What Is the "Jewish" in "Jewish American Literature"?

As I sifted through my in-box quickly one morning last spring, triaging as usual, I chose a Zeek magazine piece entitled "The New Jewish Literature" as the only non-essential reading I could afford to do that day. I was curious—how did they define "new"? The authors were reporting on the state of Jewish literature in the United States, having read and judged over fifty books by Jewish authors and acquainted themselves with many others. They acknowledged that many of the writers, such as David Bezmozgis, André Aciman, Lara Vapnyar, Dahlia Sofer and others, were of immigrant background, with roots recently left behind in Latvia, Iran, Egypt, Russia, and beyond. They also found that Jewish literature was parallel to contemporary U.S. writing as a whole, some of whose best representatives, from Jhumpa Lahiri and Edwidge Danticat to Chris Abani and Peter Carey, are of the most recent migration waves. Moreover, "It's not just that some of the new Jewish writers are themselves from elsewhere," observe the authors, "but that the American born writers are now better traveled. This is the very opposite of shtetl writing; no longer insulated and suffocating, gone are the tenements and even the suburban ambitions. The voice and the world-view have been stretched, the conceits focused not just on history, but also on a Jew's connection to a broader history." Given this introduction, I expected to find examples and a reconceptualized "broader history" of Jewish people and literature. Instead, however, what one gathers by the end of this article is that the history of U.S. Jewish writing begins with the shtetl, the tenements, and the suburbs and ends with the Shoah (since the majority of the works that received special mention were about the Holocaust), whatever the variations within this trajectory. The said need to "rethink" the label "Jewish American" at the outset of the article in fact goes nowhere; Jewish writers may be "well-traveled" today, but the cultural and geographic reach of literary history and criticism are limited as ever. ¹

I really should not have been surprised. Zeek merely echoes the majoritarianism of most Jewish American popular discourses as well as of literary scholarship. Most U.S. Jews are of white Eastern European-immigrant descent as is most Jewish American writing, so why bother? Contemporary "Jewish American Studies," is, overwhelmingly, East European/Ashkenazi Studies—all other histories, experiences, identifications, and narratives are minoritized. Operating like whiteness in the United States, Ashkenazi studies does not name itself but names its others (with Sephardim as a "subgroup" with a designated small place in "Jewish" institutional contexts). This is one but not the only or most important reason Jewish American literary studies needs to be decolonized.

At the core of the Jewish American literary canon is Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot, a work so influential that it often serves to justify claims about Jewish authors' central role in defining "American" literature itself. What frequently escapes notice is that David Quixano, as his name indicates, is a descendant of Sephardic Jews who went to Poland, a "historically possible, if improbable" trajectory as David Biale puts it. Werner Sollors and Biale point to particular reasons for this choice, including the distancing of Russian Jewishness, stereotyped at that time in the image of an uncouth immigrant in tatters, and the valorization instead of the "aristocratic" Portuguese Jewish provenance the name implies. In addition to noting these motivations for Zangwill's choice, it is also important to acknowledge that the play seals the fate of Sephardic visibility in "Jewish American" letters by rendering it only as an extinct history morphed into a mask of Europeanness that civilizes the image of "the Jew." The "Sephardism" of the play is therefore but a conduit for Americanization. The play is about the assimilation of the Sephardic into the Ashkenazi as much as it is about Ashkenazi assimilation into "the crucible of America." In modern "Jewish American" letters since then, Sephardic people have been a "lost tribe," archaized and covered over by Eastern and Western European origin stories. ²

What Zangwill did in...