The Jewishness of American Culture

Jonathan Freedman. The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. vi + 224 pp. Notes and index. $45.00

Stephen J. Whitfield. In Search of American Jewish Culture. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1999. xi + 247 pp. Notes and index. $26.00

In his collected essays on literature and Jewish identity, Fiedler on the Roof (1991), Leslie Fiedler recounts the various escape routes he took in his flight from the urban ethnic values of his upbringing. Seeking to identify himself with authentically "American" culture, he gravitated first toward the elite "goyish critical establishment" of literary High Modernism immersing himself in the work of Henry James, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot, (though he is probably better known for his iconoclastic interpretations of Twain and Melville). A critical engagement with such figures promised, as Fiedler puts it, that a Jew like himself could establish credentials as "a full-fledged, up-to-date citizen of the Republic of Letters." At the same time, however, he was drawn to the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. Later he turned his attention to "pop" authors favored by ordinary Americans: Zane Grey, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Margaret Mitchell. But rather than undercutting his sense of ethnic identification, lighting out for the territory of American letters only served to reinforce it. "For no matter how far afield my new range of interests had taken me," writes Fiedler, "I continued to write, willy-nilly, from a Jewish point of view, as a Jew." ¹

But what does it mean to write American literary criticism from "a Jewish point of view"? Ironically what may be most "Jewish" about Fiedler's point of view is the way his iconoclastic essays challenge the very concept of bounded ethnic and religious cultures and identities: the "Jewish Consciousness of [James] Joyce," the "Christian-Ness of the Jewish-American Writer," and the idea that the Yiddish speaking émigré novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer is not a "Jewish-American writer" but an "American-Jewish writer." ²

Such playful, but deeply serious efforts to defamiliarize and break apart categories like "Jewish," "American," and "culture" have a long history, a history in which Jews and also black writers, artists, and critics, among them W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Ralph Ellison have played a leading role. But it is also a history shaped by genteel white gentiles like Matthew Arnold and "that other Jew" Henry James, as literary critic Ross Posnock has called him. Cosmopolitanism or the "politics of nonidentity" is Posnock's name for the intellectual orientation of modern American writers who sought in different ways and for very different purposes to free themselves from the limitations of social and cultural categories and identities. For Du Bois, Locke, Ellison, Baldwin and others, that meant trying (though ultimately failing) to escape racial stereotypes, longing for the freedom to take a term like "black intellectual" and "to delete the first word or to accent the second . . . or to vary one's inflections at will." ³ That was precisely what Ralph Ellison had in mind when he challenged Irving Howe's assertion that the experience of race in America made it impossible for a black writer to "think or breathe, without some impulsion to protest." By such criteria, Howe had judged, it was not Ellison or Baldwin but Richard Wright who spoke most authentically for black America. In his rebuke--part of a legendary literary interchange that took place in 1963-64-- Ellison insisted on the necessity of separating the concept "black" from the vocation "writer." "While I am without doubt a Negro, and a writer, I am also an American writer." But Ellison's literary cosmopolitanism aimed to transcend the constraints of national identity as well. Echoing Du Bois ("I sit with Shakespeare"), Ellison claimed as his literary "ancestors" such luminaries as Dostoyevsky, Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, and Faulkner. "Ancestors," noted Ellison, were not the same as "relatives...