Imagining Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Contemporary American Literature (review)

Ethan Goffman’s book is the second comprehensive study of Black-Jewish relations in contemporary American fiction to appear in recent years, and it complements without diverging significantly from Emily Miller Budick’s Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation. Though less sophisticated than its predecessor, Imagining Each Other offers a historically informed, politically sensitive overview of a dynamic intertextual “dialogue” essential to our understanding of American multiculturalism and contemporary American fiction. Like Budick, Goffman examines how African Americans and Jews figure in each other’s works as symbolic markers of their own ambiguous connections to an “American” society that both promises emancipation from race and ethnicity and practices modes of racism that make ethnic and racial identifications necessary and potentially empowering. Goffman presents several authors to substantiate his claim that these two peoples have been hard pressed to imagine themselves without conjuring up the other.

Goffman aptly describes his book as “a relatively straightforward analysis of this clamorous dialogue in which Blacks and Jews are portrayed in each other’s literature, in solidarity and in conflict” (xi). His thematic readings of the literature are conventionally humanistic, though he makes obligatory references in his introductory chapter to various literary and cultural theorists. The book is a useful survey, if still burdened somewhat by the trappings of a dissertation, such as some ponderous exposition and gratuitous endnotes.

Goffman orders his book chronologically, alternating chapters devoted to African American and Jewish American texts. While some of his choices are original and his readings nuanced, his template is a now familiar narrative about African American–Jewish cultural ties from the post–World War II era to the present. That is, out of a history of mutual sympathy developed through the Labor and Civil Rights movements, a sympathy more tainted by Jewish paternalism than Jews were willing to acknowledge, tensions erupted in the 1960s that have never been comfortably resolved. Beginning with a reading of Richard Wright’s Native Son emphasizing the experiential and epistemological gap separating Bigger Thomas and the left-wing Jewish lawyer Boris Max, and showing similar points of tension in works by Lorraine Hansberry and Chester Himes, Goffman implies that the anti-Semitic hostility voiced in Black Nationalist writings of the late 1960s had long been anticipated. And Jewish writers like Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow, it seems, are more or less dishonest in their approach to African American–Jewish relations to the extent that they recognize the growing economic and social disparity between the two groups, the convoluted but historically determined process by which, in Karen Brodkin’s words, “Jews became white folks.” Goffman works harder to explain perspectives and soften the significance of volatile rhetoric than to take serious issue with his authors. Writing on behalf of a liberal multiculturalism that he sees American culture evolving towards, Goffman’s knee-jerk optimism blunts the critical edge to his recognition of the serious obstacles to its realization—obstacles represented not merely by Louis Farrakhan and various Jewish neoconservatives but also by Black America’s exceptional and insufficiently redressed history in America of slavery and Jim Crow.