Preface: “Is Milton Good for the Jews?”—A Tribute to Ernest Sirluck

In the 1950s, it was common for North American Jewish children to hear their parents react to all current events, no matter how horrible or insignificant—the Korean War, McCarthyism, Elvis Presley, or hula hoops—with the same response: “But is it good for the Jews?” The question soon became a favorite Borscht Belt punchline. Take this one (please!): “If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, did it really fall?” Answer: “I don’t know, but is it good for the Jews?”1 Although funny and self-deprecating, the punchline has serious undertones. Stanley Fish captured the gravity underlying the question “is it good for the Jews?” in an opinion piece for the New York Times in 2007. Fish could not resist turning this serious question into a joke, albeit one with a sharp edge. He also broadened the implications of “is it good for the Jews” to include all groups of people who “think of themselves as perpetually under assault”:As Fish explained, the humor turns inward while outwardly present-ing “a fiercely defensive face.” It also provides an effective means for American Jews, from Henny Youngman to Sarah Silverman, to throw their actual and potential attackers off guard, even if the sense of threat never dissipates.In his mastery of Milton’s poetry and prose, Ernest Sirluck (1918–2013) found a different but equally effective deterrent to those who might “knock on the door . . . and tak[e] it all away,” as Fish puts it. To be sure, at first glance, studying Milton and cracking Borscht Belt jokes might appear to have nothing in common. The connection becomes clear, however, if we examine Sirluck’s celebrated career as a Miltonist and his special status as the first Jewish academic to be awarded a tenure-track position in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. As Sirluck notes in his remarkable autobiography, First Generation, his role as a Milton scholar gave him “protective colouration,” meaning that the traditionally canonical poet offered Sirluck a credibility that rendered his personal identity less relevant.3 As Paul Stevens explains in his article in this issue, Sirluck’s phrase was “a kind of social or intellectual camouflage capable of deflecting or disarming prejudice, especially, in Sirluck’s case, antisemitic prejudice.” The distinguished example of Sirluck—and that of so many other eminent Jewish Miltonists—prompts the question that serves as the serio-comic title of both my preface and this special issue of Milton Studies: “Is Milton Good for the Jews?”The contributors represented here—along with Fish, Jason Rosenblatt, and Jeffrey Shoulson—first met for a roundtable session that I organized at the Thirteenth International Milton Symposium in Toronto in summer 2023. The panelists offered a series of brief, wide-ranging responses to “Is Milton Good for the Jews?” The expanded and revised versions of their thoughts on that question are now published in this special issue. Each of these essays combines scholarship on major issues in Milton studies with personal reflections on how, or if, the authors’ own Jewishness affects their engagement with Milton’s writings. For some contributors, being Jewish has little to no impact on their scholarship, while for others, Jewishness makes all the difference.What we all share in common—whether we want to or not—is the memory of the Shoah. That we work, think, and feel in the time-space that Theodor W. Adorno termed “after Auschwitz” unites us, no matter how different our commitment to Judaism might be. To be sure, given our distant historical remove from the Holocaust, we may not fully recognize how living “after Auschwitz” so deeply marks our thoughts, feelings, and actions. According to Adorno, the reason is that the existential terror which found such palpable expression in the death camps manifests itself more abstractly now that the impact of Nazi genocide and other acts of barbarism has faded in our memories.4 Yet, while it is more difficult to detect, it has not disappeared. Indeed, at this very moment in 2024, that horror has started to thicken. We can sense that they are coming for us, not just the Jews, but all vulnerable communities.At first glance, the Jews, especially those in North America, might not appear to be a vulnerable community. No one can deny that the antisemitic myth of the Jews as a subhuman, demonic people who wander from country to country and who “form a state within a state, preying on the societies in whose midst they dwell,” found its fullest expression in the Nazis’ extermination of six million Jews during the Holocaust.5 But after World War II, Jews in North America were welcomed into the top echelons of industry, government, academia, medicine, and the judicial system. Thus began the so-called Jewish Golden Age. In the 1950s, Judaism thrived in America, and the country awarded its Jews insider status. One landmark moment came in 1945, when Bess Myerson became the first Miss America who was Jewish. For American Jews, this milestone, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, affirmed that they had achieved full genetic parity with non-Jews in the United States.And yet, despite their new-found sense of themselves as full-fledged Americans, North American Jews in the Golden Age of the 1950s remained fearful that the virus of antisemitism might reemerge at any time in an even deadlier form. No wonder that they never stopped asking, “But is it good for the Jews?” According to journalist Franklin Foer, they were right to worry. In a 2024 cover story for The Atlantic, Foer convincingly maintains that “the golden age of American Jews is ending. Anti-Semitism on the right and the left threatens to bring to a close an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans—and demolish the liberal order they helped establish.”6Foer’s conjunction of Jewish Americans with “the liberal order” has a Miltonic connection through John Toland, whose Life of Milton (1698) stands side by side with his Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews (1714).7 The Jewish emancipation that Toland championed followed the Enlightenment when various Western European nations in the name of civil equality and the universal rights of man began to repeal discriminatory laws and practices designed to separate the Jews from the majority Christian community. More than a century later, Russia and Eastern European countries began to follow suit. Many European and Russian Jews signed onto the liberalism that prompted these new emancipatory measures.But Jewish emancipation in Europe and Russia was cut short when rising ethnic nationalism and economic pressures resulted in a full-throated resurgence of antisemitism. Among many other hate-fueled incidents, the 1905 pogroms in Odessa stand out: they were among the most horrific incidents of anti-Jewish violence in Russia at the time. Babies were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob.8 These pogroms also stand out for me personally because they prompted the flight of my maternal grandparents with their strong Communist convictions to New York. My grandmother, Fanya, and her sister tried to save themselves by hiding behind icons in an Eastern Orthodox Church. My grandmother recounted this story to me many times during my childhood. She would highlight the moment when someone shot her sister “right in the head.” Fanya (or, by then, Fannie) would point to the center of her forehead when she said this. In the 1960s, my mother brought my grandmother from Brooklyn to come to live with us in New Jersey. Most nights she would cry out in her sleep in Yiddish, “zay shlogn di idn” (They’re beating up the Jews).Another eyewitness account of the Odessa pogrom from local milkmen details this terrifying incident:Tellingly, in the milkmen’s report, a “knock on the door” heralds unspeakable hate crimes and slaughter. This ominous knock has an uncanny resemblance to the one that, as Fish observes, continues to haunt Jews and members of other vulnerable communities today. As Fish points out, for these communities, a question like “Is it good for the Jews?” thus remains central.This question has now gained more vital currency in recent months in the aftermath of Hamas’s vicious attacks on Israelis on October 7, 2023, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brutal retaliation not only against Hamas but also the Palestinian people. Is antisemitism different from or identical to Anti-Zionism? The answer is not so simple. Obviously, one can oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, without condemning Judaism and Jewishness as a subhuman religion and ethnicity. But, for many Jews and non-Jews alike, the Jewish state and the Jewish people are one and the same. Small wonder then that we have seen a rise in antisemitism go hand-in-hand with the Anti-Zionist, pro-Gaza protests in many American cities and on college campuses.The roundtable session out of which this special issue was born, of course, occurred long before the ongoing Israel-Hamas-Palestine war, yet none of the contributors’ work can now be read outside of that urgent context. David Loewenstein’s essay, addressing Milton’s recurrent use of the Hebraic trope of “the chosen people,” seems especially topical. Loewenstein writes that, “as an agnostic Jew, who nevertheless possesses a strong Jewish identity, I do not have a personal investment in Milton’s theology or eschatology.” But, as he stresses, he has strong feelings about the poet’s sometimes fervent commitment to national exceptionalism because, in part, the issue is of the utmost importance to our own time. Loewenstein posits that Milton’s lifelong struggle with national exceptionalism culminated in Samson Agonistes as Samson in the poem’s climax sheds his sense of Israel’s collective supremacy and acts as an individual. For me, Loewenstein’s reading of Samson Agonistes speaks volumes about his view of his own identity as both a Jew and as an American in the twenty-first century. For him, the war in Gaza represents a violent manifestation of national exceptionalism and should serve as a warning to all Americans who worship the religion of America First. In taking both Israel and the United States to task for their violent creeds of national exceptionalism, Loewenstein not only answers the question “Is Milton Good for the Jews?” but also eloquently expresses his deeply considered convictions about what is good for the Jews, the Jewish state, and America.Loewenstein’s argument against national exceptionalism illustrates what Peter Herman believes is Judaism’s defining principle: the questioning of authority. As Herman points out, when the Lord tells Abraham in Genesis that he will destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because “Their sin is exceeding grievous,” Abraham not only protests but he also questions God’s judgment: “That be far from Thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked; that be far from Thee; shall not the judge of all the earth do justly?” (Gen. 18:26).10 In Exodus, Moses similarly talks God down from destroying the people of Israel for worshipping the golden calf: “And Moses besought the LORD his God, and said, LORD, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand?” (Exod. 32:11). Herman uses these examples, among many others, to demonstrate a core value of both Judaism and Milton’s works, what Herman refers to as “calling God to account” and which he then tracks as a crucial characteristic of Paradise Lost’s narrative. In this sense, Herman proposes, Milton’s allegedly paradigmatic Christian poem is instead a deeply Jewish one.Marissa Greenberg in her essay in this issue turns from Milton’s long poems to his prose and situates these works in the twenty-first-century classroom. She argues for the value of teaching Milton in terms of the Jewish praxis of social justice, or tikkun olam. This concept in Judaism refers to various forms of action intended to repair or improve the world. Reflecting on her own personal experience, Greenberg concentrates on how tikkun olam shapes her approach to teaching the many military or military-affiliated students whom she encounters in her early modern English literature classes, especially her courses on Milton. The trauma of war often impedes these students’ success as learners. For Greenberg, Milton’s depictions of military training in Of Education, when read in relation to seventeenth-century military training books, offer valuable lessons on how to practice a “pedagogy of repair” designed specifically to help such students.Paul Stevens is similarly interested in military training, but he focuses his essay instead on the pivotal role that military service played in Sirluck’s career as a teacher, an administrator, and a paradigm-shifting Miltonist. Key to his success was what Stevens describes as Sirluck’s “talent for present occasions,” his ability to understand complex networks and to see how ordinary events and circumstances interact. As Stevens observes, in Sirluck’s military intelligence reports, he “took the welter of incoming, disparate information and reduced it to a comprehensive overview. For many, he became the eyes of the division.” The same talent finds its most stunning expression in Sirluck’s 200-page introduction to the second volume of the The Complete Prose Works of John Milton published by Yale University Press. As Stevens points out, the influence of Sirluck’s introduction has reached far beyond Milton studies. Contextualizing Milton’s prose from the 1640s within the rapidly shifting landscape of polemics in that turbulent decade, Sirluck pointed the way to the highly influential Cambridge School of early modern history, which by focusing on changing “present occasions” challenged the governing grand-narrative approach to the field.For Stevens, Sirluck’s attention to the complex ways in which our surroundings influence us was rooted in his experience as the child of Jewish immigrants who fled persecution in the Russian Ukraine to resettle in the largely German Mennonite town of Winkler in the heart of western Canada’s arid and treeless prairies. At home, the Sirluck family spoke Yiddish and celebrated Shabbos and the Jewish holidays. At school, classes were conducted in English; in the hallways and on the playground, however, students spoke to one another exclusively in the low German dialect of Plautdietsch. In these spaces and elsewhere in Winkler, Sirluck had to face daily insults about his so-called dirty Jewish ethnicity. To survive in this heterogeneous, multilingual, traditional Jewish, and profoundly antisemitic environment, Sirluck had to learn how to respond quickly to what was happening around him. It is this special skillset that would allow him to survive and thrive for the rest of his life, as a medaled soldier and eminent Milton scholar.Like Sirluck, Achsah Guibbory is a first-generation Jewish North American who became and remains an eminent Miltonist. However, her poignant life story bears little resemblance to Sirluck’s. Her father, Moses, having survived the pogrom-ridden Russian Ukraine, left home at the age of thirteen. By hook or by crook, he managed to escape to British Mandate Palestine, where he lived for more than a year in the Cave of the Minor Sanhedrin in a northern Jerusalem neighborhood. Miraculously, he came to America in the middle of World War II. Moses was a self-educated biblical scholar who was convinced that he was a prophet, appointed by God to warn his fellow men and women that the end of the world was imminent. As a child, Achsah was frightened by her father’s daily doomsday predictions. She now realizes that growing up with him helped prepare her to become a Miltonist and made her especially attuned to Milton’s apocalyptic politics and poetry. Like her father, Milton closely identified with the Hebrew prophets, especially with Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. “How strange, yet fitting,” writes Guibbory, “that I, the daughter of a self-proclaimed prophet, would in time be reading, teaching, and writing about another self-proclaimed prophet!”But while the personal story that Guibbory tells about her experiences as a Miltonist is unique, her essay touches on all the issues addressed in this special issue. Like Sirluck’s life and career that Stevens assesses, Guibbory’s narrative sheds light on the history of Jewish immigration to North America. Throughout her piece, she also echoes Herman’s claim that argument is the core value of Judaism, and she shares Greenberg’s emphasis on the Jewish practice of tikkun olam, especially in our classrooms. Finally, Guibbory reiterates with a difference Loewenstein’s critique of national exceptionalism, both in Israel and the United States. As Guibbory reminds us, the of an people is it can and a will to live to those of the of is when as an of and for and As Guibbory of an people . . . can be . . . But the of is when to and of This is palpable right in 2024, as we horrific acts of and of in the war and with the rise of Christian nationalism in the United which to America great by our of immigrants into an by any means what is the answer to “Is Milton Good for the Jews?” As the contributors to this issue is no or My own answer in its difference from another “Is Milton Jason and Jeffrey members of our have to our of Milton’s so especially through his scholarship on John Milton’s Hebraic finds a of the intellectual in in Milton’s responses to and This special issue focuses less on Milton’s with and of Jewish it how reading Milton can new and equally valuable about history, and the In this sense, I would Milton is good for the

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.