SOURCE: "Jewish-American Literature," in Ethnic Perspectives in American Literature: Selected Essays on the European Contribution, edited by Robert J. DiPietro and Edward Ifiovic, The Modern Language Association of America, 1983, pp. 133-62.

In the following essay, Tuerk presents a historical overview of Jewish-American literature in the twentieth century.

In an essay entitled "The Jew as Modern American Writer" (1966), Alfred Kazin writes: "Definitely, it was now the thing to be Jewish." And in a book published in 1969, Donald L. Kaufman writes that in America, "the new look in postwar writing is Jewish." In an introduction published the next year, Charles Angoff and Meyer Levin declare: "To 'write Jewish' is in fashion." When viewed in a historical perspective, these statements are startling. As recently as 1944, Lionel Trilling proclaimed that "as the Jewish community now exists, it can give no sustenance to the American artist or intellectual who is born a Jew...