Jew and WASP, in 20th-Century Manhattan

by  Ester Bloom for Jewniverse

Joanna Hershon's fervently readable new novel, , follows friends of different ethnicities and classes as they swerve through the awkwardness of adolescence into the complexity of middle age. Like Rich Boy, The Interestings, and A Fortunate Age, Inheritance drops Jewish strivers and alienated WASPs into the boiling pot that is 20th-century Manhattan, stirs and lets sit, and then fishes them out to examine how they and their children have changed, revealing the truth of their stripped-down selves.

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Judging the World Library of America’s Bernard Malamud Collections

By Cynthia Ozick for New York Times Book Review

Hart and Schaffner are dead; Marx, ringed round with laurels, has notoriously retired. But the firm itself was dissolved long ago, and it was Saul Bellow who, with a sartorial quip, snipped the stitches that had sewn three acclaimed and determinedly distinct American writers into the same suit of clothes, with its single label: Jewish Writer. In Bellow’s parody, Bellow, Malamud and Roth were the literary equivalent of the much advertised men’s wear company — but lighthearted as it was, the joke cut two ways: it was a declaration of imagination’s independence of collective tailoring, and it laughingly struck out at the disgruntlement of those who, having themselves applied the label in pique, felt displaced by it.

Who were these upstarts, these pushy intruders (as Gore Vidal had it), who were ravishing readers and seizing public space? Surveying American publishing, Truman Capote railed that “the Jewish mafia has systematically frozen” gentiles “out of the literary scene.” In a 1968 essay, “On Not Being a Jew,” Edward Hoagland complained that he was “being told in print and occasionally in person that I and my heritage lacked vitality . . . because I could field no ancestor who had hawked copper pots in a Polish shtetl.” Katherine Anne Porter, describing herself as “in the direct, legitimate line” of the English language, accused Jewish writers of “trying to destroy it and all other living things they touch.” More benignly, John Updike invented Bech, his own Jewish novelist, and joined what he appeared to regard as the dominant competition.

Yet it was not so much in response to these dubious preconceptions as it was to a rooted sense of their capacious American literary inheritance that all three unwillingly linked novelists were reluctant to be defined by the term “Jewish writer.” “I am not a Jewish writer, I am a writer who is a Jew,” Philip Roth announced in Jerusalem in 1963. And Bellow, pugnaciously in a 1988 lecture: “If the WASP aristocrats wanted to think of me as a Jewish poacher on their precious cultural estates then let them.” Earlier, he had asserted that he would allow no “environment” to circumscribe or confine him, and repudiated the phrase “Jewish writers in America” as “a repulsive category.”

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A Talk with Ari Shavit

Stewart Kampel for Hadassah magazine

After his book, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, was published, it sparked popular discussions and Israeli author and journalist Ari Shavit could be seen and heard on myriad talk shows. Here is Stewart Kampel’s conversation with Shavit.

For several decades, Ari Shavit, author of My Promised Land (Spiegel & Grau), has been a leading journalist and columnist for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz. He writes in English and Hebrew. Shavit, who is also a commentator on Israel’s public television channel, traces his Israeli roots to his great-grandfather, Herbert Bentwich, a well-to-do British lawyer who led a group of Zionist pilgrims to Palestine from London in 1897. Bentwich was a Cambridge-educated pedagogue who helped develop Israel’s education system after settling in the wine-producing region of Zikhron Ya’akov, and his father was a chemist at the center of Israel’s nuclear program.

Born in Rehovot in 1957, Shavit served as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces and studied philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At the time of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Shavit headed the nonprofit Association for Civil Rights in Israel and served as an unofficial spokesman for Israel’s political left. But in 1995, as suicide bombings became a monthly routine in Israel, Shavit broke with the left and wrote columns blasting the Oslo Accords as a “fraud” foisted on Israel by the Palestine Liberation Organization. Today, Shavit is considered a centrist. He is married, has a daughter and two sons and lives in Kfar Shmaryahu.

Q. Your book is getting strong reaction in the United States, from a warm embrace by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, a friend, to misgivings from Jews who believe your “promised land” is off the mark. What is your reaction to the book’s response?
A. What happened during the first week of my book’s publication went beyond anyone’s expectations, beyond my dreams. Four leading American Jewish intellectuals—David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker; Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic; Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic; and Tom Friedman—praised the book with generosity and enthusiasm, even love. It is a remarkable phenomenon. They are menschen, and I am deeply grateful.

Q. And what of the substance of the book?
A. For such a long time, the conversation about Israel has been corrupted by elements of tribalism, hate and gamesmanship, among other things. People who basically love Israel have been frustrated that it did not live up to expectations because of the occupation or ultra-Orthodox influences. This created a deep thirst. What I do in the book is to bring back a deep love of Israel in a realistic way.

Some commentators say that Israel can do no wrong or no right. Let’s relax. Let’s take a step back. Israel is a remarkable phenomenon and deserves our admiration. Because I’m such a committed Zionist, I’m very secure in my loyalty and commitment that I have no problem discussing Israel’s flaws. Zionism tried to create a nation as legitimate as any other nation. I see this as a mission. I want the book to be a launching pad to reach out to the American Jewish community. I want a fresh, new debate.

Q. How do you put the history of Israel in context?

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Tova Mirvis on Motherhood, Orthodoxy & Her Latest Novel “Visible City”

By Adina Kay-Gross for Raising Kvell

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Tova Mirvis about her new book, “Visible City,” the all-consuming nature of parenting, and the freedom that comes with accepting imperfection.

In “Visible City,” unlike your previous novels, Judaism isn’t a central theme. What took its place in this book?

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The Little Prince's Best Friend

by Zachary Solomon for Jewniverse

It's probably a bit surprising that The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's beloved 1943 children's book, is dedicated to an adult. Even more surprising is that that adult, Léon Werth, was a Jewish anarchist and leftist Bolshevik supporter.

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