Michael P. Kramer

The Cambridge companion to Jewish American literature

Introduction Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P. Kramer 1. Beginnings and ends: the origins of Jewish American literary history Michael P. Kramer 2. Imagining Judaism in America Susannah Heschel 3. The East European immigrants Priscilla Wald 4. Coney Island, USA: America in the Yiddish literary imagination David G. Roskies 5. Hebrew literature in America Alan Mintz 6. Multilingual Jewish American writing Hana Wirth-Nesher 7. Jewish American popular culture Donald Weber 8. Jewish American poetry Maeera Shreiber 9. Jewish American writers on the left Alan Wald 10. Jewish American Renaissance Ruth R. Wisse 11. The Holocaust and the Jewish American imagination Emily Miller Budick 12. Jewish American women writers and the race question Susan Gubar 13. Contemporary literary theory and Jewish American poetics Shira Wolosky 14. Identity matters: contemporary Jewish American writing Tresa Grauer.

Race, Literary History, and the "Jewish" Question

What is Jewish literature? Nearly two centuries have passed since Leopold Zunz first attempted to answer this constitutive question, launching the Wissenschaft des Judentums with an ambitious plan to recuperate the literature of the Jewish people. Less than a century after Zunz published the first manifesto for Jewish literary history, the field was in many ways already clearly mapped out, yet the question has persisted. Describing the transformation of the constitutive question from early Wissenschaft times to the present through an analysis of representative responses to it, this essay suggests that the persistence of the question of Jewish literature and the mixed multitude of answers that have proliferated belie the consensus that informed the discipline at its inception and has sustained it over two centuries of extraordinary political and social upheaval and change, that Jewish literature is simply literature written by Jews--that is, all Jews, regardless of any connection they may or may not have to what we commonly refer to as Jewish culture. The essay contends further that this racial definition is conceptually inescapable and that, rather than ignore it or condemn it, critics ought to deal honestly with its implications.

Beyond Ambivalence: (Re)imagining Jewish American Culture; Or, "Isn't that the way the old assimilated story goes?"

Writing about Jewish American culture in the mid-80s, Stephen Whitfield refused to be “animated by anxiety, or fear, or a mood of crisis.”1 His attitude has changed. “Both as a percentage and as sheer numbers,” he writes, “American Jewry has been declining of late, a tendency that shows every sign of continuing” (p. xi). More important, he believes, it is deteriorating qualitatively as well. He thinks, in fact, that American Jews have reached the end of an era. So he offers his newest study as a kind of Magnalia Iudaeorum Americana, as a way of recapturing the “belle époque” of extraordinary Jewish cultural achievement, particularly in the performing arts—the long fertile period that spanned the last century and produced (for instance) the musicals of Rodgers and Hart, Lerner and Loewe, and Stephen Sondheim; the dramas of Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, and Arthur Miller; the music of Aaron Copeland, Leonard Bernstein, and Beverly Sills; the songs of Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, and Bob Dylan. If American Jewry shall live anywhere, he seems to be saying, it shall live in this history. Sylvia Barack Fishman is more sanguine about the changing condition of contemporary American Jews. Building upon the Council of Jewish Federation’s landmark (and controversial) 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, she argues that Jews are not so much in decline as they are “relocating the boundaries of American Jewish ethnic identity” (p. 1). Indeed, she believes that a new social-psychological paradigm is emerging. She calls it “coalescence,” finds it everywhere (in statistical studies,

An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (review)

Habermas argues that in order to engage in this dialogue, two conditions must be met: religion must accept the authority of secular reason as the fallible results of the sciences and the universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality; and conversely, secular reason must not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith. This argument was developed in part as a reaction to the conception of the relation between faith and reason formulated by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2006 Regensburg address.