Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (review)

Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation, by Emily Miller Budick. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. xii + 252 pp. ISBN 0-521-63575-6 paper.

Emily Martin Budick's rearrangement and reading of a series of Black-Jewish "conversations" are perceptive and thought-provoking. Without shying away from the asymmetrical relationship between Blacks and Jews within the competitive market of American identities in general and political space in particular, Budick closely attends to a recurring pattern of cultural strategies visible at the nexus of Black-Jewish intertextuality that generates "a mutuality of cultural construction, which is not the ostensible intention of any of the interacting parties, but which is, nonetheless, the result of their attempting to define themselves through their resistance to each other" (57).

Through Budick's reading, one gains further insight into the collapse of white and American as coterminous, the coercive force propelling hyphenated identities and reproducing the notion of minority cultures. For Jews this is a tenuous link in which their inclusion is tolerated but incomplete. Furthermore, the relationship of Jews to white America, and Jews to Christian Americans, involves three different types of relationships with Black Christian Americans, each of which folds into scriptural as much as political narratives of invention.

On one level the foundational biracial character of American identity precedes the Jewish presence; on a second level, it is precisely the fundamentally Christian foundations of this American racial binary that guarantee family as a literal reference and not merely a trope. Therefore, on a third level, her analysis suggests that what Black writers recognize and Jewish writers overlook is that this fundamental, foundational biraciality of America guarantees the marginality of the Jews--in the long-run--despite, or because of, their hypervisibility. While Jewish Americans have often enjoyed the privileges of whiteness, and thus the illusion of identifying as white, Black Americans have both cautioned against the manner in which passing as white (American) actually disengages Jews from their own history and critiqued the expectation that Blacks should confirm, and conform to, particular stereotypes (hyphenated Americans) as scripted by the dominant culture.

Certain themes reverberate and resonate within Budick's choreography of conversations between particular sets of writers--from Ralph Ellison/James Baldwin and Bernard Malamud/Irving Howe to Alice Walker/Toni Morrison and Saul Bellow/ Philip Roth and others in between. These themes include universalism and particularism, racism and anti-Semitism, well-covered by previous scholars. Budick's contribution delineates a more subtle and complex antagonism: "the foundationalist/ supersessionist tension between Judaism and Christianity, white Christianity and black Christianity, and thus Judaism and black Christianity" (56).

I have no disagreements with Budick's readings. It seems curious, however, that she fails to give careful attention to one of the more important Black writers engaged in conversation with and about Jews, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. The obvious corollary is a studious neglect of people who are both Black and Jewish, acutely evidenced in her inability to give the topic attention even in a discussion of Grace Paley's "Zagrowsky Tells" in which the theme is central. The coupling of Black and Jewish identities seems to confound most commentators. Budick comes very close to disturbing the tidy notion of Jews as just another white ethnic group but not close enough--in part, because she never explicitly interrogates the misnomer "Judeo-Christian" which obfuscates completely that Jews and Judaism are a product not of the West but of the East. This is surprising given the fact that she writes from Israel where the Jewish population reflects the diasporic legacy of diversity.

Ultimately, we are left with the political question facing all writers from groups whose right to exist has been persistently challenged: What is "the responsibility of any writer to the ethnically specific materials of neighboring communities, which are themselves contributors to, even if they are resistors of, the larger cultural construction in which all of them exist?" (206).

Katya Gibel Azoulay

Katya Gibel Azoulay is...