Publishing Jews at Knopf

Abstract:Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is one of the most prestigious and influential publishing houses in the United States—and it was founded and has been largely staffed by Jews. These Knopf, Inc. staff members were regularly faced with the question of what kind of books about Jews should be published by a nonsectarian house like theirs, with famously high artistic and commercial standards. Thus the extensive Knopf, Inc. editorial records constitute an extraordinary archive reflecting the shaping of the “horizon of the publishable,” in this case in terms of representations of Jews in America. Knopf, Inc. editors envisioned a specifically Jewish market for books, which they saw as one they could and should address. They understood that Jewish market not through data but through personal experience, and consequently published European Jewish literature in translation while remaining skeptical of works treating Jewish life in America. References to Alfred Knopf’s Jewishness also served as a defense for authors accused of anti-Semitism, including H. L. Mencken and Raymond Chandler. As a whole, the case of Knopf, Inc. begins to answer the question of how and why it matters that throughout the twentieth century, Jews became increasingly prominent in the field of American publishing.