Oh, that Jewish problem

“Does the English Department Have a Jewish Problem?” This was the bait to trap unwary Modern Language Association conventioneers into attending a panel discussion earlier in the week. According to a story by Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed, six somewhat prominent literary scholars sat together at a long conference table in the Philadelphia Marriott on Sunday evening to mope that American Jewish writing is “not a hiring priority” and “not considered a research specialty” in most English departments, because Jews are not viewed as being “distinct from other white ethnic groups.” To most academics the Jews are no different from other white people, and they are no better off when they insist that they are different: “Jewishness has been associated with Israel” and therefore with “colonialism and racism.”

When Jewish writers are included on the reading lists for courses in ethic literature the students complain they do not belong, because American Jews have not experienced the same “truly marginal status of people of color.” They have “have found their place” in American society, and need no extra boost from the literary curriculum. Thus nearly every English department in the country has at least one specialist apiece in black literature, Native American literature, what is clumsily known as Latino/a literature, and sometimes even Asian-American literature. But few have anyone who specializes exclusively or even primarily in American Jewish literature. Aside from antisemitism, which the panelists were quick to dismiss as an explanation, why should that be?

The answer is not hard to find.

English professors these days pursue many different research interests from many different angles—they share neither a common body of knowledge nor a common repository of methods—but they are unified by one thing, which functions as a shibboleth among them. They are actively hostile to the social order. Their professional obligation, as they conceive it, is to sow the seeds of indignation and discontent, to nurture the green shoots of ressentiment, to give voice and expertise to oppositionality. “Ethnic literature” is included in the literary curriculum to challenge white privilege. But American Jewish writing does not readily lend itself to such a project.

There are exceptions, of course—the Communist propagandist Mike Gold comes to mind, along with a few other proletarian novelists of the ’thirties—but for the most part American Jewish writers have been absorbed with something other than social problems. If Jewish literature, as the critic Baal-Makhshoves famously said, is one literature in more than one language, then several questions confront the Jewish writer before anything else. In what language is he going to write? If he decides upon the landsprakh, the vernacular of the gentile majority, will he succeed in thoroughly cleansing his style of all traces of Jewish bilingualism? Not even a writer like Philip Roth, who found that he must write in “the jumpy beat of American English,” was able to be the writer he wished to be without occasional recourse to Yiddish and the liturgical vocabulary of Judaism.

Even to wrestle with the language question, to forge his style in the wrestling match, is to locate the writer within Jewish literature. And as a direct consequence, his writing in larger or smaller part will be constructed as an “internal dialogue between Jews,” which the great critic Ruth R. Wisse calls “the natural form” of Yiddish and perhaps all Jewish writing. But if he is also an American writer, who is equally determined to enter into dialogue with great American writers like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway (all of whom had Jewish problems of their own), then his writing will necessarily be—to use the word in its only legitimate sense—multicultural.

Any scholar who would specialize in American Jewish writers, then, would have to master both American and Jewish literature—and not merely popular Yiddish fiction, but the real literature of the Jews, the religious literature of the Jews, starting with the Hebrew bible and plunging into the sea of the Talmud. He would, in short, have to be a scholar of Jewish religion as well as literature.

All of which he would also have to bring into any class on American Jewish literature. And none of which does very much to work up righteous indignation toward the wrongs of American capitalism. Is it any wonder English departments are little interested in advancing the massively bookish and time-consuming study of American Jewish literature?

Update: The proper name for the field, by the way, is American Jewish literature. To reverse the adjectives is a blunder. Those who have created the literature are American Jews, not Jewish Americans.

Update, II: To speak plainly, English departments do not need American Jewish literature as a pretext to hire Jews, who are distributed throughout the subspecialties of English. Advertising for positions in African American or Native American or Latino/a literature is a way to guarantee “minority” applicants and then to engage in employment discrimination without appearing to do so.