Key Texts in American Jewish Culture (review)

In Reading Myself and Others (1975), Philip Roth says that the twentieth century was full of "very strongly held ideas as to what a Jew is, or certainly ought to be," a fantastic array of "projections, fantasies, illusions, programs, dreams, and solutions," ranging from those of Hitler to those of Sartre, "Moshe Dayan, Meir Kahane, Leonid Brezhnev, and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations." "The novelistic enterprise . . . might itself be described as imagining Jews being imagined." Alluding to James Joyce, Roth says, "As I see it, the task for the Jewish novelist has not been to go forth and forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, but to find inspiration in a conscience that has been created and undone a hundred times over in this century alone."¹

Key Texts in American Jewish Culture is precisely about "imagining Jews being imagined" in the twentieth century. Jack Kugelmass explains that the collection "is not intended to be a comprehensive examination of American Jewry nor to identify even the most significant texts of American culture." Instead, key texts in American Jewish culture, unlike a "canon" of works, are popular texts that address both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences in very different ways and that are grounded in their historicity. "Their meanings are fixed by the particular social circumstances in which they are generated" (3–4). The texts may or may not be great or lasting works of art, but they help us understand American Jewry at particular points of time. Each contributor writes on a particular text: the novels The Rise of David Levinsky, Marjorie Morningstar, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, and The Counterlife; the 1947 films Crossfire and Gentlemen's Agreement; the musical Fiddler on the Roof; the television shows The Goldbergs and Bridget Loves Bernie; universalism in a series of nineteenth- and twentieth- century Jewish painters; Leonard Bernstein's symphony Kaddish; the histories The Jews and World of Our Fathers; and the religious works Peace of Mind, Judaism as a Civilization, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, and the many nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions of the Haggadah for the Passover seder.

Although one could quibble about some of the choices or omissions—why Philip Roth's difficult, postmodern The Counterlife, rather than his most popular and controversial novel, Portnoy's Complaint?; and why omit the most popular American Jewish film of the past few decades, Schindler's List?—this is nevertheless a wide-ranging collection, including fiction, film, theater, music, painting, history, and the sociology of religion. The authors situate each work in its particular historical, social, and political context, and explain its popularity at the time for both Jewish and gentile audiences. Sometimes they are highly critical of works which have dated badly, as are Gordon Hutner on Herman Wouk's novel, Marjorie Morningstar, and Edward Shapiro on Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew. Other essays argue instead for the merits of forgotten television shows, such as Joyce Antler on The Goldbergs and Jack Kugelmass on Bridget Loves Bernie. The essays have been well edited and are generally clearly written. There is much here to interest scholars and students of American culture and Jewish-American studies. And since few of us are generalists, there is also much to learn. For example, I was unfamiliar with the art reproduced here or the television programs.

As Jack Kugelmass explains in his introduction, "Jewish textuality . . . constitutes a collective meditation for a changing and strikingly amorphous entity that focuses on the questions 'Who are we and why?'" (5). Jewish key texts are "meditations on the line separating Self and Other," Jew and gentile, and attempt to create "a world that is uniquely ours—a very Jewish space" (7, 12). To this end, the strategies the texts employ are various: to "epater les bourgeois—especially when the bourgeoisie is defined as Them, non-Jews"; to criticize the Jews; to make their...