Talmud on the Roof, or Materializing American Jewish Literary Studies

In 2009, as the U.S. economy imploded and my own financial resources deflated, I saw no other choice but to sell my Zhitomir Shas in order to put a badly needed new roof on my house. This set of Talmud, printed in the 1860s in Zhitomir, Ukraine, off of plates first ceremonially immersed in a mikveh, was one of the last legacies of my father's Jewish bookstore, the jewel among the books I had taken for myself when the store was forced to close in 1994. I vacillated for weeks at the thought of selling off this patrimony. I had wanted to pass it on to my only child, and through that tangible object of Jewish spiritual and material values gift him with a kind of literary yichus, pedigree, that would attest to both the distinction of the store and of his family's Jewish identity. But each day as I stepped out from under the leaky skullcap of my house and into the overwhelmingly Protestant, white, middle-class community of the Pennsylvania countryside where we live, I realized anew the illusory nature of that desire. My son attends a public school and his favorite books are the Harry Potter series. His formal Jewish education is conducted at a once-a-week Hebrew school run by the local synagogue, where lately he's been reading Chaim Potok's The Chosen. Neither of us paid much attention to the set, much less studied from it, and the fact remained that the Shas attested only to a certain guilt about its disuse and increasing irrelevance in our family library. My talisman of Jewish authenticity had been wearied in power by everyday cultural wear and tear. Perhaps in a different materialization its magic might weather a little longer on, rather than in, my American Jewish home?

I tell this story to introduce my brief reflection on the situation of American Jewish literary studies because I see it, first, as a cautionary tale about trying to see into the future. There are so many factors we can't anticipate that will certainly alter our current understanding of the production, circulation, and consumption of American Jewish literature. But I tell this story, too, because it focuses on what is presently an under-studied factor in our field: the material, embodied aspects of American Jewish literature, by which I mean investigations of that literature as a collection of consumable objects—looking into the formal and technological re-figurations of the medium in which these objects are consumed and interpreted, the social and electronic networks through which they pass, and the creative writing and popular mythologies that express both highbrow and middlebrow notions about the collection's aesthetic purpose and material value.

These sorts of investigations would shift attention away, I hope, from questions regarding the group identity of writing by Jews, or what lies "inside" American Jewish literature. They would nudge us instead toward questions-regarding property, literary trade and merger, cultural ownership, and the technologies housing American Jewish literature and its scholarship. Following the insights of theorists such as Bruno Latour and Franco Moretti, perhaps we can deconstruct "inside" and "outside" by viewing American Jewish literature as an activity, constituted not only by authors and texts but also through commerce and within social space (as I've argued elsewhere about modern Jewish literature in general [293]).

Of course, there is already a lively body of scholarly work in Jewish material culture studies that indicates the richness of, and potential future directions for, these types of investigations. Much of this scholarship is courtesy of researchers associated with the Working Group on Jews, Media, and Religion at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University (led by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler), which has sponsored colloquia, special print and online publications, and the Internet project MODIYA. Their work is dedicated to exploring Jewish material culture, new media, and vernacular practices, albeit with a particular focus on religion. Shandler's own Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture provocatively unravels the meaning of "translation" in regard to Yiddish...