The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity

By Benjamin Schreier

Benjamin Schreier argues that Jewish American literature's dominant cliché of "breakthrough"—that is, the irruption into the heart of the American cultural scene during the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley—must also be seen as the critically originary moment of Jewish American literary study. According to Schreier, this is the primal scene of the Jewish American literary field, the point that the field cannot avoid repeating and replaying in instantiating itself as the more or less formalized academic study of Jewish American literature. More than sixty years later, the field's legibility, the very condition of its possibility, remains overwhelmingly grounded in a reliance on this single ethnological narrative.

In a polemic against what he sees as the unexamined foundations and stagnant state of the field, Schreier interrogates a series of professionally powerful assumptions about Jewish American literary history—how they came into being and how they hardened into cliché. He offers a critical genealogy of breakthrough and other narratives through which Jewish Studies has asserted its compelling self-evidence, not simply under the banner of the historical realities Jewish Studies claims to represent but more fundamentally for the intellectual and institutional structures through which it produces these representations. He shows how a historicist scholarly narrative quickly consolidated and became hegemonic, in part because of its double articulation of a particular American subject and of a transnational historiography that categorically identified that subject as Jewish. The ethnological grounding of the Jewish American literary field is no longer tenable, Schreier asserts, in an argument with broad implications for the reconceptualization of Jewish and other identity-based ethnic studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Sep 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812297560

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The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS

Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania

Series Editors: Shaul Magid, Francesca Trivellato, Steven Weitzman

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature

Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity

Benjamin Schreier

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schreier, Benjamin, author.

Title: The rise and fall of Jewish American literature : ethnic studies and the challenge of identity / Benjamin Schreier.

Other titles: Jewish culture and contexts.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Series: Jewish culture and contexts | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020004257 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5257-6 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: American literature—Jewish authors—History and criticism. | Jewish literature—United States—History and criticism. | Jews—Identity.

Classification: LCC PS153.J4 S373 2020 | DDC 810.9/8924073—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004257

To Michael P. Kramer

Contents

Introduction. What’s the History in Jewish American Literary History the History Of?

Chapter 1. The History of Jewish American Literary History: Breakthrough and the Institutional Rhetoric of Identity

Chapter 2. Before Jewish American Literature

Chapter 3. After Jewish American Literature

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

What’s the History in Jewish American Literary History the History Of?

We must free ourselves from the sacrilization [sic] of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and in human relations as thought.…

Criticism is a matter of … show[ing] that things are not as selfevident as one believed … see[ing] that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such.

—Michel Foucault

Nothing testifies to the etiolation of the field of Jewish American literary study—my field—so much as the fact that so few people ever fight about anything. There are no big methodological or theoretical disputes, no open rivalries between competing theories or methodologies. One could be excused for having the impression that nothing is at stake—or at least the impression that few intellectuals operating in the field believe there’s anything at stake.

Sometimes I wonder if an alternative title for this book could have been Jews and Truth. Michel Foucault is so important for this project because he helps us understand the effects of thinking about power rather than about representation. The main function of the shift to power was to replace the self-evidence of a system of dominant representations with questions about, indeed a field of analysis of, the procedures and techniques by which power relations and the knowledge practices they organize and enable are actually effectuated. Representation tends to presume something represented, and begins and ends there, with its object of scholarly desire. But it’s the job of critical thinking to not start with the end.

Anyway, now vee may perhaps to begin.…

Ask anyone, or at least anyone who cares: the dominant event of Jewish American literary history is emergence or breakthrough—the irruption in the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley into the heart of the American cultural scene. In fact, or maybe (more cautiously) more to the point, the fact of breakthrough is the primal scene of the Jewish American literary field: the more or less formalized or academically disciplined study of Jewish American literature grew up around the consolidating self-evidence of the breakthrough narrative, and the field’s legibility and condition of possibility have from the start been articulated with it. The prevailing accounts of Jewish literature in the United States inevitably orbit, even if only implicitly or inconspicuously or once or twice removed, in the gravitational field of this central event, which also establishes an assimilationist—if also pluralist or multiculturalist—temporality that’s exceedingly easy to take for granted as culturally and socially self-evident, a before and an after of Jewish American confidence, security, and success.¹ Though Jewish American literary study, unlike its sibling U.S. ethnic literary formations (which have for at least a generation been trying to denaturalize the link between identity and body), has mostly resisted the urge to explicitly theorize itself and its practices—a refusal that’s intimate with Jewish studies’ more general difficulty or discomfort with understanding itself (that is, as an institutional entity, or even just an academic program) as political or resistant in the same way that, say, African American studies understands and is comfortable with itself (it would be interesting to see how many teach-ins about Charlottesville, for example, were held by African American studies units vs. by Jewish studies units; and it’s in any case notable that the Association for Jewish Studies has as of this writing refused to follow the lead of other professional academic organizations in denouncing Trump’s December 2019 executive order clarifying the meaning of antisemitism, with its express curbs on academic freedom)—the narrative of breakthrough has operated as a deputized proxy for the only real theory, however sporadically and insufficiently acknowledged, of Jewish American literature that has ever been able to carry any currency—either professionally, in the academy, or publicly, among lay readers of Jewish American writing: namely, immigration.² Thus, if Jewish American writing before World War II can mostly be characterized by a parochial or provincial angst, and can often easily fit into such stalwart U.S. literary historical compartments as immigrant writing or regionalism or urban fiction, categories as durable as the dependability with which they consign their constituents to a decidedly second-tier prestige—so this foundational paradigm goes—then within two or three decades of the war’s end it had rapidly shed these marginalizing limitations and come to represent American literature at its most central and innovative and ascendant, the Jewish American standing as the representative modern figure and the Jewish American writer the spokesperson for the modern condition in toto. Accordingly, as Jewish American literary study has tended, certainly in some of its recent formations, to become more diverse in focus and more sophisticated in scope, it often draws its warrant for these critical investments from—and it reproduces an image of its own intellectual responsibility in the name of—the increasing diversity, sophistication, and independence of Jews in America. Jewish American literary study persists in imagining itself as part of the enduring historical reality of breakthrough.

Significantly, in this narrative of sociocultural movement from margin to center and rear guard to leading edge, Jewish American literature dependably tracks the career of Jewish America: the breakthrough narrative of Jewish American literature normalizes itself as a straightforward—I use this term ironically, of course, informed by Antonio Gramsci’s critical keyword commonsense—and largely politically innocent reflection of or representational lens on Jewish Americans conceptualized as a population, as a mode of representational access that suppresses critical theorization in the name of instrumental or productivist—which is to say self-evident—ethnological history, leveraging its hegemony on the assumption that literary history is itself neither theoretical nor historical. This book begins in a critical suspicion about the way in which professional academic formations, including both English department–based literary study and Jewish studies–based interdisciplinarity, have taken Jewish American literature for granted—and about the way in which Jewish American literary history has itself reflected these predispositions, taking for granted its own literary historical warrant. My critical targets are the disciplinary and intellectual modes in which the Jewish American literary field’s exceptionalist estrangement from the mainstream of humanistic critical self-regard have been carried out. By historicizing the practice of Jewish American literary study and destabilizing the assumption that Jewish American literary history operates under the ethnological authority of an inquiry into the lives and times of Jews in America, I hope to make it easier for humanists to imagine and act on a critically self-aware intellectual practice. Breakthrough needs to be approached primarily as an event in Jewish American historiography, not Jewish American history.

I certainly don’t pretend that there was no institutionally housed study of writing by Jews in America before the 1950s, or that the literary intellectuals of the breakthrough invented the idea of thinking about what we now easily call Jewish American writing. To be sure, before World War II there was fiction and belles lettres being written by Jews in the United States, there were scholarly works written that took as their object the representation of Jews in English and American literature, and there was of course the persuasive tradition of nineteenth-century German-Jewish Wissenschaft des Judentums premised on the cultural-nationalist logic of a transhistorical unity of Jewish cultural expression, a tradition that, in Michael P. Kramer’s description, shifted the locus of Jewish selfdefinition from Judaism as a revealed religion to Jewishness as national character and imported and legitimized "the Romantic notion of literature as the expression and repository of the spirit or genius of a people, of its Volksgeist … as the primary justification for the study, cultivation, and dissemination of Jewish literature."³ But before the discursive innovation of breakthrough, scholarship could not yet take for granted the field unity of a canon of literature organized, defined, and essentially interpretable by the Jewish American identity of its authors; this was a postwar development and it has a history that itself cannot be extracted from the gravitational pull of the breakthrough narrative. The innovation of breakthrough was not simply to link, inevitably and unimpeachably, the Jewish authors and Jewish texts of Jewish American literature but to reorient thinking about literary texts written by Jews in America around authors as representatives of Jewish American people, experience, and culture; Jewish American literary study would professionalize over the following decades as scholarly focus shifted from the object of literary representation to its subject, from Jews as a community written about to Jews as a population writing.

This was an epistemological transformation likely encouraged (if not enabled) by the concept of Jewish peoplehood, the revisionary, 1930s-era American crossing, particularly in the writings of people like Stephen Wise and Mordecai Kaplan, of, on the one hand, Wissenschaft’s cultural nationalist investment in the Volksgeist of the Jews and, on the other, the rise of Zionism as a full-fledged political, intellectual, and nation-building movement. As Noam Pianko has argued, "The language of peoplehood translates some of Zionism’s fundamental assumptions into a vocabulary that serves as a kind of code word for nationhood, internalizing those assumptions while erasing the term nation from the conceptual vocabulary of American Jewish collectivity. The concept of Jewish peoplehood established Jewish nationalism as the central framework for defining Jewish collectivity in America by contrasting itself to explicitly state-oriented Zionism even as it relied on much of Zionism’s deeper conceptual foundation. It enabled Zionism’s conception of Jewish groupness to move from the margins to the mainstream of American Jewish life and thought."⁴ Pianko’s focus on the importance of Zionism in the history of the term demonstrates that the concept of Jewish peoplehood, which was designed to evade some of the restrictive implications of a strictly religious or theological concept of Jewish identity through a more secular and expansive concept of civilization, has a fundamentally nationalistic pedigree; but at the same time, answering the anxieties of a community already wary of charges of dual loyalty, the ideology of peoplehood tended to suppress explicit mention of—and focus on—nationalism and Zionism. Thus, just as Zionism tended (and tends) to suppress attention to alternative or divergent histories of links between land and identity, so the concept of Jewish peoplehood incited a more or less unitary concern with a coherently Jewish narrative.

More pointedly, therefore, the elaboration of breakthrough was often framed in triumphalist terms (colored at times by a touch of the tragic) by critics for whom the narrative of emergence was also crucially and fundamentally bound up with a reflexive structure of self-recognition in a persistent scholarly affect Kramer has helpfully identified as critical narcissism. For Kramer (as for many others) Jewish literary study should be seen in the context of the academic recovery of ethnic literature in the second half of the twentieth century, and this political history had important consequences—what I might call subcognitive consequences—for the professional study of Jewish literature: the profound sense of cultural affinity that drew African Americans to African American literature, Asian Americans to Asian American literature, and American Jews to Jewish American literature also tended to suggest strict protocols about the study of ethnic texts—about who is authorized to interpret texts and what sorts of interpretations are acceptable. That is to say, it produced a tendency toward critical narcissism.⁵ As Leslie Fiedler, one of the leading breakthrough intellectuals, put it in a late-career reflection on his writing about Jewish American literature, "It was not, I realize now, a disinterested venture, since I thought of myself at the beginning of my writing career as part of the movement that had carried such children of immigrant Jews from eastern Europe from the periphery to the center of American literary culture—making their experience, our experience, a part of the communal dream stuff, the myth that makes all Americans one, whatever their ethnic origin. More generally, he admits that over his professional life, whatever the topic, he continued to write, willy-nilly, from a Jewish point of view, as a Jew.⁶ The frequency with which first person pronouns like us and our appear in the writings on Jewish American literature of Fiedler and his fellow breakthrough literary intellectuals is notable, and the repeated investment in constructions like our language and our culture as pervasive shibboleths is impossible (and would be foolish) to miss. For the vast majority of the breakthrough literary intellectuals, that is, the critical study of Jewish American representativity was fundamentally autocritique. I am less interested in the ways in which Jewish American literary study enforces protocols for the positive representation of Jews than Kramer hopes his term critical narcissism describes, but I do think the term helps illuminate how the exceptionalist insiderism that breakthrough inherited from the Wissenschaft tradition and Kaplan’s revisionary speculation on Jewish peoplehood" matured in postwar thinking about Jewish American literature, constituting as well a legacy for the consolidation of professional Jewish studies.⁷

The field of Jewish American literary study ignores this history at its peril—or at least at the risk of its irrelevance. The ethnic literary formations we often associate with the emergence of multiculturalism and ethnic studies arose from and as institutional deputies of active political movements; and they still often identify themselves as part of this struggle. In its institutional interdependence with the narrative of breakthrough, however, Jewish American literary study in a sense emerged as part of a perception that a political struggle was in fact over. And as a result, to the extent that it continues to constitute itself as a technology for interpreting the history of what Jews do, say, and write,⁸ and to the extent that it instantiates itself in the assumption that Jews are always recognizable and always somehow continuous with all other Jews wherever or whenever they might be found, Jewish American literary study reproduces the grounds of its own redundancy, if not in fact its own obsolescence. If thought is to be something other than an ethnologically descriptive instrument in the toolbox of demographic accountancy—and, perhaps more important for some potential readers of this book, if Jewish American literary study is to approach prestige parity with its sibling academic formations within the literary, ethnic, and Jewish studies complexes—then scholars cannot take for granted the representational capacities of the word Jewish—not in the study of Jewish literature, and not in Jewish studies more generally. Rather, we have to approach such use—critically interrogating it even as we unavoidably reproduce its modes and applications—as a productive act of theorizing and analysis far more significantly than as an ultimately deterministic act of reference or reflection. My polemical goal—my struggle, if you will—is to make legible a nonethnological concept of Jewish identity, one that can liberate a critically minded literary practice from vassalage to a restrictively conceived Jewish studies–based, Wissenschaft-derived, and nationalism-informed—in a word, Zionist, as I’d like to expansively and critically use that term—orthodoxy that takes history for granted as the fundamental scholarly discipline.

Eve Sedgwick opens her book Epistemology of the Closet by enumerating the Axioms or theoretical principles that orient her work; it is an attempt, as she puts it, to articulate some of the otherwise implicit methodological, definitional, and axiomatic groundings of the book’s project.⁹ Given the degree to which exceptionalist resistance to criticism of first principles (or indeed to any sustained theoretical self-awareness) largely governs the way academics and other thinkers have often been able to (or indeed have cared to) imagine the field of Jewish American literary study and the intellectual labor it organizes and authorizes, I take Sedgwick’s approach as a kind of model here in my own Introduction. My hope is that in laying out the postulates or analytical starting points from which I launch my critique of the field I can make clear the polemical stakes of my project in this book and, more significantly, make it a little more difficult to dismiss, disregard, creatively overlook, or otherwise ignore that critique.¹⁰

A note for the perplexed (and perhaps for the impatient): I admit I’m being a bit playful here, but I hope nonetheless to make obvious that I straddle the line here in my axioms between the descriptive and the normative.

1. We need to put more effort into trying to think about identity under the banner of epistemology rather than ontology. Please.

The countless occasions on which I have been misunderstood in talking about identity suggest that I need to be exceedingly careful and clear about how I’m using the term. By identity I mean to indicate not some kind of stuff, an ontological attribute in those whom we identify, but an epistemological or interpretive frame that allows us to do that identifying. The stuff side of the ledger is obviously important, but the other, frame, side has been woefully underexamined in Jewish American literary study. I’m not using identity as a way of naming the historical object inhering in Jews that grounds our practices of categorizing them—as an alternative to, but largely commensurate with, such historical objects as race, religion, ethnicity, culture, and so on, concepts that end up grounding what are inevitably essentialist projects under guise of another name (and concepts as well that Michael P. Kramer has helped us think critically about under the banner of metonymic ethnicity¹¹). Rather, I’m focused on identity more as way of naming the form of thought, the discursive machine, the conceptual apparatus that, precisely by spectrally producing the presence of such an object, grounds our professional practices of categorizing Jews. Which is to say that my interest in the concept of identity is entirely theoretical and a priori (and therefore has nothing necessarily to do with Jews): my point is simply that we cannot talk about Jews, we cannot engage in Jewish studies (just as we cannot engage in any kind of ethnic studies, or queer studies, or American studies, or American literary studies, or modernist studies, etc.), without a concept of identity. I used to think this is pretty obvious, but I guess I was wrong.

2. Jewish American literary study is unduly—stubbornly—burdened by the assumption of representativity, by an expectation that it offers, fundamentally, a reflection of Jewish American historical reality.

Why does so much Jewish American literary scholarship approach its field as if its task were at some basic level ethnographic? That’s not exactly a rhetorical question, but I certainly consider the asking of it more critically productive than a possible answer might be; and indeed, on the one hand I don’t really have such an answer, at least so long as we emphasize the Why that begins the question, but on the other hand in this book I endeavor to narrate the institutional and intellectual paths taken to get us to this situation, with emphasis on an implied how. If someone were to tell you that the most important thing—indeed, the fundamental, the primary, thing—that scholarship on Moby Dick can do is to tell us about whaling or whalers, you’d call that person a lunatic. Laughable, yes, but the truth is that the Jewish American literary field is overshadowed by an often unquestioned assumption that the primary value of its literary archive is its ancillary function supplementing the historical record of Jews in America, an assumption taking form in practices ranging from the widespread habit of anchoring Jewish American literary criticism with historical claims about Jews in America to such maddening customs as taking for granted the scholarly value of assaying how easily (Jewish) scholars can identify with characters in Jewish American literary texts or blithely claiming that Nathan Zuckerman is the alter ego of Philip Roth, zl. To be sure, these and many more allied practices do not characterize the entirety of the field’s work. But it behooves us to ask what the Jewish American literary field would look like were it to discipline itself as something other than a repurposed ethnographic—or autoethnographic—history oriented by a set of questions about how Jews are represented (or represent themselves) in and by cultural texts. Any responses to such an inquiry would likely have to route themselves through questions about what Jewish American literary study would look like were it to ask critical questions about how knowledge practices have produced Jews as objects and subjects of discourse. Granted, most identity-based studies fields are burdened by at least some kind of expectation of representativity (often refracted through Kramer’s cultural affinity)—the particular recognizable case reveals what a subjectified they or objectified we" are like—but I think this problem is exacerbated in Jewish American literary studies to the extent that the field has mostly refused a sustained project of critical self-theorization.

In 1845, in his eleventh and final thesis on Feuerbach, Karl Marx famously wrote that idealist philosophy up to that point had assumed that its task was merely to interpret the world in various ways; Marx’s point was that thought in fact can (and indeed does) exert force in and change the world. I have written this book in the hope that we’re at a point in the field-history of Jewish American literary study at which this difference is becoming urgent; certainly the ongoing debate about the role of Zionism and Israel in the politics and practices of Jewish identification in the United States, both in the American Jewish community and in American politics more generally, and especially the unequivocal fact that—at least as a problem strictly of biomass if not biopolitics—Zionism is far more pressingly significant as a lever of identification in the United States as a white Christian issue than as a Jewish issue (indeed, long before Zionism became a Jewish political movement in the late nineteenth century, the restoration of Jews to Palestine had been an established evangelical Protestant project), suggests at the very least that the links and relays between Jewishness and representation—links that are now taken for granted at so many levels—are neither self-evident nor secure. To be sure, strong institutional influences enforce the conservatism of intellectual habits and scholarly practices premised on the assumption of a reflection theory of literature, culture, and indeed thought, but I’m beginning to think that if they are still dominant, they may no longer be hegemonic.

3. Jewish studies is the analysis not of Jews, but of discourses about Jews; or, alternatively, Jewish studies is not about Jews, but about how we know about Jews.

This is not a book primarily about Jews. To be honest, and also more to the point, the book isn’t even really about Jewish American literature, strictly speaking, either, at least insofar as it doesn’t comprise a series of readings of texts already taken to be representative of—contained in and typical or characteristic of—the set Jewish American literature. It’s about, rather, Jewish American literature’s aboutness. It analyzes the professionalization of an institutionally situated way of talking about Jewish American literature, and is therefore about the historical development of a discursive link between Jews and what would become knowable as the Jewish American texts they write: it’s about the investment of literature by and about Jews in America as a culturally capitalized object of cultural knowledge—a coordination and an investment logically informed by a larger project to know about and manage populations that is characteristic of a postwar regime of knowing. This coordination between discourses oriented around the investment of Jews as an object of knowledge established itself so quickly and so unequivocally during just a couple of decades after World War II that within a generation it had become hegemonic—to the point that it is still almost entirely taken for granted that the study of Jewish American literature (like Jewish literature more generally) is, primarily, a privileged site providing knowledge of Jews. In other words, this book is about how Jewish American literature came to be regarded as being a privileged record of Jewish life in America via the epistemological medium of its identifiably Jewish authors. But to the extent that Jewish American literary study—and indeed Jewish studies more generally—takes its current formations and practices for granted, forgetting its own history and declining to investigate or even acknowledge the discursive logic in which those formations and practices are grounded, its pursuit of field mastery will continually reenact and reproduce a blindness to its own instrumentality.

Kandice Chuh has admitted an irritation with aboutness, specifically with the regularity and normativity of the practices and questions organized by and around it, which is to say with a process of normalization that, as she points out, plays out in such ordinary academic activities as the creation of doctoral exam lists, course titling, and departmental hiring practices, all of which still largely follow the dogmatism of mastery-of-field ideology. Bracketing for now the fact that very few hiring committees in the last decade or so have presided over searches for specialists in Jewish American literature, such activities unfold in an institutional context that posits fields and knowledge formations as external to each other, and with the former dependent on—and about—the independent latter. By directing our "attention to how aboutness functions as an assessment of relevance," Chuh argues that questions about what a given field or canon is about—some canon of literature marked by (almost always as the expression of) some ethnically identifiable group—or what is ethnically identifiable about a given text are intellectually impoverished and fuel a complacency that insulates fields from each other and ignores the historicities of knowledge work, the inevitable result being that we come to think of fields as more or less self-evident.¹²

With Chuh’s critique in mind, we need to remember that neither the literary-historically recognizable categories Jewish American literature (or its immediate-predecessor formations, like American Jewish novel or American Jewish writing or Jewish-American writing) or Jewish American writer nor the ethnographic historicist culturalism of our current mode of ethnic literary study is self-evident, and that they have histories. Specifically, in this book I chart the appearance of a discourse that articulated an emergently legible field of literary production to a newly conspicuous ethnic population—ethnicity itself a term that was undergoing change and elaboration during precisely the same period—in a national context in which the post–civil rights movement and nascently multiculturalist United States was revising how it understood groups and the population-bound cultures through which they are recognized as unified. So I might revise my opening claim: this is not a