American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States, and: Red, Black, and Jew: New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature, and: Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry (review)

The fact that three books on American Hebrew literature have appeared simultaneously tells us something significant about a transformation in the American literary conversation, even though each one of these books belongs at least as much to the story of Hebrew literature. As their subtitles suggest, these books deal primarily with the internal development of Hebrew literature as a transnational phenomenon, originating in Europe in the late nineteenth century and winding up, for the most part, in Israel—with a temporary but extremely important stopover in the United States. The readings in these three studies therefore appropriately take into account the American scene that witnesses and influences the cultivation of this community of writers, and they consider the implications of the existence of this foreign-language group in the US for an understanding of American and American Jewish literature in English.

To understand how these books written by American academics about a branch of Hebrew literature came to be published at this particular moment, one needs to say a few words about the contemporary American literary conversation vis-à-vis ethnic literature generally; I use the term ethnic broadly, referring to literary texts written by minority groups, whether their minority status is defined by race, religion, or national origin. Even if the story of Hebrew literature in America is not primarily a reflection of American culture, the publication of these books at the beginning of the twenty-first century is. As Alan Mintz notes in his preface to Michael Weingrad's American Hebrew Literature (2010):

The astonishing power of the English language to absorb successive waves of immigrants from vastly disparate lands is one of the great sources of America's coherence as a society. Precisely because of that power, equally astonishing are the pockets of foreign-language culture that resisted linguistic integration and remained apart from or parallel to the rule of English.

(xi)

Mintz cites The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (2000), edited by Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, as "a good place to appreciate [American literature's linguistic] diversity" (xi), and one might add the 2001 Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, which includes heretofore untranslated and uncanonized texts originally written in Yiddish and Hebrew, as another good source.

These anthologies are the consequence and culmination of transformative cultural forces in the final decades of the twentieth century. Dominating the scene of Americanist literary criticism in the US from the 1970s on has been the African American studies movement, trailed only slightly by feminism—both of them renewing interest in texts by and about Native Americans, Latino/a Americans, Asian Americans, and other marginalized groups. By the time of this revolution in the study of ethnic literature in the US, a significant number of major American Jewish texts were already deeply entrenched in the American canon; American Jewish writing was therefore felt to be indistinguishable from mainstream American literature. To stay relevant in the changing literary academy, Jewish critics needed to find a way to re-ethnicize and re-hyphenate American Jewish culture. Such avenues of re-linkage were discovered through subjects such as the Holocaust and the history of Jewish oppression abroad; Jewish women's experiences at the beginning of the twentieth century; and the recovery of religious, cultural, and literary tropes and themes from the liturgical tradition, Yiddish folktales and mysticism, and the Hebrew language. Jewish American literature, it emerged, was as ethnic as any of the newer entries to this important tradition of US fiction, poetry, and prose.

Despite their similar...