The Future of Jewish American Literature: Notes from a Recovering Snob

Abstract

HE AM BIDGE HTORY OF EW SH AM EICAN LITATURE 17. On this subject see Leah Garrett, Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015). 18. Bryan Cheyette, “On Being a Jewish Critic,” Jewish Social Studies 11 (2004): 49. Newton cites Gilroy briefly (516) in his section on race in the Cambridge History. Freedman mentions Cheyette in a critique of “roots” in Klezmer America, 90–91. Freedman also echoes Cheyette’s call for more theoretical engagement in his remarks on the postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha’s importance for Jewish cultural studies. See Klezmer America, 345n. 19. I’m thinking of the contributions to the Symposium “Finding Home: The Future of Jewish American Literary Studies,” especially the comparativist-inspired studies by Rachel Rubinstein, Dean Franco, and Kathy Schlund-Vials. Of all the chapters in the Cambridge History, Rubinstein’s on “Encountering Native Origins” is the most attentive in its juxtaposing desire to set Native American and Jewish American writing in dialogue: “How might Native studies,” Rubinstein asks, “vibrate alongside and even serve to reorient Jewish American literary studies, particularly in a comparative or interdisciplinary framework?” (76). For a collection of original essays inviting ways of setting Jewish American literature in dialog with a range of multicultural texts, see Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein, eds., Teaching Jewish American Literature (New York: MLA Press, 2018).