American Jewish Identity Politics

The Paradoxes of American Jewish Culture

The Paradoxes of American Jewish Culture Stephen J. Whit‹eld A Culture of Recoil Perhaps no ‹n de siècle intellectual was more rancid in his estrangement from his own country than Henry Adams, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, whose autobiography begins with a sneer. Had his surname been Cohen, “born in Jerusalem . . . and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest . . . , he would scarcely have been more distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the coming century, in running for such stakes as the century was to offer.” Adams contrasted himself with Jews recently arrived from Warsaw or Krácow, “still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the of‹cers of the customs —but [who] had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he—American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him.”1 How curious that the grandson of an actual immigrant named Cohen, born on the Fourth of July two years before these ruminations, would personify that facility of adaptation to modernity that the bitterly anti-Semitic Adams could not accomplish. Cohen’s grandson, Lionel Trilling, would become the ‹rst tenured Jewish professor in the Department of English at Columbia University. While teaching the AngloAmerican literary canon, he would also doubt the viability of a JewishAmerican culture and make its very possibility problematic. “My existence as a Jew is one of the shaping conditions of my temperament ,” Lionel Trilling conceded, “and therefore I suppose it must have its effect on my intellect. Yet I cannot discover anything in my professional in243 This essay was originally presented on April 6, 1992, at the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. tellectual life which I can speci‹cally trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing. I do not think of myself as a Jewish writer. I do not have it in mind to serve by my writing any Jewish purpose. I should resent it if a critic of my work were to discover in it either faults or virtues which he called Jewish .” In 1944, Trilling accepted that designation primarily “as a point of honor,” and admitted ‹nding “no pride in seeing a long tradition, often great and heroic, reduced to this small status in me,” especially when so many Jews were suffering so greatly for sharing that condition of ancestry. Otherwise the assistant professor of English could see only sterility and complacency, complaining that modern Judaism had not produced “a single voice with the note of authority—of philosophical, or poetic, or even of rhetorical, let alone of religious, authority.” Having helped edit the Menorah Journal, he knew something of Jewish cultural movements ‹rsthand and concluded that neither then nor earlier had “the Jewish community . . . give[n] sustenance to the American artist or intellectual who is born a Jew. . . . Writers . . . have used their Jewish experience as the subject of excellent work; [but] . . . no writer in English . . . has added a micromillimetre to his stature by ‘realizing his Jewishness,’ although . . . some . . . have curtailed their promise by trying to heighten their Jewish consciousness.”2 Such recoil was not quite typical even of the prominent critics of Trilling’s own generation. Far more af‹rmative, indulgent, and even sentimental responses were to arrive in succeeding decades—from Alfred Kazin, the Walker in the City (1951) who de‹antly labeled himself a New York Jew (1978); from Irving Howe, the cicerone of Yiddish literature as well as the elegist of the World of Our Fathers (1976); from Leslie Fiedler, the explainer To the Gentiles (1972) and the entertaining Fiedler on the Roof (1991); and even from the managing editor of that issue of the Contemporary Jewish Record in which Trilling’s just-quoted remarks appeared, Philip Rahv (whose estate went to the State of Israel in 1973). Their postwar burst of in›uence has seemed in retrospect a vigorous—and therefore almost inevitable —displacement of the genteel custodianship of Anglo-American letters once associated with such august ‹gures as Harvard’s Barrett Wendell , who once told a young immigrant: “Your Jewish race is less lost than we, of old America. For all [its] sufferings . . . it has never lost its identity, its tradition, its existence.” “As for us,” he added, “we are submerged beneath a conquest so complete that . . . I feel as I should think an Indian might feel.”3 How ‹tting that Wendell’s correspondent, Horace M...