Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation

Explores the works of leading black and Jewish writers from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Emily Miller Budick (Author)

9780521635752, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 September 1998

266 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.45 kg

"...the book eloquently voices a theme that runs throughout African American and Jewixh American relations...The most important contribution of Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation lies in its thorough, thoughtful tracing of these dialogues as it works out, in essay form, the vicissitudes of black-Jewixh relations." Contemporary Literature

Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation explores the works of a range of black and Jewish writers, critics, and academics from the 1950s to the 1980s. By recording conversations both direct, 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, this book shows how dialogue can engender misperceptions and misunderstandings, and how blacks and Jews in America have both sought and resisted assimilation. By analyzing the history of this discourse, the author explores the ways in which ethnic fiction works in interethnic America, the effects of identity politics, and the tensions and bonds created as African and Jewish Americans continue to construct their ethnic and religious identities in the United States.

Introduction
1. Mutual textual criticism of Black-Jewish Identity
2. Crisis and commentary in African-Jewish American relations
3. Race, homeland, and the construction of Jewish American identity
4. Cultural autonomy, supersessionism, and the Jew in African American fiction
5. 'The anguish of the other'
On the mutual displacements, appropriations, and accomodations of culture.

Subject Areas: Jewish studies [JFSR1], Black & Asian studies [JFSL3], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]