The New Jewish American Literary Studies ed. by Victoria Aarons (review)

Professor Victoria Aarons brings together in this volume prominent critics in the field of American Jewish literature. Organized in three sections—I. Concepts; II. Contexts; III. “New” Forms and Histories—The New Jewish American Literary Studies aspires to provide a comprehensive, contemporary, evaluation of this field through a highly interdisciplinary methodology, which transcends the “literary” label in its title. Aarons’ Introduction provides a thought-provoking discussion of the ways in which Jewish American fiction in the twentieth century largely followed a historical “narrative” in which the Jewish immigrant experience in the United States was represented by the playing out of the “old” diasporic Jewish identity versus the “new” American identity. Such a narrative, Aarons notes, needs to be updated and refocused in the twenty-first century, not least because several generations of Jewish writers originate internationally and cannot be read only in terms of the dual label “Jewish American.”

The Concepts section begins with Berel Lang’s nuanced essay on the cultural and ideological implications of word order in the labels “Jewish American” or “American Jewish.” Within the former, Lang argues, the use of “Jewish” may be helpful in systematizing subject matter, character types, or a particular language, but may be too narrow and restrictive if conceived in terms of authorship or ancestry. In an apt coda to Aarons’ Introduction, Lang reveals the debate between CUP editors and editor Victoria Aarons regarding the titling of this volume: American Jewish versus Jewish American. In “A New Diaspora,” the volume editor fleshes out notions previously outlined in her Introduction, foregrounding how Jewish American writing today centers around “draw[ing] upon the past to inform the present and lay the groundwork for the future [as] a useful metaphor for thinking about the literature produced by a contemporary generation of Jewish writers in America.” As she shows in this chapter, there is now a wide array of American-born Jewish American writers next to a diverse group of foreign-born Jewish writers who have relocated to Anglo North America. Given the expectations raised by the chapter’s title, it is somewhat disappointing to find that Aarons subsequently deals only with an isolated case study, the story “Yom Kippur in Amsterdam,” by Maxim Shrayer, which she reads as epitomizing “the central tensions and patterns [in] this growing body of literature” (p. 33).

Historian and theologian Eli Lederhendler turns to “Israel and America in Jewish American Writing” in chapter four, noting how, since Roth’s Operation Shylock (1993), Israel as a literary topos has been recurrently imagined as Other in Jewish American writing, “an authorial, aesthetic, artistic invention” (p. 60) standing in opposition to America as diasporic home/land. The historian’s main focus is how Israeli politics, the public discourse on Zionism, and the unresolved territorial conflict inform contemporary Jewish American fiction, specifically Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am. Lederhendler’s argument is appealing, yet his discussion of the ways in which these issues are represented in the novels could have been developed in more detail.

Two comprehensive and well-argued chapters, on race and gender respectively, serve as closure to the Concepts section. Dean Franco traces an outline of “Jewish American Writing and Race” in chapter five, focusing on the particular “in-betweeness” of American Jews as they transitioned from racial other to assimilation as whites. Particularly compelling is his argument on how Jewish Studies and Ethnic Studies evolved in non-intersecting ways within American academia, a mutual disregard that Franco attributes to a number of causes. This opacity between the disciplines was first problematized in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (1998), whose editors conceptualized the American Jew as lacking a fixed identity. In this context, Franco examines two 1990s studies on mutual representations of Blacks and Jews in literature or the public space,¹ and some recent monographs that “complicate the premise that Jewish racial identities are multiple, co-constituted...