Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish-American Literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff and Roth (review)

Ranen Omer-Sherman's Diaspora and Zionism in American Literature proposes that the future of American Jewry lies in Diasporism—a theory that rejects the idea of the Diaspora as a powerless pathology to be overcome in favor of renewal through statelessness rather than nationhood. Omer-Sherman displays a substantial breadth of reading, wide-ranging scholarship, and intimacy with current literary theory, although his overuse of the vocabulary of theory often gets in the way of reader-friendly prose. He argues that ever since the prose and poetry of Emma Lazarus in the late-nineteenth century, Diaspora and Zionism have been twin tendencies that have produced a "creative tension" in American Jewish literature. Making no secret of his own sentiments regarding the two tendencies, he appends two epigraphic quotations to the book, one from Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin's Diaspora and one from a Grace Paley story in which a character says, "I believe in the Diaspora. . . . I'm very disappointed that [Israel] decided to become a nation in my lifetime." Omer-Sherman claims "kin with writer Grace Paley" (p. 1), and has clearly learned much from the brothers Boyarin about Diaspora as a source of Jewish culture and power.

Beginning with Emma Lazarus, Omer-Sherman sets out to explore "the parallels and discontinuities between Zionist rhetoric and the writer's situatedness in his or her culture" (p. 7). Arguing that "homelessness, ethnic identity, and Americanization converged in her work" (p. 70), he says that she prefigured future Jewish secular intellectuals insofar as she was not sustained by any religious faith; the only Jewish community she found it possible to belong to was located in the glorious ancient past. Her proto-Zionism, greatly motivated by her desire to improve the image of ghetto Jews and also by the need for a haven for the persecuted, was a call to reject the image of the "unmanly humiliations of exile" (p. 268). In the book's conclusion the author contends that "this call has been met and exceeded. The descendants of the Maccabees she celebrated in her verse have created a formidable military strength—and a labyrinth of moral dilemmas—she could not have dreamed of" (p. 268). Moreover, Lazarus was, he says, "notably silent on the possibilities of Jewish continuity in the American milieu" (p. 268).

Omer-Sherman makes a few mistakes in this chapter. The dates he cites are not always accurate. He believes that Lazarus's proto-Zionism was strongly based on her desire to improve the image of the ghetto Jew, and that "when she says that Palestine offers the only alternative that will allow the immigrants a way to preserve their 'time-honored customs and most sacred beliefs,' she is implying that in America this form of continuity would not—or should not—endure" (p. 63). But these opinions are undercut by Lazarus's own words: "For the most ardent supporter of the scheme does not urge the advisability of an emigration en masse of the whole Jewish people to any particular spot. There is not the slightest necessity for an American Jew, the free citizen of a republic, to rest his hopes upon the foundation of any other nationality soever, or to decide whether he individually would or would not be in favor of residing in Palestine." ¹

Omer-Sherman's second subject is Marie Syrkin, journalist, polemicist, doyenne of American Labor Zionism, and part-time poet. He has chosen her in part because he claims that "the political tug-of-war between the private poet and collective identity, between the American Diaspora and Zionism that we witnessed in Lazarus's poetry has even greater consequences in the work of [the] twentieth century writer," Marie Syrkin (p. 70). Omer-Sherman contends that she inherited from her father, Nachman Syrkin, a...