SOURCE: "Response to Ted Solotaroff: The End of Marginality in Jewish Literature," in The Writer in the Jewish Community: An Israeli-North American Dialogue, edited by Richard Siegel and Tamar Sofer, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993, pp. 67-71.

A longtime editor of the leftist magazine Dissent and a regular contributor to the New Republic, Howe is one of America's most highly respected literary critics and social historians. He has been a socialist since the 1930s, and his criticism is frequently informed by a liberal social viewpoint. In the following essay, he explains the contemporary period in Jewish-American literature as one in transition from a concentration on "Jewishness as experience" to "Jewishness as essence."

The notion of marginality, often under the more imposing guise of alienation, became central to the self-understanding of Jewish American writers a few decades ago. A declared alienation was, in part, a way of preserving the psycho-social...