Jewish Studies as Counterlife A Report to the Academy by Adam Zachary Newton (review)

Early in my career I taught an evening course at a Jewish institution in New York City. At the beginning of one session I posed the question "what is Jewish literature?" One of my more voluble students raised his hand. "In my opinion," he said, "[Jorge Luis] Borges is Jewish literature. He was interested in Jewish themes and he liked Jewish people. It's only the parochialism of the rabbis that has prevented us from recognizing him as a great Jewish writer." It wasn't exactly the answer I was soliciting, but I tried to challenge him as he was challenging me. Was it really fair, I asked, to annex a non-Jewish writer to the study of Jewish literature? Can we define "Jewish literature" more rigorously than "things Jewish people like to read"? Most significantly, before we define "Jewish literature," don't we need to define what literature is?

The questions "what is literature?" and "what is Jewish literature?" as well as "what is Jewish about Jewish literature?" are deliberated, defined, and deferred in Adam Zachary Newton's magisterial study Jewish Studies as Counterlife. A Borgesian intensity characterizes AZN's prose—and referring to him by his initials mimics his proclivity to designate Jewish Studies throughout the book as "JS"—because like Borges he conveys the impression of having read every book ever written. He's the only writer I know of whose "Acknowledgements" include footnotes! The book consists of five chapters connected by six "interchapters" that link themes examined in the chapters, often via reference to popular culture. The volume is neither a history of Jewish Studies nor a prognostication of where it should go, so much as a deconstruction of its task, along with the challenges that make conflicts within the field so difficult to resolve.

AZN is an ideal author to pose these questions. Having served for many years as a professor of English and comparative literature at Yeshiva University in New York City, he is not a person "between two worlds," like the Russian Jewish ethnographer Sh. An-ski, so much as a latter-day Walt Whitman who contains multitudes in his command of literary theory, several national literatures, an encyclopedic knowledge of culture, and a rabbinic mastery of traditional Jewish sources. Jewish Studies as Counterlife is his sixth volume in little more than a quarter century, and it finds him now on the outside of the academy, no longer affiliated with an Orthodox university increasingly dismissive of the value of secular knowledge. That AZN is not an elder statesman in the field, but a voice crying from the wilderness, is itself a poignant rebuke of the profession he analyzes with such insight and equanimity. The discipline would be well advised to heed his voice now.

The book's final chapter focuses on a juxtaposition between medieval exegesis on Genesis 24 and the 2009 Coen brothers' film A Serious Man (which AZN refers to as ASM). This combination illustrates a fault line that is both generational and methodological: between the "hard" Jewish Studies conceived in the spirit of nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums that focuses on rabbinics, Hebrew, and the classical canon of Jewish thought, and the "soft" Jewish Studies of contemporary cultural studies, media studies, gender theory, and the anthropology of everyday life. As a literature scholar working primarily on the modern era, AZN is situated between these polarities, and few scholars can write with so much erudition and authority about the discipline as a whole. His reading of ASM offers no answers to the film's contradictory allegories because to do so would violate the Coen brothers' intentions as well as AZN's book. Instead, envisioning a Jewish Studies in which the postmodern and the premodern, the ostensibly secular and the seemingly sacred, coexist suffices for a hermeneutic.

As AZN elaborates, conceptualizing a field of study where the "hard" and the "soft" Jewish Studies cross-pollinate one another requires explication...