Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon
Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse
Edited by Justin Daniel Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint and Rachel Rubinstein
Harvard University Press, 750 pages, $75.

In September 1976, Commentary printed the letters of three novelists who had taken umbrage at appraisals of their work, in a previous issue, by a relatively unknown Yiddish professor named Ruth Wisse. Cynthia Ozick, the most fervent of the respondents, judged Wisse guilty of a “fundamental (and, for a good reader, unforgivable) critical error”: confusing literature with sociology.

This old contretemps bears recalling less for its substance — authors and critics have bickered about the relationship between fiction and life for centuries — than for what it reveals about Wisse’s personality. (more…)

Sam Astrachan was only 21 when his first novel appeared, in 1956; everyone, including his professor Lionel Trilling and his editor Robert Giroux, thought he would be the great American Jewish novelist. To learn what happened, read my essay on Astrachan, which appeared today on Nextbook.org.

I’ve recently published two scholarly articles about comic strips and graphic novels. Neither is available online for free, unfortunately, but if you have access to Project Muse, and are curious about a fascinating multimedia phenomenon from the 1910s, please check out “‘Wait for the Next Pictures’: Intertextuality and Cliffhanger Continuity in Early Cinema and Comic Strips,” which appears in Cinema Journal 48:2 (Winter 2009): 3-25.

The other essay, on Will Eisner and Jules Feiffer, appears in The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches, edited by Ranen Omer-Sherman and Samantha Baskind, and published by Rutgers University Press. It’s called “‘Wanna Watch the Grown-Ups Doin’ Dirty Things?’: Jewish Sexuality and the Early Graphic Novel.”

Breadowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %&*!
By Art Spiegelman
Pantheon. 72 pages. $27.50.

Publishing a literary masterpiece can be a little like creating a golem, it seems: first you’re just proud you were able to create it, then you’re astonished to see how powerful it becomes, and then, suddenly, you’re scared you can’t control it. That’s been Art Spiegelman’s experience, at least, with Maus, one of the finest comic books ever printed and among the great literary achievements of the past quarter century. One panel of Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! – a recent series of Spiegelman’s brief autobiographical comics – makes this clear: “It’s no use…,” Spiegelman’s avatar says, glancing back at a monolithic mousy representation of his father: “No matter how much I run I can’t seem to get out of that mouse’s shadow.” (more…)

Ludwig Lewisohn doesn’t get much press these days, but he was the most famous Jewish writer in America before WWII, and his books were praised not just by literary heavyweights like Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Mann, but also by Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. Take a look at my appreciation of this master over at Nextbook.org.

What do you get when you cross Philip Roth with Alfred Hitchcock? That’s the subject of my latest piece for Nextbook.org, a look at a little-known Roth short story called “The Contest for Aaron Gold,” and its adaptation for TV in 1960.

Of the many insults and epithets launched at the Jews through the ages, none has quite the cultural pedigree of “dirty Jew.” Writers in many languages have seized on it again and again, mostly because it is not only harsh and hateful, but also vague. Dirtiness can refer to anything from a lack of proper hygiene to an ideological failing to a moral taint; being called “dirty” often has something to do with sex, though not always. A history of the term’s appearances in literature and film suggests not just changing perceptions of Jewishness over the years, but also a transformation in the way we talk about “dirtiness.” (more…)

Today Nextbook.org published an essay I wrote about the neglected African-American novelist John Oliver Killens, in whose blistering novel, And Then We Heard the Thunder (1963), a Jew teams up with some disaffected African-American soldiers to wage bloody war on the racist U.S. military at the end of WWII. It’s a bizarre and almost entirely forgotten moment in the strange and often tragic history of black-Jewish relations in American literature. Please take a look over at Nextbook.

“I keep kosher. Sort of.” I’ve always felt the need to add a disclaimer to the end of that sentence, because I don’t keep kosher the way that some people do. This comes up whenever I’m trying to explain what I do and don’t eat to someone, Jewish or not, who isn’t intimate with the Jewish dietary laws. Conversations like these can be particularly confusing for the non-Jewish partners or family members of Jews who practice some form of kashrut, because the varieties of what “kosher” can mean are perplexing at best, and sometimes downright maddening.

Personally, I don’t eat chicken and beef that haven’t come from a kosher butcher, nor have I ever tasted pork (no big loss, from what I hear) or shellfish (which, I’m told, is more of a sacrifice). Still, I happily order fish and dairy dishes in non-kosher restaurants, and, what’s more, I don’t even ask the waiters whether my mushroom risotto’s been softened with beef stock, even though, as the author of a cookbook, I know that it almost certainly has been. When it comes to the animal-based oils used in frying, to the presence of rennet in cheeses, and to unknown species of fish when I’m dining out abroad (what North American really knows, offhand, what lotte or rochen correspond to?), my policy is simply Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. If there are no cubes of ham staring up at me from the split pea soup, I tuck in and hope for the best. And I turn a blind eye even though I know my maguro may have snuggled up next to some uni in a sushi chef’s display case. (more…)

Just in time for the new Jewish year 5678 (a gut un zis yor!), here’s an essay on the extraordinary, unfortunately neglected writer Myron S. Kaufmann, in whose 1957 bestseller, Remember Me to God, I discovered a character bearing some striking similarities to myself. Take a look over at Nextbook.org.