenses through which to read familiar material.'

Heather S. Nathans Source: Studies in American Jewish Literature

'… scholars who … read America with an enthusiastic but skeptical eye for its occasional flashes of Jewish significance have achieved the exact sorts of edifying and lively results that fill the pages of the Cambridge History.'

Michael Hoberman Source: Studies in American Jewish Literature

“… captures both the vital and vitalizing multifariousness of the field and also the editor’s unique vision that gives that multifariousness a conceptual coherence …'

Michael Kramer Source: Studies in American Jewish Literature

'The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature is indeed a landmark, a superior assortment of field-defining essays, and a testimony to scholarly activity and achievements in the rich transnational, transcultural, polylingual field of Jewish American literature.'

Cheryl Lester Source: Philip Roth Studies

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 16 - The Ghost of the Holocaust in the Construction of Jewish American Literature
    pp 343-361
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Philip Roth was a notorious author of the extraordinary stories in Goodbye, Columbus, and novels Letting Go, When She Was Good, and Portnoy's Complaint. Jay Cantor wrote two remarkable novels in the period between 1970 and 2000: The Death of Che Guevara and Krazy Kat and a little later published Great Neck. This chapter groups together the writers: Sontag, Auster, Cantor, Price and Lethem because they are Jewish American writers who do not advertise their Jewishness in any particular way. In Chabon's novel it is something like a smothered dream and permitting oneself the fantasy of freedom is a route to whatever freedom is to be had. In this perspective, to live a Jewish life in the American language is to remember difference and loss with especial intensity and to be alert to the chances of slipping free from at least some of the restrictive chains of the New World.
  • 18 - Their New York: Possessing the “Capital of Words”
    pp 380-395
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Religious/civic activism among women marked direct entry into and participation in the public sphere. This chapter discusses religious activism with regard to the three nineteenth-century women poets: Penina Moise, Rebekah Hyneman, and Emma Lazarus. While some of Moise's poems reflect contemporary women's culture, her main body of writing is emphatically public. Most Moise hymns in any case address public rituals and are intended as common prayers. As with Moise, the few comments on Hyneman's work focus interpretation through the women's culture that Jewish women shared with other nineteenth-century women. Emma Lazarus is among the first writers self-consciously to regard America as fundamentally ethnic. For Lazarus, as for Moise and Hyneman, it is affiliations that launch and give force to poetic voice, voice that is addressed to others in a community in which religious selfhood becomes conjoined or redefined through further gendered, ethnic, and national identities.
  • 19 - Spaces ofYidishkayt: New York in American Yiddish Prose
    pp 396-412
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Secularism is part of a dynamic ontology that is generally important for making an account of Jewish identity, and specifically relevant to understanding the contemporary moment in Jewish American poetics. For all their collective ferocity in matters of divinity and transcendence, those who identify proudly as Jewish secular poets make special allowance for Kabbalah as a rich poetic resource. This chapter explores how the kaddish, the Jewish prayer linked to ritual mourning, becomes the target of radical secular poetics. Through the art of translation and of poesis, Peter Cole suggests an alternative to the usual ways of thinking about the relation between the sacred and the secular. He imagines a more harmonious model, whereby poetry serves an important function in allowing us to draw closer to the sacred. The poet Rachel Tzvia Back shows how poems can help us find our way to those sacred texts that may help us live.
  • 20 - Landscapes: America and the Americas
    pp 413-431
  • View abstract

    Summary

    When comparing prose with poetry, what is perhaps most striking is the secondary role played by prose in the development of American Yiddish literature. Di Yunge's meetings became the birthplace of several initiatives that from 1907 onward would yield the first American Yiddish publications exclusively devoted to literature. The many diverse arguments in the Inzikh manifesto all strove to promote one primary goal: to expand the scope of Yiddish poetry in all its aspects. The anthology Amerikaner yidishe poezye featured the works of more than thirty poets, as a collective, cultural biography. The majority of these writers shared several fundamental traits such as their Jewish East European birthplaces. The interim years between the two world wars ought to be considered the golden era of Yiddish poetry in the United States. The years 1918-1920 saw two major developments: Di yunge collected a selection of their poetry in several books and the inzikhists exploded onto the literary scene.
  • 22 - The Role of the Public Intellectual in American Culture
    pp 449-469
  • View abstract

    Summary

    By the end of the nineteenth century, Yiddish theater had been carried by immigrants to five continents. This chapter divides the history of professional secular Yiddish theater chronologically into four periods, 1882-1890, 1891-1909, 1909-1945, and 1946-Present, keeping in mind that in so short a span, the most creative years for individual playwrights and actors necessarily overlapped. American Yiddish theater was free of old country impediments: arbitrary censorship and shifting legal bans on Yiddish theater, local wars and mass dislocations, and periods of abject poverty. Avrom Goldfadn's Shulamis, Sholem Aleichem's The Jackpot, Jacob Gordin's Mirele Efros, and S. Ansky's Dybbuk were repertory perennials through the twentieth century and beyond. Till the end of the twentieth century, in memory and later in imagination, stars and theatergoing were emblematic of a rich Yiddish communal life. The theater serves as connection to Jewish cultural and religious roots and to America's past, and contributed to the American theater.
  • 23 - TheCaravan Returns
    pp 470-487
  • Jewish American Literary Anthologies 1935–2010
  • View abstract

    Summary

    One can hypothesize that the impressive volume of American Jewish plays created over the past half-century needs also to be seen as filling a vacuum created by the disappearance of the Yiddish theatrical scene. Israel Zangwill wrote two major Jewish plays, Children of the Ghetto and The Melting Pot, which were pioneering works in terms of Jewish drama. The theme of intermarriage introduced to the stage by Zangwill's The Melting Pot characterized numerous American plays. American anti-Semitism would emerge in the aftermath of World War II in Arthur Laurents's Home of the Brave, the first drama to explore the nexus of Jews, the military, and the psychologically debilitating effects of anti-Semitism. In the 1950s and the early 1960s the number of Jewish themed dramas declined. Some of the dramatists of the 1930s had migrated to Hollywood, while others were discouraged by the unwelcoming ambience of the Cold War and McCarthyism.
  • 24 - Poetics and Politics of Translation
    pp 488-502
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Hollywood, as F. Scott Fitzgerald's self-pitying comment unwittingly suggests, was a place where Jewish and gentile fantasies mixed, met, and collaborated - in part because the former had to attract and the latter as part of their business. This chapter discusses four moments in the history of Jews and Hollywood: D. W Griffith's Musketeers of Pig Alley; Warner Brothers' Jazz Singer; Barbra Streisand's Yentl; Coen Brothers' A Serious Man. These films show the kinds of contortions and compromises by which Jews entered film first as objects then as (ambivalent) subjects; they demonstrate as well how Jews use the film industries to carve out new (and not unproblematic) itineraries for themselves in eras of ethnic revival, gender revolution, and postmodern hybrid identity formations challenging the very category Jew itself. A Serious Man tells us about Jews in the unfolding narrative of post-Hollywood film, and tells us about the concerns of baby-boomer generation Jews like the Coens.
  • 27 - Performance: Queerly Jewish/Jewishly Queer in the American Theater
    pp 547-565
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe carried some Hebraists to the United States, adding New York City to the major centers of Hebrew literary production. By the end of the nineteenth century, Hebrew writers in America included Naphtali Hertz Imber, whose poem Hatikvah later became the Israeli national anthem. In the introduction to his 1938 anthology of Hebrew poetry in America, Menachem Ribalow described the rise of modernism as a storm swept through all literatures and rocked the foundations of poetry. In the early 1920s, Hillel Bavli published a series of five articles on contemporary American poetry that shows how difficult it was for the Hebrew poet in America to see Anglo-American modernism as a resource and a model. To the extent that a new flowering of Hebrew culture in America such as the Hebraists accomplished is at all conceivable, it would be an extension of Israeli literature and not a center in its own right.
  • 28 - Jewish American Comic Books and Graphic Novels
    pp 566-583
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses the beginnings of Ladino usage in the United States, introducing the Ladino press and then offering a comprehensive picture of poets and writers who wrote in and about Ladino. It introduces a few contemporary artists who have created and performed in Ladino, and observes their stance toward language preservation, while interrogating their place in both the Jewish and the broader community. Indeed, non-Jewish Latinos have expressed interest in Ladino and in Sephardic genres, and nowhere is this interest more explicit than in music. The chapter focuses on music, a fluid commodity that travels across nation-states and acquires new meanings, as it encounters conditions unlike those in which it was created and is transformed by them. Ladino theater performers as well as Ladino singers and composers have made repeated attempts to reach out to an audience that extends beyond the Jewish community.
  • 29 - Jewish American Popular Culture
    pp 584-600
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter addresses a part of rich cultural production by analyzing recent prose narratives of Jewish Egyptian and Iranian worlds published in the United States. The stories of Middle Eastern Jews present a way of rethinking perceptions of intractable historical conflict and irremediable difference that help perpetuate conflict. Lucette Lagnado exposes the complexity of affiliations and politics in telling vignettes throughout her two books but withdraws it in such observations that reduce global and national politics to colonial differences and clashes of civilizations. The Jewish narratives need to be viewed in the context of the cultural production, from poetry to television, cinema, and digital storytelling by other Iranian Americans of the past decade. Jewish Middle Eastern writing enriches the U.S. literary canon with the relatively rare and skillful portrayal of Jewish-Muslim confluences, a topic on which there is very little research and that merits a lot more attention.
  • 30 - Jewish Humor in America
    pp 601-621
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses Holocaust in American Jewish fiction by analyzing the book, The Ghost Writer for two reasons. First, it is the American text that first establishes the Holocaust as a topic of serious philosophical and cultural discussion. Second, it creates one of the dominant tropes that will accompany the Holocaust subject through its transmigrations and transformations in American writing: the idea of the Holocaust as a ghost. The chapter shows how the American authors' texts move from a position of melancholic obsession with the Holocaust to a place of mourning its victims. Among the Holocaust texts considered, Ozick's The Shawl is the best representation of the phenomenon of blocked mourning. The United States of America provides a creative future for American Jews, even if the ghosts of the Holocaust may still continue to haunt the Jewish imagination and, perhaps create post-Holocaust aesthetic that is specifically Jewish American.
  • 31 - Since 2000
    pp 622-642
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores what do the general trends and major works reveal about specifically Jewish American cultural attitudes and self-conception, as American texts construct perceptions of Israel, Zionism, and Jewish national identity. It focuses on prose fiction, autobiography, and poetry written and published in English. Until the watershed era of the Holocaust and the establishment of statehood in 1948, many Jewish authors in the United States opposed Zionism, remained indifferent toward it, and/or were committed to other causes. In the second half of the twentieth century, when Israel's popularity rose among American Jews and when the righteousness of Zionism served as a central tenet of Jewish communal thinking, imaginative writers still devoted so little energy to the subject of the Jewish state. The late 1980s ushered in a new era in the literary treatment of Israel. Changing historical circumstances triggered a new set of responses and variable attitudes in relation to homeland and diaspora.

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