In The Anatomy Lesson (1983), Roth has his authorial alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, explicitly blame the loss of his writerly subject on the creation of the Jewish state. In the wake of Israel, Zuckerman has exhausted the subject of being an American Jew. While “the great Jewish struggle was with the Arab states,” Zuckerman's own great struggle was with “the Jersey side of the Hudson, his West Bank.” His difficulty was to portray how this conflict had ended with his territory “occupied now by an alien tribe.” Zuckerman's despair is that with his parents dead and his neighborhood lost, he must confront the recognition that “no new Newark was going to spring up again for” him (Zuckerman Bound, 445).

One might well imagine that when Zuckerman does, in The Counterlife, recover his “posture for writing” -or perhaps his imposture for writing - it is because Israel has finally been launched into the position of “homeland” and, thereby, Oedipal father. “There's a world outside the Oedipal swamp,” Nathan's brother Henry angrily responds in The Counterlife, when Nathan questions Henry's new-found home in a right-wing Israeli settlement. “Tell me something, is it at all possible, at least outside of those books, for you to have a frame of reference slightly larger than the kitchen table in Newark?” (Counterlife, 138). Nathan's response amounts to an honest and resounding no.

By almost all accounts, The Marble Faun is the most obscure of Hawthorne's four full-length romances. Not only does it break stride with the other long romances and most of the short fiction by being set outside the United States ( “Rappaccini's Daughter,” the notable exception, is also set in Italy), but it seems even to violate Hawthorne's own carefully specified definition of romance fiction. This is the definition put forth in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, in which Hawthorne establishes the basic features of what becomes an influential, perhaps definitive American genre:

In the third of the Zuckerman novels, Philip Roth includes the following poignant detail concerning the protagonist's dying mother:

Roth's figure of the Holocaust lodged in the brain of the American-born Jewish mother in a 1985 Jewish American novel that seems in no way a work of Holocaust fiction can be taken as a measure of the place of the Holocaust in the Jewish American imagination. As Norma Rosen puts it in the foreword to the recent republication of her 1969 novel Touching Evil: “As safe Americans we were not there. Since then, in imagination, we are seldom anywhere else” (Preface, 3). For most Jewish Americans (and many non-Jewish Americans as well: Rosen's own novel deals with non-Jews as does Emily Praeger's even more recent Eve's Tattoo [1998]), this Holocaust consciousness is largely unspoken and, as compared with the daily concerns of ordinary life, it is almost of radical disconcern.

When working-class Newarkian Neil Klugman in Goodbye, Columbus phones affluent Jewish American princess Brenda Patimkin and launches into his “you-don't-know-my-name-but-I-held-your-glasses-for-you-at-the-club” “speech,” she answers him, quite naturally enough, by asking him what he looks like. “I'm … dark,” he answers; “Are you a Negro?” she responds. “No,” he replies. Pages later the conversation repeats, in painfully truncated form. Asked what his cousin looks like, he responds: “She's dark-” “Is she-” “No.”

How are we to understand the placement of this conversation in a novel essentially concerned not with blacks but with Jewish Americans? And what, further, are we to do with that “no,” Neil's refusal of likeness between himself and the “Negro”? The answers to both questions might seem obvious enough, and wholly objectionable, on both Neil's part and on Roth's as well, were it not for an even more dominant and pervasive pattern through the novel. This is the book's affirmation of a genuine similarity, verging on consanguinity, between blacks and Jews, as much on Neil's part as on Roth's.

In 1987, Toni Morrison published a book that quickly became a classic of contemporary American literature. Like much African American literature, especially by women, Beloved focuses on the African American experience independent and autonomous of the white world. White society does not by any means disappear from the text. It is not, however, a subject in its own right. Instead, as if reversing the dominant assumptions of much fiction written by whites, it hovers over the story as both context and pressure, an informing principle to be understood only through reference to black life itself.

Beloved, in other words, deals only obliquely with white people. It deals not at all with Jews or Jewish history. Yet Morrison prefaces her text with two statements that might seem to turn the book toward just this subject of the Jews. One such piece of text is her dedication to “Sixty million and more.” In the American context, this dedication cannot, especially to a Jewish readership, but recall the “six million” of the Holocaust.

Even though it is a black critic who first cites the problem of Beloved's relationship to Jewish history, nonetheless my reading of Morrison's novel, through the very slender, perhaps insignificant, opening offered by the dedication and the epigraph, has fundamentally to do with my being a Jewish reader of this text. In a similar way, my uneasiness, in Chapter Three, in relation to the depiction of the Israeli in Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, cannot be separated from my being an Israeli, an identity further complicated by the fact that I consider myself an American as well.

According to an extraordinarily lengthy series of books, collections, articles, and symposia published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the 1960s witnessed a baffling and painful demise of what many intellectuals of the period referred to as the “Negro–Jewish alliance.” This lament for the end of the black–Jewish alliance is odd, for at least two reasons. First of all, by most responsible accounts, the alliance hardly existed before the Civil Rights activism of the 1950s. This is not in any way to deny the significant intervention of certain prominent Jews in the NAACP and other black organizations. Nor is it to erase black–Jewish involvement in the Communist Party or the labor unions. It is, however, to suggest that the term “alliance” misstates or overstates the nature of the exchange.

In Chapters Three, Four, and Five I discuss a series of mutually constructing African and Jewish American fictions. Like Malamud's Tenants, these short stories and novels produce portraits of ethnic identity by utilizing materials of the other ethnic group. Now, however, I want to pursue a few more nonfictional conversations in the mutual construction of African and Jewish American identity. These conversations appear in a series of journal articles and books, most of them from the 1950s through the early 1970s. My focus is on the post-Second World War period, for several reasons. First of all, this is the period when Jews started to move into positions of power within American society. It is also the period when, possibly because of their newly gained strength but very likely also because of the questions of Jewish survival raised both by the Holocaust and the precarious existence of the State of Israel, they participated in large numbers in black movements.

The war was equally decisive for blacks. As the pages of The Crisis make exceedingly, bitterly, clear, American blacks had pinned their hopes for integration and social justice on their record in the war. The painfully disappointing experiences of demobilized black soldiers and their families directly fed the passions of Civil Rights activism in the postwar decades.

Even though both blacks and Jews have been strangers of sorts in the land of America and have cast themselves and each other as such in their writings, for the most part their histories have had very little in common. Such interaction as did exist occurred only among slender elements of both populations, and, even then, only at very specific moments and under highly particular circumstances. Notable among these is 1930s and 1940s activism in the Communist Party or labor unions and in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. Still, black and Jewish writers, intellectuals, and academics have tended to keep each other in mind, as if, indeed, there were a revelation for each of them in the existence of the other. For a significant number of African and Jewish American writers, the other group becomes a vehicle by which to think through their own ethnic identities. What is not obvious is how blacks and Jews function in each other's thinking and writing. More importantly, perhaps, it is not clear what this relationship means for interethnic dialogue and for the construction of American culture.

This study attempts to record several conversations among prominent African and Jewish Americans. Sometimes the dialogue is explicit, proceeding through essays, letters, and symposia. Sometimes, especially as manifested in fictional writings, it is more indirect. I am not concerned with all black and Jewish writers, or even with all those writers who engage the other ethnic community.