Mapping Jewish American Literary Studies in the New Century

Writing in the Introduction to a now obscure anthology, Jewish-American Literature (1974), its editor Abraham Chapman argued for the importance of Jewish American expression during that transitional moment—the early 1970s—in U.S. cultural and political history. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the winding down of the Viet Nam War, and at the onset of the so-called "ethnic revival" that, later in the decade, would prompt the search for "roots" and "identity" (now problematic, contested terms, especially in Jewish Studies), Chapman asserted that "the literature of the Jewish experience may be particularly meaningful in the present historical epoch, when the struggles against cultural imperialism and racism have reached unprecedented dimensions, and specifically in the United States, which is a multiracial, multilingual, and multireligious society, in which the struggle for cultural pluralism remains very much alive."¹

Today, almost half a century later, Chapman's claims on behalf of the relevance of Jewish American literature, above all its potential as oppositional discourse—authorizing in his view "the right to dissent within one's own culture, the right to criticize institutions and the wielders of power within a culture"²—sounds like a report from another country. In 2018 Jewish American literature apparently exists apart, relegated to the margins of the English department, more or less ignored by scholars in ethnic literatures, studied and analyzed almost exclusively by Jews. "How did this happen?" (4), Hana Wirth-Nesher asks in the Introduction to the collection of essays in The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature. She explains that her editorial aim was not only "to enrich the study of American and Jewish literatures" but "to expand the scope of ethnic and minority literary study such that the role of Jewish American writing in the making of American culture can be recognized and the literature can be explored and savored" (13). The volume is certainly rich and varied and expansive. To be sure, its thirty-one chapters treat familiar subjects like immigrant writing, Jewish American fiction at mid-century, Yiddish literature, New York City as a site for creative expression, overviews of Jewish American poetry, drama, popular culture, and humor. But not only. There are also sections that invite re-thinking of the geographic and linguistic boundaries of the field, thus expanding our idea of what "Jewish American literature" (each term also under interrogation these days) represents as a subject of academic inquiry.³ In this respect the Cambridge History begins an important remapping of the field. It may not, however, achieve Wirth-Nesher's other aim—a desire among Jewish Americanists for "recognition" by colleagues in minority literatures and ethnic studies. But the publication of the Cambridge History may, perhaps, enable conversations across disciplines and their respective archives to begin.

Most readers of SAJL, I assume, are familiar with the issues concerning the status of Jewish American literature and its relation to cultural theory in general, especially critical ethnic and whiteness studies. A number of scholars in Jewish Studies, many of whom contribute chapters to the Cambridge History, have been addressing questions like "Does the English Department have a Jewish Problem?" or considering the issue of "Jewishness, Pedagogy, and Multi-Ethnic Literature," or reflecting on "The Future of Jewish American Literary Studies." Taken together, these panels and journal symposia highlight the vexed relation between Jewish American literary studies and what Jonathan Freedman calls "other Others."⁴ How can serious theoretical attention to Jewish American literature deepen, enliven, or simply engage adjacent fields like postcolonial studies, whiteness studies, and critical ethnic studies?

A major voice arguing for the critical import and explanatory power of the new Jewish cultural studies, Freedman (who contributes a chapter on "Jews and Film"), has spoken elsewhere of a lamentable "disciplinary self-blindness" with respect to current American Studies modes of inquiry; "such blindness," he observes, has "unfortunate consequences when it comes to raising questions of Jewish difference in the context of other ethno-racial configurations."⁵ In Freedman's view, colleagues in ethnic studies tend to miss, and thus miss out on a potential, as yet untapped alliance...