SOURCE: Kellman, Steven G. “Tenants, Tenets, and Tensions: Bernard Malamud's Blacks and Jews.” In American Literary Dimensions: Poems and Essays in Honor of Melvin J. Friedman, edited by Ben Siegel and Jay L. Halio, pp. 118-27. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Kellman discusses the uneasy relationship between African Americans and Jews in Bernard Malamud's The Tenants.

Each, thought the writer, feels the anguish of the other.

—The Tenants

The most controversial cover in the history of The New Yorker offers an apocalyptic vision of amity between two mutually wary American minorities. For its 15 February 1993 issue, the magazine reproduced a painting, Valentine's Day by Art Spiegelman, that depicts a Hasidic man and an African-American woman locked in a lusty embrace. In an extraordinary editorial note explicating the image, Spiegelman wrote: “This metaphoric embrace is my Valentine card to New York, a wish for the reconciliation...