Literary-Historical Zionism: Irving Kristol, Alexander Portnoy, and the State of the Jews

My goal here is to think critically about a dominant mode of Jewish American literary history that I polemically align with Zionism. This overdetermined label may be unwise in the current academic climate, but what I mean by it is a way of reading Jewish literature for the expected recognition of a Jewish population that is already conceptually coherent, legible, and historiographically legitimate despite geographical and temporal diversity—a mode of reading administered by what I call a biologistic principle. To be clear, recent movements in Jewish studies (as in ethnic studies and other “studies” studies more generally) to decenter and pluralize the field of scholarly labor (in talk of histories, literatures, cultures, or in talk of differing scales of analysis, of microhistories or micropractices versus macrohistories), which might ostensibly offer a counterexample of the kind of management or organization I’m talking about here, suggest in fact precisely the identitarian mechanism I’m pointing to in their epistemological return to the conceptual unity of population. There’s a powerful nationalized logic at work here that allows us to categorize—easily, mostly without our even knowing it, or at least without our really being able to criticize it—all of these various histories, literatures, and cultures, for example, under the already-legible and already-academically legitimate “Jewish” or “Jewish studies” rubric. I’m calling “Zionist” the tendency, but really the ability, or rather the twined epistemological capacity and incentivized institutional authorization, to organize a welter of historical, literary, and cultural expressions as “Jewish” in the sense that they are understood as of Jews, as arising from or otherwise pertaining to Jewish people; I like the term “Zionist” as a description of this organization because it is the name under which the biopolitical normalization of Jewish identity continues to be historically contested.

Any project to think critically about identity in literary study must begin in the displacement of an identitarianism that seeks sanction from, as it expects to represent, an already historiographically legible population; only then can it be possible to clear space for imagining how a concept of identity coordinates concepts of population, historical significance, and difference. The identitarianism I’d like to move away from precognitively grounds thinking about identity in a knowledge of population that stands as its warrant or justification, and it circulates as a normalizing historiographical concern with representation. In its place, literary criticism should turn to imaginatively making conspicuous the procedures through which identity functions as a categorical machine for producing recognizable narratives for historicist scholarship—in the interest of negating this production. Rather than focus on what gets to count as Jewish, I’m hoping to shift critical attention to the coherence of an institutional formation or framework that enables us to count what gets to count as Jewish. I’d like to think about how Jewish difference is made available to criticism, especially given a dominant but undertheorized literary-historical account that reads Jewish American literature through keywords like immigration, assimilation, Americanization, and/or multiculturalism. Specifically we need to analyze the ways in which Jewish identity is recognized through biopolitical processes of nationalization—processes that map identity in terms of a corporate body or population defined ultimately via a kind of genetic logic of inheritance—but without taking these processes for granted as given. Here I cross two authors—Irving Kristol and Philip Roth—who stand, linked, at the crux of our most familiar historical narratives of post–World War II American literature and culture: Kristol, the figure who represents perhaps more saliently than anyone else the stock narrative of the hard right turn taken by formerly left, predominantly Jewish intellectuals, and Roth, whose book Portnoy’s Complaint not only represents as much as any other the liberatory cultural energies released during the 1960s, indeed, represents the cultural revolution that led so many erstwhile socialists to become the neoconservatives, but also stands as a signal text in a dominant historical account of Jewish American literary autonomy.

Judith Butler has analyzed what she calls the “Zionist effect,” the ways...