Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination by Jennifer Glaser (review)

One of the consequences of the post–World War II shift in the status of Jews in America was the changing regard for Jewish suffering. If a blame-the-victim mentality was pervasive in American culture generally during the first half of the twentieth century (whether regarding victims of rape, domestic abuse, bullying, racism, or bigotry), that logic adhered particularly strongly to Jews. Before the war, Jews were often regarded as deserving their ill treatment—whether one viewed Jewish sins as religiously or ethnically based. But World War II—in which the most horrific abuse was inflicted on Jews—had the ironic effect of changing that line of thinking. In the decades after, and to some extent during, World War II, one of the ways that Americans made sense of their involvement in the European conflict was as a means of helping suffering Jews. That logic that defined Jewish suffering as deserving of sympathy also set in motion a new literary landscape. As early as 1952, the voice of a German-born, Jewish girl living in Amsterdam was on the way to becoming an American cultural phenomenon. And decades after the publication of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, that new regard for Jewish suffering continued to shape the American literary scene in increasingly unexpected ways.

Literary scholar Jennifer Glaser’s Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination delves into that postwar American Jewish literary scene. World War II and the Holocaust are secondary and background topics in this study, but as part of their legacy, the literary history that Glaser brings to light should be of interest to those who study the twentieth-century Jewish experience and the role of suffering in American liberal culture. Building on work by Michael Rogin and Dean Franco, Glaser continues the project of positioning American Jewish literature as central to literary studies of racial, ethnic, and religious differences. One of the strongest contributions of Borrowed Voices is the history it provides, through Glaser’s case studies, of how difference came to be understood and expressed through each of her postwar Jewish writers.

Glaser does not begin her story with the war years. She opens, rather, with the first generation of American Jewish writers who inherited the war as their material. While the masses of postwar American Jews were absorbed with fitting into the American middle-class of the 1950s, this cadre of intellectuals and writers were headed in an opposite direction: trying to hold on to their Jewish difference. Jewish suffering became one mark of that distinction. In her first chapter, Glaser discusses Hannah Arendt’s 1959 essay about school desegregation, “Reflections on Little Rock,” in order to highlight Arendt’s seeming ease in speaking for African Americans. Postwar Jewish writers’ impulse to ventriloquize the voices of African Americans is a major theme in Glaser’s study. Arendt’s preface to the essay (“I should like to make it clear that as a Jew I take my sympathy for the cause of the Negroes as for all oppressed or underprivileged peoples for granted and should appreciate it if the reader did likewise” (16)) is a testament to how strongly the equation that put Jewish suffering on the side of good had taken hold in American culture. As Glaser notes, Arendt believed that “speaking as a Jew legitimated not only a politics of sympathetic identification but also a politics of representation: both figuratively and literally, Jew came to stand in for oppressed others” (16). That Arendt was criticized by her progressive, intellectual peers, however, reveals that nearly as soon as this logic of cultural appropriation took hold, cracks in it became apparent. As has become clear again, in a Black Lives Matter era, the very ability of one group to declare that it understands and can speak for the suffering of another group becomes a sign of power and inequality. Glaser...