Zitsn af shpilkes

What follows is an adapted transcription of some remarks I offered as respondent to a session at the 2010 AJS conference, "Jewish American Culture Beyond Identity Politics," within the larger rubric of modern Jewish literature and culture. I began my quoting my colleagues who presented at that session, and I do so again here:

1. 1. "White horses will always be white, oranges will always be orange. Jewish American literary study will always be Jewish American, which is to say that it will never get beyond identity politics. . . . Jewish American literary study beyond identity politics will undoubtedly be Jewish American literary study." Michael P. Kramer, Bar-Ilan University: "Double Cosmopolitanism: Emma Lazarus, the New York Intellectuals, and the Art of Assimilation"

2. 2. "I'd like to suggest that literature cannot be 'Jewish' in itself or in the stuff of its representations, but only elsewhere than where we recognize it to be so." Benjamin Schreier, Penn State University: "Trilling, Schwartz, and the Ordeal of Civility; or, what are we really doing when we practice Jewish American literary history?"

3. 3. "Neither Jewish nor American, Sergio Leone deconstructs the emerging narrative about the Jewish-American experience that the revival of the Lower East Side and the culture of Yiddishkeit shaped. . . . The brilliant coup [of his movie] is to show us that memories like those the [Robert de Niro character] has been carrying around with him and of which he is disabused are not just individual reminiscences but collective fictions, shaped, crafted, articulated, by photographs, images, films, theater, performance culture itself. And more: that the images that have constructed not just our factitious and idealized narratives of the Lower East Side, of Jewishness in America, but of the U.S. itself turn out to be as false, or at least, incomplete, as [his]." Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan: "Once Upon a Time in New York: Sergio Leone and the De-Sacralizing of the Jewish Immigrant Narrative"

These three moments in my colleagues' work converge at the vanishing point we might call the sometime-literary fiction that is literary history. What we, as critics or narrators, seek to emplace as constitutive of a tradition of cultural, national, ethnic expression collects in itself its own force of resistance or recalcitrance, and often works through subversive displacements no matter our efforts to order, contain, or as two of my colleagues have put it, "categorize." Since I decided it would be either foolhardy or artificial to attempt to braid together in one skein the separate strands of Lionel Trilling, Emma Lazarus, and Sergio Leone in this session's three papers, what I will do instead is sketch two directions for a dynamic of displacement—call it zitsn af shpilkes, the inability to sit still or stay put—that may be internal to the project of American Jewish literary history. One of these directions, happily enough, makes reference to the critic Hana Wirth Wirth-Nesher, whom Michael Kramer alluded to in his presentation, "Double Cosmopolitanism." The other, which is more accurately a hasty conclusion, uses Dan Miron's recent book, From Continuity to Contiguity: Towards a New Jewish Literary Thinking, as a point of departure for continuing the conversation. Obviously, in making these two choices, I am already tipping my hand by re-hyphenating Jewish American literature and literary history, in an easterly direction. Appropriately enough, the Israeli novelist Aharon Applefeld has observed of Philip Roth, "The stranger brings out the Jew in Roth." Mutatis Mutandis, it might be fair to say that "strangers" of all sorts—African American secret sharers, Italian filmmakers, even Israelis—bring out the Jew in Jewish American.

I am assuming that most readers have a passing familiarity with a short story from Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and Other Stories entitled "Eli the Fanatic." Less familiar perhaps is an essay about that story by Hana Wirth-Nesher of Tel Aviv University, "Resisting Allegory, or Reading 'Eli, the Fanatic' in Tel Aviv," now almost a decade old. In it, Wirth-Nesher explains how different the Roth story became for her, with its tropes of blackness, assimilated suburban Jewish Americans, and post-Shoah Haredi Jews, after she made...