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.”