SOURCE: "The Stranger and the Victim: The Two Jewish Stereotypes of American Fiction," in Commentary, Vol. 8, No. 2, August, 1949, pp. 147-56.

In the following essay, Howe traces the portrayal of Jews in American fiction, highlighting various inadequacies and stereotypes.

Most novels about American Jews are afflicted with stereotyped characterizations. Seldom does the Jew appear in them as an individual; almost always he is made the representative of a group or subgroup (a "kind" of Jew: a good or a strange Jew); in the eyes of both writer and reader he is first the Jew and second a person. If conceived with hostility, he is drawn from hidden regions of the unconscious, for in America anti-Semitism is not respectable and therefore is largely repressed in public. (This perhaps explains the relative scarcity of Jewish characters in our fiction: the novelist, balking at the difficulties involved, simply suppresses his awareness of...