Jewish Counterfactualism in Recent American Poetry

This essay argues that there is currently a cultural prohibition in Jewish literature against rewriting history. Jewish artists cannot abandon history and cannot condone historical revisionism, but they can present alternatives within history either to redeem it or critique it. Poets Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Charles Bernstein have turned to the counterfactual (the "what if") as a narrative and poetic structure in order to imagine a different, and Jewish, relation to history and to take stock of the dangers of this intervention. For both poets, the counterfactual device is used to imagine a leftist Jewish relation to history, particularly at points where history has been damaged or drained of these ways of relating to it. However, Benjamin Friedlander's poetry and essays play the foil—his poetry fakes history to show that there really is no taboo in inventing history, but the consequence is that Jewish poetry has drifted increasingly further away from anything like Jewish historical action.