Editor’s Introduction

With this issue, I’m happy to present our first more or less normal-looking issue. Fourth time’s the charm. Here we have three articles addressing vastly divergent subjects—the first on Ariel Dorfman, Southern Cone post-dictatorial traumatic expression, and Latin American Jewish literature; the second on Vanessa Davis’s graphic memoir Make Me a Woman; and the third on Larry David and the Jewish humor tradition. To be perfectly honest, these articles are appearing now together for largely chronological reasons: they’ve been waiting for publication the longest. But it’s hard to imagine another group of three papers that would better signal the breadth of the field of Jewish American literature as Studies in American Jewish Literature wants to pursue and analyze it.

For those of you out there who might be worrying that such a claim suggests that SAJL will therefore be proportionally inattentive to Old School Jewish American Literature—whether as manifested in the post-war “Big Three” of Malamud, Bellow, and Roth, or in our earlier honorable literary mothers and fathers, or in any of the other established literary historical formations in which scholarship has heretofore taken shape—have no fear. In this issue we’ll also be inaugurating an occasional feature of the journal, which we’re calling the SAJL “Forum,” for lack of a better title;¹ in this case, a few of us on the editorial board, who participated in the Roth@80 conference celebrating Philip Roth’s eightieth birthday in Newark in March 2013, thought we’d try to reproduce a taste of the proceedings there. In the introduction to our first issue (31.1), I explained what we had in mind for this “Forum” section: “We look forward to including in future issues of SAJL, as frequently as possible, a forum for opinion pieces that don’t necessarily resemble proper articles, and that shouldn’t necessarily be peer reviewed in the same way a proper article should be; we envision this as a framework or apparatus for comment, on conversations and problems pressingly relevant to the field and intersecting fields, but not necessarily exclusive to or contained by the field—responses to new publications, or to conference panels, or to other significant events.” So, in that spirit, we’re offering this issue’s “Forum” in two parts: the first part includes two essays on the academic conference and festivities that followed, and the second part includes papers by the four participants of a round-table panel held at the conference called “Teaching Roth: How, Now?”

Perhaps we’re still a work in progress, but if so it’s only because the field right now is such a moving target, with so many pieces, and we’re trying to do right by it.