SOURCE: "Zion as Main Street" and "Jewish-Americans, Go Home!" in Waiting for the End, Stein and Day, 1964, pp. 65-103.

Fiedler is a controversial and provocative American critic. While he has also written novels and short stories, his personal philosophy and insights are thought to be most effectively expressed in his literary criticism. Fiedler often views literature as the mirror of a society's consciousness, and his most important work, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), assesses American literature, and therefore American society, as an infantile flight from "adult heterosexual love." In the following essay, he examines the place of the Jew in twentieth-century American culture and literature.

Certainly, we live at a moment when, everywhere in the realm of prose, Jewish writers have discovered their Jewishness to be an eminently marketable commodity, their much vaunted alienation to be their passport into the heart of Gentile American culture. It...