Liberal Anti-Judaism and the Victims of Modernity

William Styron's Sophie's Choice (1979) has long been a subject of adverse criticism within Holocaust studies, and it was initially generated by Cynthia Ozick's prepublication polemic against Styron, "A Liberal's Auschwitz" (1975), in the spring edition of the aptly entitled journal Confrontation. Ozick's delegitimation of Styron and his novel was, in turn, exhaustively taken up by Alvin H. Rosenfeld in an essay for Midstream, "The Holocaust According to William Styron" (1979), and was developed further in Rosenfeld's A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (1980) and Imagining Hitler (1985). As this argument has been recently contested in Sue Vice's Holocaust Fiction (2000), I heartily recommend a reading of Vice's chapter on Styron next to "Jews Without Memory" and its earlier incarnations.

Professor D. G. Myers adds little to these decades-old attacks on Styron and ignores virtually all of the critical material on Sophie's Choice in the 1980s and 1990s, which can be found in Holocaust Fiction. Nor does he add anything of substance to the manifold deliberations on Jewish uniqueness and the Holocaust which have been usefully summarized by Michael Marrus in The Holocaust in History (1988) and by Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). Professor Paul Breines is right to concentrate on the underlying assumptions that underpin Myers's essay and I will follow his lead in this regard. At the same time, I believe that it is essential to move beyond the identity politics--whether neoconservative (Myers) or liberal assimilationist (Breines)--which have unfortunately set the terms of their exchange. The key point is not to replace one version of American-Jewish identity with another, as Breines has done, but to shift the debate away from the futile question of identity. While I disagree wholeheartedly with Myers (there is barely a sentence of his essay which I would not wish to challenge), he has certainly raised some important issues: namely the question of "Liberal Anti-Judaism" and the relationship of Western modernity to its (Jewish) victims. While I agree completely with Breines's critique of Myers in the first half of his essay (which is a stunning demolition), it is disappointing to see how Breines finally collapses his argument into a rather crude and anecdotal account of American-Jewish assimilation (whatever that may be).

In Britain, where I work, there has been a considerable dispute on the nature of "Liberal Anti-Judaism" and, in a familiar extension, the ways in which modernity can be viewed as complicit with, to name the most obvious issues, the history of European anti-Semitism or colonialism or slavery or genocide. On a local level, the question of "Liberal Anti-Judaism" is a key concern of much Anglo-Jewish historiography and is a central element in much recent work in Anglo-Jewish literary studies. Those (at one time British-based) theorists of modernity and its victims which I find most useful, not least in relation to Jews and Jewish culture, include Bauman, Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, and Gillian Rose. The disagreement in all of these fields concerns the nature of liberalism and modernity and the extent to which these supposedly inclusive formations should be placed at the heart of the history of European and Western oppression.

From the viewpoint of American Literary History, it is clear that these questions open up a range of comparative or transnational possibilities. An Anglo-American perspective has, for instance, recently proved itself particularly fruitful with regard to the question of literary anti-Semitism, among much else, as can be seen in Alex Zwerdling's Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London (1998) and Jonathan Freedman's The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (2000). Although not a central issue in Zwerdling's Improvised Europeans, both books are useful interpretations of the way in which anti-Semitism functions within liberal culture. Freedman, in particular, has mapped out a...