Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (review)

As Julian Levinson points out in his stimulating book Exiles on Main Street, recent scholarship in American Jewish studies has been moving away from an either–or approach, where a stable idea of Jewishness is measured against a stable idea of Americanness, toward more nuanced approaches that characterize the dialogue between Jews and American culture "as an ongoing, dynamic interaction between two entities that are themselves in a state of flux" (2). From this perspective of cultural interaction, Levinson explores the ways in which America's visionary literary tradition shaped how Jews redefined their own Jewishness. Rejecting the master narrative of immigrant tradition giving way to modernity and assimilation, Levinson traces the "return" of prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals as a recrafting of their Jewish identity resulting from their encounter with America. Since current Jewish cultural studies scholarship has tended to focus on the ethnic, racial, and class aspects of Jewish self-definition in America, Levinson greatly enriches the discussion by focusing on the intellectual and spiritual dimension.

The guiding principle of Levinson's book is evident in the first two chapters on "the founding mothers of Jewish American literature," Emma Lazarus and Mary Antin (15). In contrast to the depiction of Judaism in the works of writers such as Abraham Cahan, who emphasized ritual and rabbinic tradition, Lazarus and Antin described spiritualized versions of Judaism derived from Romanticism and from its American offshoot, Transcendentalism: hence, Levinson's claim that he will be tracing "the motif of the Jewish 'soul'" as it found expression in these authors' rhetoric of spirituality (15). Lazarus's debt to Emerson is well-known, but Levinson goes further in demonstrating how rhetoric about the nobility of "Hebrews," exemplified in the writings of Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and William Dean Howells (as opposed to objectionable immigrant "Jews"), influenced Lazarus's view of the biblical Israelite. Lazarus found this idea of the true biblical Israel echoed in German Jewish historiography, notably in Heinrich Graetz's History of the Jews. The idea that an original spiritual Judaism can be recovered from its rabbinic and Talmudic overlay also characterizes Mary Antin's portrait of Jewish life in the Old World in her celebrated autobiography The Promised Land. Antin's familiarity with this basic tenet of Reform theology, according to Levinson, can be traced to her profound friendship with Emma Lazarus's sister Josephine whose own theological writings emphasized Abraham's direct contact with God. These opening chapters of Exiles on Main Street establish a complex genealogy of Puritan and Reform theology, Transcendentalism and spiritual Judaism, on the one hand, and of Hebrews in the imagination of both Gentiles and Jews, on the other.

Jews who wrote in the interwar period faced a new hostile atmosphere in America where nativism and isolationism cast the Jew in the role of threatening ethnic and racial outsider rather than exoticized Hebrew. In the writings of Waldo Frank, Ludwig Lewisohn, and Anzia Yezierska, Levinson identifies a voice of critique and social conscience that holds America accountable to her ideals. These writers valorized their outsider status by transforming it into an ethos, and demonstrated their Americanness by dissenting from the status quo. Although they were not immune to the rhetoric of racial memory and identity, they used it to synthesize their American and Jewish selves. For Lewisohn, for example, the Jewish prophetic tradition endows the Jew with the attributes that make him inherently loyal to America's own prophetic mission. According to Levinson, Lewisohn created an image of the Jew as a "saving force at a moment when the horizon of history was growing dark" (75). For Waldo Frank, Judaism "was nothing less than a spiritual language" for legitimating the project of the avant-garde (77). Frank's turn toward modernist aesthetics, radical politics, and mysticism, argues Levinson, suggests parallels between his intellectual development and that of Jewish intellectuals in Germany during that period, with the crucial difference that "Frank was able...