Exceptional differences: Race and the postwar Jewish American literary imagination

This exploration of the shifting role of race in Jewish American literature begins in the immediate postwar period, when Time magazine trumpeted the Jewish writer as a “culture hero” and newly-anointed spokesperson for the age. To many Americans, the role of the Jewish writer was allegorical, the embodiment of countless hopes and anxieties during the post-Holocaust atomic age. For a number of Jewish American writers, however, accepting the role of representative for suffering Everymankind was not in the least an allegorical move. Beginning in this period, when many Jewish American writers and intellectuals unselfconsciously wrote from the belief that their Jewishness placed them in an exceptional position to speak for all oppressed peoples, this dissertation shifts to discuss the Jewish American literary imagination after 1967—a period during which Jews\u27 uneasy relationship to whiteness and simultaneous assumption of empathic identification with a host of racial others were challenged in fundamental ways. ^ The dissertation originates from the contention that exploring the ways in which Jewish American authors and intellectuals negotiate race and ethnicity can work against the prevalent tendency to view Jewish American literature as a monolithic narrative of assimilation and upward mobility discrete from the literature of other ethnic American writers—a literary genealogy that does not allow for the ways in which shifts in cultural value affect and are affected by literary representation. Ambivalence about the particularity of the “Jewish” in the hyphenated Jewish American is central to contemporary debates about Jewish American literary history. How Jewish American authors negotiate the thorny issue of race in America has profound implications for those seeking to understand the way in which postwar challenges to cultural pluralism radically redefined America\u27s political and literary landscape and undermined long-held beliefs in both Jewish American and American exceptionality.