Editor's Introduction

(A version of this piece—well, a version of the first part of it—appears in the Spring 2012 issue of AJS Perspectives)

More than thirty-six years ago, in the editorial note that opened the inaugural issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature, Dan Walden described the problem the journal was founded to address. Speaking for the editorial board—which in those early years included scholars like Sarah Blacher Cohen, Leslie Fiedler, Allen Guttmann, Irving Howe, Sanford Pinsker, and Moses Rischin—Walden wrote, "This is the first issue of a new journal devoted to the American Jewish writer and the American Jewish experience. In view of the way that some sectors of academia have ignored American Jewish materials . . . it seemed necessary to a number of people in the field to provide a medium of communication." Responding to this historiographic lapse, the journal would aim to publish "the best available" work "bearing on the American Jewish experience, particularly in literature and related areas." It was quite a responsibility, and an ethics of representation, that this word bearing bore.

In 1974, one year earlier, Walden had edited On Being Jewish, an important, field-defining anthology of Jewish American literature, and in it he previewed this argument for the historiographic significance of Jewish American literary study. Walden highlighted the immense cultural work performed by Jewish America—he sketched a historical typology from the Jews who immigrated to America, to the American Jews of their children's generation, to the Americans who were Jews of their grandchildren's generation—as it struggled at once to define and to hold on to an identity that was always in flux and never self-evident. As he laid it out in the anthology's introduction, the literature written by these Jews is so important because it constitutes the record of this cultural work: "That set of experiences, these problems, this people, are the source and reason for the American Jewish writers included here." More specifically, and more significantly, if Jews in America were and remain "uncertain . . . of their precise Jewish identity," Walden insisted on focusing on those "writers who have asked the questions about other Jews, because that is whom they know, and love, and hate, and because they care deeply and want to find out what it means to be a Jew or an American Jew or an American who is a Jew." Thus as Walden defined the field, Jewish American literary study is important in the first instance because of the literature's sociological-historical reference, because it attests to a Jewish American experience that has rarely been made the focus of academic study, and in the second instance because it asks important questions about Jewish identity and identification.

As a professor at Penn State University Walden was instrumental in the late-sixties movement to introduce the study of minority and ethnic literature into the American academy as a way of addressing, and administering, the institutional crisis wracking universities across the country; Dan taught some of the first courses in ethnic and urban literature offered on U.S. campuses. The logic that energized this movement, that political representation and artistic representation are bound up with each other and mutually reinforce each other, and that literary analysis should be understood as a species of historiography, has become so normalized, is so pervasive now, so much a part of our academic and cultural commonsense, that it can sometimes be hard to notice, or hard to envision alternative approaches.

The key to Walden's Jewish American literary criticism, as to his institutional advocacy, is simple and elegant: as he wrote in the anthology, "The American Jewish writers wrote of what they knew. American Jewish literature was invented by them." What's changed since the late sixties and early seventies, and since the founding of SAJL, of course, is that we no longer have to make the case for specifically American Jewish literary study; thanks in large part to Walden, we can now point to a legitimated and growing canon of Jewish American literature and a vibrant field of literary critical and historical scholarship. But at the same time, this...