Embodying Jewishness at the Millennium

This essay argues that in evoking and imagining vivid representations of Jewish bodily difference, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America produce subjects whose distanced, critical relation to U.S. national culture is legible on their bodies. Rendering mid-twentieth-century Jewish visibility in hyperbolic terms, these texts suggest that ethnicity, queerness, and disability should be read in intimate conjunction with one another and as in some way accountable to one another. By contrast, the Jewish Americans in Tony Kushner's Caroline, or Change, while outsiders in Louisiana in the 1960s, inhabit a space of white privilege and align themselves with dominant racial and national narratives. Kushner's text, then, illuminates the stakes of Chabon's and Roth's imaginative (indeed, counter-factual) efforts to denaturalize the link between Jewish bodies and American national identity.