Introduction: American Jewish Writing Today

AJS Review ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-230
Author(s):  
Naomi Sokoloff
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Cynthia Ozick ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Allegra Goodman ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Thane Rosenbaum ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Exciting Time ◽  
Michael Chabon

This is an exciting time for North American Jewish literature. In the past ten years, there has been an explosion of writing by new and established authors. In the field of fiction alone, the shelves have filled with titles by such fine talent as Pearl Abraham, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Myla Goldberg, Ehud Havatzelet, Dara Horn, Jonathan Safran Foer, Joan Leegant, Tova Mirvis, Jon Papernick, Jonathan Rosen, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and many others, as well as new works by veteran writers such as Allegra Goodman, Thane Rosenbaum, and Steve Stern. Add to these names the preeminent Cynthia Ozick, and don’t forget Philip Roth, whose productivity continues unabated and whose latest novels include some of his strongest work ever. A variety of striking themes has come to the fore in this new wave of literary creativity. Notable trends include an unprecedented attention to religion (especially Orthodox Jewish life); a fascination with women’s lives and with questions of gender and sexual orientation; a concern with the experiences of the second and succeeding generations of the Holocaust; a nostalgia for and rediscovery of the old country; a consideration of new Americans in the 1980s and 1990s; and a rethinking of what it means to be a Jew in Israel and in the Diaspora.

5. Into the mainstream

2021 ◽  
pp. 50-60
Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans
Keyword(s):  
International Literature ◽  
Anzia Yezierska ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
Abraham Cahan ◽  
Cynthia Ozick ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
Grace Paley ◽  
Jewish Writers

“Into the mainstream” looks at immigrant Jewish writers in America, such as Abraham Cahan (The Rise of David Levinsky), Anzia Yezierska (Bread Givers), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories), all of whom transitioned from Yiddish into English, and analyzes Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as a transitional novel. We notice here the transition from “ethnic” to “national” writer in the careers of Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick. Much was gained and lost in Jewish literature as a result of Jews becoming a “successful minority” in America. Jewish readers have always been a voracious audience of international literature.

scholarly journals Hybrid identity in the American-Jewish literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 454-458
Author(s):  
Marina K. Bronich ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Hybrid Identity ◽  
World War ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Second World

The paper analyzes the complex relationship between becoming American and keeping up ethnic and religious traditions in immigrant families as portrayed in the works of leading American Jewish novelists who entered the literary scene after the Second World War when the back-to-the-roots sentiment was on the rise driven by the expanding multiculturalist discourse. The writings of Saul Bellow, Alan Lelchuk and Philip Roth are discussed to illustrate the different stages in the reassessment of Jewish identity.

Omri Asscher, Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. 256 pp.

2021 ◽  
pp. 281-283
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Writers

This chapter studies Omri Asscher's Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews (2020). This book employs translation to think about how two groups — American and Israeli Jews — understand and relate to one another. It stresses how adoption of different everyday languages and residence in distinct territories produced two collectives possessing divergent modern Jewish identities: when Jewish people and institutions came to mediate, manage, and regulate the social meanings of translated texts in the United States and Israel, they employed translations to define their center in contradistinction to its perceived antipode. Asscher also convincingly demonstrates how Israeli critics of the 1950s through the 1980s took pride in the literary successes of American Jewish writers, while dismissing the contents of their writing on ideological grounds. In contrast with his points about American Jewish translations of Israeli literature and Israeli translations of American Jewish literature from the 1950s to the 1980s, Asscher's broader claim about translation lacks effective substantiation.

Red Threads and Amulets: Women’s ‘Unofficial’ Life in the Family

2021 ◽  
pp. 208-251
Author(s):  
Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz
Keyword(s):  
Young Women ◽  
Jewish Education ◽  
Shape Change ◽  
Western World ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
The Family ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Religious Lives ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Everyday Context

This chapter explores unofficial domestic customs. The least visible aspect of Jewish women's lives is the individual customs or practices they perform in a domestic or everyday context, many learnt from female relatives, and the part these play in their religious lives. Individual practices are often so automatic that women do not reflect on them. In some cases, they receive so little attention from rabbis or in popular Jewish literature that women themselves discount or denigrate them as 'superstitions', even as they practise them. There has been a decline in older practices, which are more likely to be identified as magical or superstitious by women operating partly within a Western worldview, whereas more pietistic practices have increased in number among young women with higher levels of formal Jewish education. Other factors that facilitate and shape change in women's religious lives include developing technology in the Western world, such as the replacement of domestic manufacture by industrial production, leading to the demise of customs associated with these technologies, and the growing possibilities offered by the Internet in spreading knowledge of recently invented or expanded customs. Traditionalist women, though principally Western in their education and thinking, are still inextricably linked to their Jewish identity, which often includes customs and practices for which they might struggle to find a rationale, but which they are committed to observing. These customs provide a fertile field for women to adapt and reinterpret existing practices, and to invent new ones that express their most urgent concerns and aims.

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