Symposium: Jewishness, Pedagogy, and Multi-Ethnic Literature

For this special issue of MELUS, we asked four scholars to reflect briefly on their experiences of integrating the study of Jews and Jewishness into ethnic and American literature classes. In the responses that follow, they address pedagogical strategies they have used to teach Jewish American texts, authors, and ideas as part of a multi-ethnic curriculum as well as intellectual and institutional challenges posed by the incorporation of Jewishness into such courses. We hope this symposium spurs further conversations about how Jewish texts and contexts—and the rich debates they engender about identity and the nation, representation and marginalization, and cultural traditions and literary aesthetics—can shape the future study and teaching of American and ethnic American literature.

—Lori Harrison-Kahan and Josh Lambert

• Vitalizing the Still New World
• Elisa New (bio)

It is the beginning of December in Cambridge. Those students in my nineteenth-century American survey not yet suffering from an acute respiratory illness, seasonal affective disorder, or the aftereffects of the rugby season; those not facing impending graduate school deadlines; those who are still with me (having soldiered through Cooper and been converted by Stowe, having fallen in love either with Isabel Archer or Huck Finn, though usually not both)—these students now face, for their pains: Naturalism.

As if the wind off the Charles weren't enough, Dreiser's Hurstwood turns on the gas. Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger (1916) lets bad things happen to good people. Frank Norris's McTeague murders his wife Trina in the kindergarten, the murder only a little more horrific than Trina's loss of her fingers to blood poisoning (the combined result of McTeague's violent and abusive chompings and the poisonous paint Trina uses to decorate Noah's Ark animals). Even students behind in the reading do get to see excerpts of Stroheim's Greed (1924), in which an undressed, ecstatic Trina rolls in a bed full of money. But they of course miss the connection the novel McTeague (1899) makes between Trina's quenchless desire for money and the twisted avarice of the book's Jewish character, the repellant Zerkow. If Zerkow is a singularly anti-Semitic character, it is also true that his vices, like Trina's and Mac's, are genetic, determined, and ineluctable. Just as American literature slips out of the grip of Calvin's Providence, it is ambushed by Darwin's and Spenser's. By the late nineteenth century marriage is a struggle of the fittest and the passions of youth are dangerous. The frontier is closed; the city is corrupt; government is a machine. Gold reigns supreme. In Week 11 of my syllabus, the New World seems very old indeed.

And then, in Week 12, comes Abraham Cahan.

Cahan's Lower East Side of tenements and sweatshops is no less dirty and squalid than McTeague's San Francisco, but for all their struggles, Cahan's characters live again in a New World to which they bring wit and gusto, resourcefulness and, most of all, youth. Dancing, flirting, dating, meeting, and breaking up—Cahan's characters inhabit a modern New York, a young person's city, a place of possibility. Yes, shallow Yekl believes too completely that clothes make the man. Yes, he pins far too much faith on his command of slang and sports jargon, his dancing ability, and his robust physique. But as a single man in the city, unconstrained by parents or traditions, Yekl, who renames himself Jake, has a chance to seize what destiny his own gifts and cunning command. Even Jake's spurned wife, Gitl, rebounds from his rejection of her, finding not only a new husband to take Jake's place, but a smarter one, too. Turns out, Cahan shows us, in another story, "The Imported Bridegroom," that brains are sexy. Turns out, the twentieth century's first major Jewish writer tells us, America still has some thinking, and waltzing, to do.

Cut now...