we steer clear of using such hyphenated titles as “Jewish- American writers” and “Jewish-American literature.” Those terms have always been fraught and writers themselves have protested their indiscriminate use. Such terms are preloaded with ill-defined meanings, implying hyphenated identities, hybridized consciousnesses, and crises of identity. Such states of mind, these days, are barely on the map at all. In our own estimation, the label has lost its utility even as the literature it describes has grown robust.
Significantly, we note that since the turn of the 21st century, an increasing number of Jewish writers may be Americans according to their current locales, but are certainly not so by birth. New Jewish writing seems to have more in common with the broad currents of contemporary American fiction, so much of which is the work of émigrés.
There are no longer Jewish mothers and references to bagels and baseball and assimilationist dreams. The voice and the worldview have been stretched, the conceits focused not just on history, but also on a Jew’s connection to a broader history.
three developments stand out: 1) The growth of historicism and the emergence of the collective self, the “we” and “us” of the historical self replacing the “I” and “me” of earlier fiction; 2) The appearance of the researched novel as a vehicle for this historicism. 3) The outlines of a new transnational or diaspora writing that recalls a century’s earlier condition of Jewish writing under the powerful influences of Zionism, Marxism, the Haskalah, the Yiddish renaissance, and the vernacular revivals of a century earlier.
Zeek's mention of the Filipina leg, Jessica Hagedorn is refreshing, considering that Filipino or Jewish literature exploring the historic bond between Israel and The Philippines is rather paltry. She is very kind, especially to aspiring writers. I remember leaning against a wall in a crowded room at NYU's APA venue, picking her brain; that, despite her notoriety for subverting discrimination against Filipinos in America with her award-winning novel, Dogeaters, I didn't expect much reciprocity from "unaccustomed earth." And still don't.
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