"Today," Neusner asked rhetorically, "in all the Jewish world, who - as a matter of Jewish sentiment or expression - reads an Israeli book, or looks at an Israeli painting, or goes to an Israeli play, or listens to Israeli music?" ("Is America" 124). ![]() To mention just one area: Israel had failed to become a "spiritual center for the Jewish people" because Jews around the world (and especially in America) do not look there for "stimulation," "imagination," or creative impulse. Yet, in order to make a powerful claim even stronger, Neusner undercut the cultural, political, spiritual, religious, and scholarly achievements of Israeli Jews by unfavorably comparing them to those of American Jews. Although I disagree with the assertion that by 1987 American Jews had arrived at a coherent "vision of themselves" (this would be truer for 1997 when he revised his thesis), Neusner rightly argued that Jews were building a stable, productive life in America, one that embodied and perpetuated "human value." In 1987, Neusner, the indefatigable Jewish scholar, proclaimed that "America is a better place to be a Jew than Jerusalem." "Here Jews have flourished," Neusner said, "not alone in politics and the economy, but in matters of art, culture, and learning." Moreover, since Jews "have found an authentically Jewish voice - their own voice - for their vision of themselves," Neusner concluded that "for here, now and for whatever future anyone can foresee, America has turned out to be our Promised Land" ("Is America" 121). I am not restating Jacob Neusner's polemic on America as the Promised Land for the Jews. I mean, therefore, that American Jewish signals a new, unpredicted yet vital phase of Jewish history. By legitimate I mean that in America, Jews can be deeply committed to the values, aspirations, and meanings embodied in Jewish history while at the same time remaining loyal to American institutions that ensure democratic freedoms. ![]() By homeland I mean a country where Jews are living meaningful, creative Jewish lives, and where their actions and deeds in the world reflect their Jewish identities. Golda Meir, "What We Want of the Diaspora"Īgainst the prophets of doom who have predicted the de mise of a recognizable American Jewish community, I argue that America has finally become a legitimate homeland for Jews that this hypothesis may be fully illustrated if not quite proved and that Philip Roth's recent work exudes a contemporary spirit of Jewish self-examination and cultural inquiry, a fictional essaying that in itself exemplifies a new dynamic in American Jewish life. In dramatic contrast to these caricatures, the Roth who emerges from Posnock's readable and intellectually vibrant study is a great cosmopolitan in the tradition of Henry James and Milan Kundera.Īmerican Literary History 13.1 (2001) 79-107 InPhilip Roth's Rude Truth-one of the first major studies of Roth's career as a whole-Ross Posnock examines Roth's "mature immaturity" in all its depth and richness.Philip Roth's Rude Truthwill force readers to reconsider the narrow categories into which Roth has often been slotted-laureate of Newark, New Jersey junior partner in the firm Salinger, Bellow, Mailer, and Malamud Jewish-American regionalist. Three-and-a-half decades and more than twenty books later, Roth is still at his serious "pursuit of the unserious." But his art of immaturity has itself matured, developing surprising links with two traditions of immaturity-an American one that includes Emerson, Melville, and Henry James, and a late twentieth-century Eastern European one that developed in reaction to totalitarianism. ![]() ![]() Has anyone ever worked harder and longer at being immature than Philip Roth? The novelist himself pointed out the paradox, saying that after establishing a reputation for maturity with two earnest novels, he "worked hard and long and diligently" to be frivolous-an effort that resulted in the notoriously immaturePortnoy's Complaint(1969).
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