A "problem-anthology"

If anthologies of essays have sub-genres, we might consider The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature to be a "problem-anthology." As editor Hana Wirth-Nesher writes in her introduction, the book addresses itself to a conundrum. On one hand, Jewish American Literature (look ma, no hyphen!) is, by any measure, flourishing. Even in these times of contracting print outlets for publication and publicity it comprises writers of diverse backgrounds: women and men, American-born and immigrant, Ashkenazic and non-European, religiously attuned and secular, speakers of various languages, and especially, a healthy number of writers under forty who have hitched their literary fortunes to the field. If generic diversity is a strength, we find that in spades in the wide variety of genres, modes, and media treated here. "Popular" is no longer a derogation, now that (as Stephen Whitfield observes in his sprightly essay) the lines that one demarcated high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow culture have been blurred. Also flourishing are the institutions through which Jewish American writing is heralded, reviewed, awarded, and circulated; in fact, Josh Lambert's final essay in the volume argues that these very institutions have beckoned to young writers by offering them financial support, community, and readers.

But despite the evident "abundance, scope and power" (3) of Jewish American literature, it has become oddly sidelined in the academy. The two interdisciplinary fields where we might expect to find Jewish American literature ensconced—American Studies and Ethnic Studies—have marginalized it; even the field of Judaic studies, dominated by scholars of late Antiquity and Europeanist scholars of the medieval, early modern, and modern eras, tends to treat the American Jewish culture as a poor cousin, newly arrived. As the editor trenchantly notes, at the 2009 MLA this sidelining was called, somewhat polemically, a "Jewish Problem;" three years later, in the pages of MELUS, it was figured as a sort of "disciplinary exile."

It is a mark of the editor's tact and generosity that she prefers to view the marginalization of American Jewish literature as a misreading rather than as rejection of it as "white" or even as an efflorescence of anti-Zionist fervor. At the core of this misreading is the notion that Jewish American literature is a field that essentializes and celebrates both parts of its hybrid identity rather than interrogating and criticizing them. On the contrary, argues the editor, both Jewish American literature and the academic field that studies it deserve recognition as sites of "fissures and tensions" rather than celebrations of ethnic diversity and cultural achievement.

If it is the work of the CHJAL to compel that recognition, then in that pursuit, it should meet with success. To this end, the volume proposes Emma Lazarus (cited in a half-dozen essays) and to a lesser extent Horace Kallen as presiding figures who, writing from an avowedly Jewish stance, defined America as a transaction among cultures rather than as a stable national identity. Thus, Lazarus and Kallen jointly launch the argument that American Jewish culture was "always already" a matter of parsing identity as a problem for interpretation rather than stipulating it as a matter for celebration. Philip Roth (who with Lazarus leads the pack in index entries), sustains this argument throughout with his talisman of the Jewish American "counterlife."

Having rooted its campaign in these three figures, the CHJAL borrows its method, by and large, from the revisionary, post-hegemonic field of American studies. Just as American studies courses now begin with "encounter" between indigenous peoples and Europeans rather than with "discovery," the CHJAL opens with three encounters: with the "Idea of America" (Julian Levinson), with English (Hana Wirth-Nesher), and with Native Origins (Rachel Rubinstein). And like the contemporary practice of American Studies, part 3 of the CHJAL privileges space and location as a critical categories. Immigrant narratives, read for their subjective constructions of identity by Werner Sollors in Part II, are deemphasized in Part III in favor of dialectical constructions of place and peoplehood: Michael Weingrad's essay "Hebrew in America," Monique Rodrigues Balbuena's "Ladino in U.S. Literature and Song," Dalia Kandiyoti's "Writing and...