In this Book
- Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness
- Book
- 2011
- Published by: State University of New York Press
summary
Argues that debates about Jewish identity and assimilation are signs of creative potential rather than crisis. Identity Papers argues that contemporary Jewish American literature revises our understanding of Jewishness and Jewish difference. Moving beyond the reductive labeling of texts and authors as “too Jewish” or “not Jewish enough,” and focusing instead on narratives that portray Jewish regeneration through feminist Orthodoxy, queerness, off-whiteness, and intermarriage, Helene Meyers resists a lachrymose view of contemporary Jewish American life. She argues that such gendered, sexed, and raced debates about Jewish identity become opportunities rather than crises, signs of creative potential rather than symptoms of assimilation and deracination. Thus, feminist debates within Orthodoxy are allied to Jewish continuity by Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, and Tova Mirvis; the geography of Jewish identity is racialized by Alfred Uhry, Tony Kushner, and Philip Roth; and the works of Jyl Lynn Felman, Judith Katz, Lev Raphael, and Michael Lowenthal queer the Jewish family as they reveal homophobia to be an abomination. Even as Identity Papers expands Jewish literary horizons and offers much-needed alternatives to the culture wars between liberal and traditional Jews, it argues that Jewish difference productively troubles dominant narratives of feminist, queer, and whiteness studies. Meyers demonstrates that the evolving Jewish American literary renaissance is anything but provincial; rather, it is engaged with categories of difference central to contemporary academic discourses and our national life.
Table of Contents
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- Acknowledgments
- pp. vii-viii
- 3. Queering the Jewish Family
- pp. 73-123
- 4. The Color of White Jewry
- pp. 125-177
- Works Cited
- pp. 205-215
Additional Information
ISBN
9781438439242
MARC Record
OCLC
794699036
Pages
200
Launched on MUSE
2012-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No