A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the Jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry, and: Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity, and: Translating Israel: Contemporary Hebrew Literature and Its Reception in America (review)

In the last decade there has been a salutory and exciting, but also dubious, renaissance (or just plain naissance?) of interest in Jewish matters in the academic literary humanities: salutory and exciting because "the new Jewish cultural studies," which is partly responsible for this phenomenon, brings so much beyond religion, nostalgia for tradition, and unnuanced assumptions about identity and identification into its dynamic purview; dubious because some of this work runs the risk of partaking of a kind of me-tooism in the general embrace of multiculturalism sans politics that is the watered-down version of critical literary historiography. While the three books under review participate in this revival, they do not, for the most part, fully embody either the edgy interdisciplinarity of the new Jewish cultural studies (epitomized, I would say, by the work of Jonathan Boyarin and Walter Benjamin, whom two of the three cite) or multiculturalism sans politics (epitomized, I would say, by the rantings of Michael Lerner, who mercifully goes uncited by all) that I've identified so sketchily above. To qualify still further, they lean toward the former pole from a point slightly left of center. As one might expect, three literary books with little or no interdisciplinary content do not begin to exhaust the possibilities of exploring contemporary Jewish literary culture (nor do they claim to do so). In fact, their differences from and similarities to each other only begin to suggest the vastness of such a topic.

Fredman's study of Charles Reznikoff and Finkelstein's investigation into "Jewish" issues in contemporary Jewish American poetry overlap considerably, but the two books nonetheless demonstrate a range of approaches to their subjects, which makes for substantially different reading experiences. Both A Menorah for Athena and Not One of Them in Place begin with a binarism and organize their arguments around it. Fredman revisits Matthew Arnold's famous Hellenism-Hebraism binary, which held that Jewish (didactic, prophetic, monotheistic) and Greek (aesthetic, rational, polytheistic) influences on Western culture were fundamentally incompatible, in order to investigate how members of the (modern, U.S.) secular Jewish intelligentsia had to negotiate their relationship to the mainstream (white, gentile) intellectual currents of their time. However artificial Matthew Arnold's neat dualism may have been (and it pains me to see him given so much consideration in such a volume), real-life Jews experienced exclusion from the intellectual mainstream and faced charges of backwardness and "narrowness" when they tried to make their experience as Jews relevant to public American discourse. The founding of Menorah Journal at Harvard, which became the primary publication venue for Reznikoff's poetry and prose, was an attempt to address this experience. Fredman depicts elegantly and sympathetically Reznikoff's stoic, pioneering, and persistent working out of a new aesthetic (which has come to be termed objectivist) that encompassed "Jewish" sensibility and thematic materials within a resolutely modernist commitment to the everyday and the contemporary. Foregrounding Reznikoff's achievement in forging a "poetry of ethical interaction, based upon a new relationship of equality among poet, language, and society" (3), Fredman weaves biographical, literary, and sociohistorical material together into a densely textured, analytic narrative that shows how Reznikoff's "Jewish dilemmas" mirrored both those of his contemporary and secular Jewish poets and intellectuals (Joel Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, Horace Kallen) and those of...