A “Problem-Anthology”

If anthologies of essays have sub-genres, we might consider The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature to be a “problem-anthology.” As editor Hana Wirth-Nesher writes in her introduction, the book addresses itself to a conundrum. On one hand, Jewish American Literature (look ma, no hyphen!) is, by any measure, flourishing. Even in these times of contracting print outlets for publication and publicity it comprises writers of diverse backgrounds: women and men, American-born and immigrant, Ashkenazic and non-European, religiously attuned and secular, speakers of various languages, and especially, a healthy number of writers under forty who have hitched their literary fortunes to the field. If generic diversity is a strength, we find that in spades in the wide variety of genres, modes, and media treated here. “Popular” is no longer a derogation, now that (as Stephen Whitfield observes in his sprightly essay) the lines that one demarcated high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow culture have been blurred. Also flourishing are the institutions through which Jewish American writing is heralded, reviewed, awarded, and circulated; in fact, Josh Lambert’s final essay in the volume argues that these very institutions have beckoned to young writers by offering them financial support, community, and readers.But despite the evident “abundance, scope and power” (3) of Jewish American literature, it has become oddly sidelined in the academy. The two interdisciplinary fields where we might expect to find Jewish American literature ensconced—American Studies and Ethnic Studies—have marginalized it; even the field of Judaic studies, dominated by scholars of late Antiquity and Europeanist scholars of the medieval, early modern, and modern eras, tends to treat the American Jewish culture as a poor cousin, newly arrived. As the editor trenchantly notes, at the 2009 MLA this sidelining was called, somewhat polemically, a “Jewish Problem;” three years later, in the pages of MELUS, it was figured as a sort of “disciplinary exile.”It is a mark of the editor’s tact and generosity that she prefers to view the marginalization of American Jewish literature as a misreading rather than as rejection of it as “white” or even as an efflorescence of anti-Zionist fervor. At the core of this misreading is the notion that Jewish American literature is a field that essentializes and celebrates both parts of its hybrid identity rather than interrogating and criticizing them. On the contrary, argues the editor, both Jewish American literature and the academic field that studies it deserve recognition as sites of “fissures and tensions” rather than celebrations of ethnic diversity and cultural achievement.If it is the work of the CHJAL to compel that recognition, then in that pursuit, it should meet with success. To this end, the volume proposes Emma Lazarus (cited in a half-dozen essays) and to a lesser extent Horace Kallen as presiding figures who, writing from an avowedly Jewish stance, defined America as a transaction among cultures rather than as a stable national identity. Thus, Lazarus and Kallen jointly launch the argument that American Jewish culture was “always already” a matter of parsing identity as a problem for interpretation rather than stipulating it as a matter for celebration. Philip Roth (who with Lazarus leads the pack in index entries), sustains this argument throughout with his talisman of the Jewish American “counterlife.”Having rooted its campaign in these three figures, the CHJAL borrows its method, by and large, from the revisionary, post-hegemonic field of American studies. Just as American studies courses now begin with “encounter” between indigenous peoples and Europeans rather than with “discovery,” the CHJAL opens with three encounters: with the “Idea of America” (Julian Levinson), with English (Hana Wirth-Nesher), and with Native Origins (Rachel Rubinstein). And like the contemporary practice of American Studies, part 3 of the CHJAL privileges space and location as a critical categories. Immigrant narratives, read for their subjective constructions of identity by Werner Sollors in Part II, are deemphasized in Part III in favor of dialectical constructions of place and peoplehood: Michael Weingrad’s essay “Hebrew in America,” Monique Rodrigues Balbuena’s “Ladino in U.S. Literature and Song,” Dalia Kandiyoti’s “Writing and Remembering Jewish Middle Eastern Pasts,” Sarah Phillips Casteel’s “Landscapes: America and the Americas,” and Rebecca Margolis’s “Across the Border: Canadian Jewish Writing” all refresh Jewish American studies by pointing us to lesser-known texts and writers and by using the term “America” hemispherically rather than nationally. Not surprisingly, several of these essays explore possibilities for dialogue between Jewish American literature and other ethnically or racially constructed fields. Particularly nuanced is Rubinstein’s aspirational inquiry about Jewish and Native American studies, while Balbuena’s essay proposes music as a lively point of intersection between Ladino culture and Latinx studies.Also in tune with trends in American and Ethnic Studies is part 5 on “New Perspectives,” an umbrella term including “intersectionality”—crossings among the categories of gender, race, sexuality and ethnicity—and established fields of study (performance art, queer theory, the graphic novel) that are hardly new to Americanists, but might be deemed “new” in the longue duree of Judaic Studies.Thus, there is a tension—a productive tension—between Parts 1, 3, and 5 and parts 2 and 4. Part 4, grouping such topics as “The Role of the [Jewish] Public Intellectual” (a perceptive, well-wrought essay by Jessie Raber), anthologies, and translations, hews resolutely to a literary, textual focus. And part 2 features nine chronologically structured chapters on three traditional genres—albeit genre “adopt[ed], adapt[ed] and reinvent[ed].” Part 2, in other words, reminds us that we are reading a “history … of literature,” or what we used to call “literary history.” These essays perform that familiar task of navigating between coverage and selection, in sometimes idiosyncratic ways. The two fine essays on poetry in English by Wolosky and Shreiber focus on inscriptions of (and resistance to) the sacred. Also noteworthy is Michael Wood’s quirky take on a cluster of Jewish American novelists (among them Sontag, Auster, Cantor, Price and Lethem) who have precious little to say explicitly about Jewish America, but whose work suggests a distinctly Jewish skepticism about American liberties. The category of “drama” doesn’t quite contain the energies of Jonathan Freedman’s intrepid essay on “Jews and Film” (next time, several essays, please), a wild ride through such topics as “the metonymic Jew,” Jewish masculinity, Streisandiana, and the Coens’ Job, finally letting us out at the doorstep of Lena Dunham. Each of the essays in this section responsibly acquits its duty to historicize, and could be valuably assigned to undergrads or to grad students preparing for exams or dissertations.Thus, there are two questions raised by this mix of literary history and American/Ethnic studies. First, we have in hand a Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature that embraces, with exquisite critical attention and traditional scholarly values, such diverse phenomena as the graphic novel, stand-up comedy, film and video, gender-bending performance art, and popular music (including “Jewface”—who knew?). Instead of demanding that this book don the uniform of the Cambridge histories of English, American, Victorian, Early Modern, Classical, Chinese, Italian, or Spanish Literature, why not style it as The Cambridge History of Jewish American Culture? Or perhaps, Hollywood-pitch style, The Cambridge Histories meet American Jewish Culture; or is that too … Jewish?A second question relates to the four issues that constellate American Jewish culture in particular. According to Professor Wirth-Nesher, the “distinctive features of Jewish American culture that invite a reexamination of models of minority writing in America are religion, peoplehood (ethnic and cultural), race, and language” (7). We have Professor Wirth-Nesher, our best expositor of Jewish American multilingualism, to thank for the rich multilingualism of this volume, which treats works in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, and English, and includes an astute essay on translation by Anita Norich. But what sort of book would we have if these four topics provided the organizing principle of the volume? Or alternatively, launched the volume with four essays designed to guide the reader to the treatment of these themes throughout the book? One result, I’d hazard, is that religion, as both text and discourse, might receive more explicit and comprehensive treatment than it does in the present volume, where it emerges chiefly in discussions of devotional and narrative poetry. If there is room for Mickey Katz at this feast, why not Mordechai Kaplan? Why Sarah Silverman and not (American-born) David Hartman?To end on a rather parochial note, I’ll provide a postscript for Princeton’s 2001 conference, “Celebrating Jewish American Writers,” inaugurating the Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Collection of Jewish American Writers. Since 2001, Mr. Milberg has been steadily enhancing the collection with the extraordinary acquisitions that recently became the focus of an exhibition entitled, “By Dawn’s Early Light: Jewish Contributions to American Culture from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War,” iterations of which have been mounted at the Center for Jewish History and the New York Historical Society. And now, nearly two decades after the celebrations of 2001, Mr. Milberg has generously committed to establishing at Princeton a new Chair in American Jewish Studies—a chair that, far from being homeless and exiled, has been offered a warm home in American Studies. The world turns.

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