The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History by Benjamin Schreier (review)

Benjamin Schreier’s The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History offers a meta-analysis of Jewish literary studies. Moving through the history—or rather, more accurately, the story of Jewish literary scholarship—and offering his own astute readings of Jewish literature itself, Schreier’s book analyzes Abraham Cahan, New York Jewish Intellectuals, Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, and many other figures in the Jewish literary landscape.

Finding that “Jewish American literary study has isolated itself,” (2) the first chapter is a thorough rendering of debates around multiculturalism and how Jewish American literary study fits—and does not fit—in. This history of identity politics includes an analysis of how “postwar American Jews [hitched] their collective identity to an increasingly first-world Israeli star.” (51) Indeed, the book argues that a “pernicious orbit of biologistic nationalism” (96) has encircled Jewish intellectuals even though it is often not thus explicitly marked as nationalism. Schreier makes a convincing argument and one that I do not think has been made in quite this way before. By expanding the locus of the problems around ethnically grounded identity habits to nationally driven identity habits (and Jews are an interesting case because of the “Jewish state”), Schreier helps unstick the usual problematics around identity politics.

Citing Chantal Mouffe, who argues that politicized identities should be understood as “discursive surface[s]” rather than as biological, empirical referents, Schreier unseats biological Jewishness as a means of delimiting the objects of study of Jewish Studies. Of the authors he examines as case studies to make his points, I am most familiar with Philip Roth and Jonathan Safran Foer. Schreier’s reading of Roth in this context is very helpful. Roth has famously occupied himself with doubles, alternative realities, and counter lives. Schreier unpacks these to argue that the Zuckerman books “insist on a model of identification that cannot be reduced to the representational historicism authorizing the humanities’ obsession with sociological reference in matters of identity.” (157) This argument resonates with the one I make in Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth because in both cases the way that Zionism functions is deconstructed.

The closing chapter, on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), furnishes Schreier with an opportunity to discuss a novel by a prominent young Jewish American writer that has neither a centrally Jewish nor a Holocaust theme. Of course, Foer’s highly popular Everything is Illuminated (2002, which was made into an even more popular film) is a Holocaust novel starring a Jewish character named Jonathan Safran Foer and Foer’s newest book, Here I Am—which was not out when Schreier was writing—features a reluctant Bar Mitzvah boy, a huge catastrophe in Israel that encourages the state to call all Jews home, and many other Jewish themes. The headline of the New York Times review (which, again, of course came out after The Impossible Jew) but which Schreier will have appreciated is: “Jonathan Safran Foer’s New Novel Wrestles with the Demands of Jewish Identity.” (September 9, 2016).

Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close charts the aftereffects of 9/11 on the child of one of its victims—a kid named Oskar. As Oskar struggles with his father’s death in one of the towers and with the fact that he has a physical record of his father’s last words in the form of an answering machine that he hides from his mother, he has many interactions with his grandfather. The story of the grandfather dares to approach an almost taboo theme: that there were victims, German victims, during the Allied firebombings of cities like Dresden. After a careful reading of both the novel and its critics, Schreier argues that, “Jewishness in Foer’s novel proclaims a categorical recognizability that constitutively eludes the critical literary historical desire for it...