“It is much the point of Judaism that efforts to waken the consciences of others should not prevent Jews from reexamining their own.” So writes Stephen Whitfield, a professor of American studies at Brandeis, in this new study of 20th-century American Jewry.

The means Jews have frequently used to arouse and examine the conscience have often been literary. Whitfield considers the place within Judaism of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth (a triumvirate once dubbed the “Hart, Schaffner and Marx of Jewish Letters” by Bellow); Gertrude Stein, Susan Sontag, Chaim Potok, S.J. Perelman, and so on, until such half-Jews as Dorothy Parker and J.D. Salinger are reached. Whitfield seems amused that an American laureate in literature, Isaac Bashevis Singer, should have to have his work translated info English. Robert Lowell once remarked that “there wouldn’t be any active American culture now without the Jewish element,” and Whitfield comes close enough to saying the same thing to annoy some Gentile readers. But in surveying Jewish writers, he does have sufficient sense of perspective to admit “no Faulkner has emerged among them as preeminent, as authoritative enough to generate the anxiety of influence.”

Although Whitfield’s effort to reexamine the Jewish conscience suffers from a tone that is too often that of the sympathetic insider, he does at times take his brethren to task.

To be a Jew in America generally has not been difficult. . . . And to have been born in America, especially since midcentury, has meant a certain immunity . . . from the sadness and unrewarded toil that, in so many places and centuries, have seemed natural to life. The future historian . . . might be almost forgiven for hyperbolically concluding that, for many, pain was tennis elbow . . . [and] injustice was going off to college and not getting into a Jewish fraternity or sorority.

Clearly, Whitfield has little patience with middle-class Jews who think they lead the rough life in contemporary America.

Whitfield contemplates at length the traditional devotion of Jews to liberal causes and leftist politics. He notes, for instance, that Jewish fervor for the New Deal was such that Jonah J. Goldstein, a Jewish Republican judge, once remarked, “The Jews have three velten [worlds], di velt [this world], yene velt [the next], and Roosevelt.” Incredibly, before the ACLU took up the cudgels for the right of Nazis to march through downtown Skokie, Jews comprised nearly half of the ACLU’s membership. These facts leave Whitfield puzzled. The commitment of Jews to the left—possibly a response to past European injustices—is in present-day America not only an enigma, but, as Whitfield says, “perhaps even an insult to common sense.” Yet at other times Whitfield writes approvingly of what has been called the Jews’ “bourgeois humanism”; “No other phrase,” we are told, “more aptly describes the Jewish struggle to imagine a society in which the right to be equal is secured, without threatening the freedom to be different.” Similarly, Whitfield worries that the “relative absence . . . of anti-Semitism, combined with secure location above the poverty level for the majority of Jews, enlarges the danger that an individualist ethos . . . may outstrip awareness of the plight of others.” Some readers may wonder why an individualist ethos is necessarily incompatible with a concern for others.

Disraeli believed Jews are conservatives at heart but for now at least Whitfield is correct in observing that most Jews “have found incomprehensible Lord Melbourne’s definition of the entire purpose of government: the prevention of crime and the preservation of contracts.” Elsewhere Whitfield observes that “conservative moralism is . . . alien to most Jews.” He suspects this is because “poverty and lifelong celibacy were never Jewish ideals.” In any event, freedom from the Gentile’s gentility has spawned an unrivaled number of Jewish comedians: although Jews comprise just 3 percent of the population, they account for more than 80 percent of our nation’s funnymen. Nonetheless, “almost all” are minor as comedians go, since their humor is “about as adult as the short-sheeting that is the soul of wit in summer camps.”

 

[Voices of Jacob, Hands of Esau: Jews in American Life and Thought, by Stephen J. Whitfield (Hamden, CT: Archon Books) $25.00]