Final Paper Proposal
I would like to discuss Jewish literature and its influence on today’s American
literature as my final paper proposal. Jewish literatures are works created by Jews on
various Jewish themes, the most famous ancient Jewish literature is known as Biblical
literature and rabbinic literature. As lectured in the class, the foundation of Jewish
literature has produced with the modern emergence of secular Modern Jewish culture.
Modern Jewish literature is included with Israeli literature, Yiddish literature and Jewish
American literature. I will be more focusing on the Jewish American literature as my topic
and main discussion in final paper. In the final paper, I am going to analyze some influential
American Jewish literature masterpieces and discuss what impacts have these literatures
made on American culture and how those literature change the todays’ Jewish culture
mainstreams.
The reason I am planning to choose Jewish literature as my topic is that I believe
Jewish literature has become an indispensable part of modern American literature in many
ways. Not only Jewish literatures achieve many accomplishments in literary circle, but also
provide a significant platform to let readers, other religions to learn the Jewish culture in
an opening and public way. And through class readings, like “Hear my story” written by
Michael Garbutt, I think Jewish culture does not only represent for Jews or Jewish culture,
instead it stands for many other immigrants from all over the world and reveals lots of
common cultural problems including assimilation, redemption and border existence.
The discussion of Jewish literature is quite appropriate topic as the final paper. The
lecture this semester mainly covers the most aspects of Jewish identity that includes culture,
tradition, food, behaviors and lots of other things. Jewish literature can be viewed as portrayal of
Jewish culture. Admittedly, Jewish literate has its own special values that is the other social
ideology can no the replaced, which makes us not able to ignore and underestimate the role of
Jewish literature in society.
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Weekly Assignment
The influence of Jewish literature over the current American literature can be dated
back to a century ago if we include the literature that the Yiddish immigrants brought with
them around 1885-1935. Most of these writers were mainly secularists and radicals. The
Jewish-American writers always exhibited strong liberal thus secular ideas ever since 1877
poetry. The mediums that they used to express themselves was poetry, newspapers, novels,
theater and scholarly books, papers, and pamphlets. Among the writers that brought
“Jewishness” to America was Morris Winshevsky. He was among the people that promoted
socialism but had little content relating to Jews in his poetry. He was also a devotee of the
Jewish enlightenment called the Haskalah that emphasized secularity. He, however,
represented a revolt against the religion during the end of the 19th century according to
Nelson and Emmanuel Sampath, 2005.
As noted by Gerhard Falk there were innumerable more authors who began with
memoirs and petitions but only a few stands out as contributors to the current day writing in
America. Morris Rosenfeld is one of these writers, and he was the principal representative of
the “sweatshop” poets. These were the poets that reflected on the radicalism of that time
which was as a reaction to the misery they went through living in slums, Jewish worker’s
exploitation and the desperation of their masses. Rosenfeld was too much agnostic, and it was
his radicalism that led to the rejection of the religion in Europe. Another great and prominent
voice was that of Emma Lazarus, who created “The New Colossus” on the statue of liberty. It
became the most significant highlight of the American migration while another writer
Gertrude Stein turned out to be the most influential in the early 20th century using her prosestyle.
Most of the novels of the Jewish-American literature focused their attention on the
pulls that existed between the Jewish traditions and the secular society. These were felt by the
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immigrants that passed through Ellis Island. Ludwig Lewisohn was born in the United States
if two German Jewish immigrants and was among the writers that wrote about the fate of the
immigrants. All of this literature rejected religion and tried to find a way that pragmatism and
realism were to be more superior while attempting to solve the problems that man was
affected by rather than the belief of anything supernatural. Apart from Ludwig Lewisohn and
Meyer Levin who defended being Jewish, the other writers all leaned to a political standing
who viewed their being Jewish as a secular condition. The types of novels included
Somebody in Boots (Nelson Algren), From the Kingdom of Necessity (Isadore Schneider),
and The Foundry (Albert Halper), as listed by Fried, Lewis, Ed. 1988. Socialism was now
viewed as the answer to the problems that the Jewish incurred disdained religion is
demanding that the future should be free of tradition. Michael Gold wrote a novel Jews
Without Money which he believed would send the message that Marxism and not Judaism
would be the answer to the hardships of the immigrant slums. More recent authors such as
Michael Chabon, Nicole Krauss, Alan Kaufman and Art Spiegelman have continued to
examine the identity dilemmas in their literature and primarily focusing on the Holocaust,
cultural rediscovery and assimilation by the younger generation of Jews.
As of 1997, Furman Andrew, writes that Leon Uris had the most arguably influential
American-Jewish novel called the Exodus. It explains the struggle to try and create a modern
state of Israel and translate it into Russian which then became an inspiration to many Russian
immigrants to Israel. Modern literature has very few Jewish characters so as to address such
themes as Zionism/Israel, assimilation, anti-Semitism and the New anti-Semitism. As noted
in the New Yorker, the American magazine that has been an instrumental part in exposing all
these Jewish writers with an aim of reaching a much wider reading public.
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Bibliography
Fried, Lewis, Ed. 1988. Handbook of American-Jewish Literature: An Analytical
Guide to Topics, Themes, and Sources. Greenwood Press.
Nelson, Emmanuel Sampath (2005). The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic
American Literature: I - M. Greenwood Publishing Company. p. 1175.
Dr. Gerhard Falk commentary: Jewish-American Literature
http://jbuff.com/c021501.htm
The New Yorker: (Jewish-American Literature) www.newyorker.com
Furman, Andrew, 1997. Israel through the Jewish-American Imagination: A Survey of
Jewish-American Literature on Israel, 1928-1995. SUNY Press,
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