Secular Sermons and American Accents: The Nonfiction of Bellow, Ozick, and Roth

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Emma Lazarus's words affixed to the Statue of Liberty heralded an affinity between American and Jewish values and identities. At the same time, however, Henry James's negative comments about the Yiddish language of these immigrants at Ellis Island and on the Lower East Side of New York undermined the acceptance of Jews into the American mainstream. In their own essays Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, and Philip Roth admire James but challenge his antisemitic sentiments by adopting a range of rhetorical strategies that combine elitism and egalitarianism to reaffirm the overlapping of American and Jewish identities. Their moral seriousness in conjunction with their ironic attitudes simultaneously questions rabbinic authority; their nonfictional jeremiads synthesize and reinvent a Jewish-American covenant. Their secular sermons remain true to American tradition while seeking new frontiers of thought.