Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation

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by Emily Miller Budick

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published October 1998, 272 pages, paper

ISBN 0521635756

In an attempt to lend a more nuanced ear to the ongoing dialogue between African and Jewish Americans, Budick examines the works of a range of writers, critics, and academics from the 1950s through the 1980s. This study records conversations both explicit, such as essays and letters, and indirect, such as the fiction of Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Alice Walker, Cynthia Ozick, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin. The purpose is to understand how this dialogue has engendered misperceptions and misunderstandings, and how blacks and Jews in America have both sought and resisted assimilation.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Mutual Textual Criticism of Black-Jewish Identity
Crisis and Commentary in African-Jewish American Relations
Race, Homeland, and the Construction of Jewish American Identity
Cultural Autonomy, Supersessionism, and the Jew in African American Fiction
The Anguish of the Other; On the Mutual Displacements, Appropriations, and Accomodations of Culture

Series: Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture