JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT feels that she is on to something, but she is not quite sure what to make of it. Contemporary Jewish American culture is just too variegated, too promiscuous, too contradictory to explain away with easy generalizations. What can you say about a culture in which ‘indices of dissolution are equally matched by indices of vitality’? In which intermarriage thrives and, at the same time, ultra-Orthodox institutions flourish? In which ‘female sexual shlemiels’ share the cultural stage with (say) Holocaust museums? In which primers for inventing Jewish ritual share shelf space with the Artscroll siddur? In which one Jew serves a life sentence for spying for Israel while a professedly observant Jew runs for vice-president? In which Bob Dylan converts to Christianity and then shows up on a Chabad telethon? Come to think of it, the National Museum of American Jewish History—the ‘Museum of You’ with whose disorderly catalogue Joselit begins—is housed in the same building as Philadelphia's Congregation Mikveh Israel, which boasts on its website (<www.mikvehisrael.org>) that its decorous Orthodox prayer services ‘are virtually the same as during the eighteenth century’. How can you react to the baffling mess of Jewish American culture, asks Joselit, but to lift up your hands and say, ‘Go figure!’?

Frankly, it is hard to disagree. Jewish American culture has indeed developed in multifarious, even paradoxical, ways that have gladdened some, saddened others, and surprised many—and the panorama can be dizzying. It is easy enough to nod along with Joselit and, as above, to multiply ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ examples. Even in my business (I teach literature) where we snicker self-righteously at Irving Howe's prediction in 1977 of the impending demise of Jewish American fiction (Howe 1977: 16–17), and smugly shep naches from the extraordinary proliferation of young, unembarrassed Jewish writers on the scene in America today—even here it is hard not to agree that the range of these writers, from those who lovingly reclaim Jewish tradition to those who emphatically reject it, neatly confirms Joselit's initial observation. Think, on the one hand, of Dara Horn's recuperative In the Image (2003) and The World to Come (2006) and, on the other hand, of Shalom Auslander's rebellious Beware of God (2005) and Fore skin's Lament (2007).