What Is Ethnic Studies For?

The white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, which left one counter-protester dead, targeted Jews as well as Blacks. But as Benjamin Schreier notes, the response to the rally by programs in African American studies, measured in events like teach-ins, was much louder and more energetic than the response to it by programs of Jewish American studies. Why? A slogan like "Jews will not replace us" would seem to invite, at the very least, some further analysis. The reason for the field's relative silence, Schreier suggests, is that unlike "its sibling U.S. ethnic literary formations," Jewish American studies has refused to "explicitly theorize itself and its practices" and has refused in particular to see itself "as 'political' or 'resistant' in the same way that, say, African American studies understands itself and is comfortable with itself" (2).

It's just a passing comment, but it raises some large questions. Are these ethnic literary formations indeed siblings? Is a commitment to being "political" or "resistant" a trait that is shared by the whole family of "ethnic literary formations"? To ask is to start speculating about possible differences within the family, and thus about academic formations in general. The term sibling rivalry also comes to mind, though it of course assumes a consanguinity that cannot be taken for granted. Sibling rivalry does not turn out to be the master key to Schreier's sparklingly intelligent book, but it offers one path through its unusual narrative terrain, and I would argue that it leads the reader to some hidden treasures.

Schreier takes as his subject not the works and authors sometimes classified as Jewish American literature, but rather the academic sub-field of Jewish American literature. He examines the field-defining statements, anthologies, and controversies that have helped bestow on it such prestige or legitimacy as it has, the struggles to define it and, as the historical experience and sense of identity of American Jews changed, to redefine it, the contents that do and do not persist beneath these changes. The book is expressly and unapologetically meta. It is a real tour de force to have made so very meta an argument—one that says so little about the literature itself and so much about how scholarship about that literature has been framed—into so fascinating and eminently readable a story. The pay-off of this sustained exercise in disciplinary self-consciousness is not merely a heightened understanding of what academic fields are, but also (as the aside about the Charlottesville rally suggests) a hypothesis about the somewhat mysterious relation between politics inside and outside the university.

Schreier's impatience with the political conservatism of his field is palpable and (to me, at least) very welcome. But it is not a totally trustworthy guide to the book. The book seems more motivated by impatience with the field's theoretical conservatism, which is not the same thing. By theoretical conservatism, Schreier has in mind the field's unquestioned dependence on a demographic and even biological understanding of its object of knowledge, which is to say on a particular population, Jewish Americans. Whatever "Jewish" means—Schreier doesn't have a horse in that race, though some will wish he did—he objects to the objectification. He objects, ultimately, because a demographic or ethnographic understanding of the field displaces attention away from the literariness of the literature and makes it seem as if what is to be interpreted, under the rubric of Jewish American literature, is a collection of more or less accurate or misleading, more or less sympathetic or critical representations of American Jewish experience. The field's point seems to be to supply information about the Jews of America. Literature is its means, but not its end.

There is much to be said in favor of Schreier's rejectionist position, not all of them taken full advantage of. For one thing, Schreier could find allies among a chorus of writers from different regions of the global South who have complained about much the same thing: the metropolitan demand that they serve the cause of representing their countries...