SOURCE: "The Outsider Within: Women in Contemporary Jewish-American Fiction," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 28, No. 3, Fall, 1987, pp. 378-93.

In the following essay, Aarons explores the "paradox of simultaneous exclusion and inclusion" from tradition and heritage that women in Jewish-American literature face.

For quite some time now the issue of ethnic identity in Jewish-American fiction has posed a central concern for critics and writers alike, a concern bred from the necessity to identify the place of Jewish fiction within the broader scope of American literary culture. Not unlike other literatures that we have come to call "ethnic," black or chicano fiction, for instance, or even those which comprise the "immigrant experience" in fiction (such as Maxine Hong Kingston's novels of Chinese-Americans), Jewish-American writing emerges as yet another example—if not the primary paradigm—of both an "ethnic" and an "immigrant" fiction. Certainly the Jewish-American literature that directly grew out of...