SOURCE: "Sentimentalizing the Jews," in After the Tradition: Essays on Modern Jewish Writing, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1969, p. 35-45.

An American educator and critic, Alter has published highly respected studies of Stendhal, American Jewish writers, and the picaresque novel. In the following essay, which was originally published in 1965, he describes the ways in which a "sentimental literary myth of the Jew" has been promulgated in contemporary Jewish-American literature.

The peculiar cultural phenomenon which some choose to call an American Jewish literary renaissance is by now showing signs of having overstayed its critical welcome: one begins to suspect that too much has been made of what may not have been such a significant or valid development in the first place. There is no question that a great many writers now active in America are of Jewish descent. This hardly justifies, however, those critics, readers, publishers, members of the organized...