SOURCE: "Jewishness, Judaism, and the American-Jewish Novelist," in The Chicago Jewish Forum, Vol. 23, No. 4, Summer, 1965, pp. 275-82.

In the following essay, Bernstein characterizes the half-century between the publication of The Rise of David Levinsky and Herzog as a period of waiting "to rediscover in Judaistic values the definition of the worth of self heart, mind, and society.'

Today the Jewish writer is the subject of scrutiny in Germany, in England, and in America. On the East Coast he is studied in the Jewish-supported Commentary; on the West Coast he is studied in the Catholic-supported Ramparts. Last year the Jewish Publication Society (Philadelphia) not only issued Irving Malin and Irwin Stark's Breakthrough, an anthology of thirty-one American Jewish writers but also Oscar Janowsky's edited collection of essays by many hands, The American Jew, A Reappraisal. For the 1964-65 season the New York City 92nd Street YMHA-YWHA has advertised...