Janet Burstein wrote in the Forward Sep. 26, 2003:
Critical preoccupation with “the notion of Israel as a sacred homeland to which Jews in diaspora are longing to return” runs like a subtext through several essays by American-born critics who now live in Israel. Equally persistent is the contradictory notion that American Jews see America as “the new Promised Land.” Philip Roth is said to reject Israel and to choose America as a “homeland” for the sake of “freedom” and “security.” Like most American Jews, however, Roth’s novels develop this issue way beyond the polarity of “either/or,” constructing the personal “home” and the collective “homeland” as facets of an awareness as complicated and as fraught as Roth’s sense of Jewish identity.
Finally, American writers’ complex connection to the Jewish past is also reduced to a simple polarity. As novelists here struggle to relate themselves to the Holocaust — which happened elsewhere, to other Jews — American writers are seen “to be caught in a no-win bind. Forget the past and the Jewish component” of identity “falls away. Remember the past and you write European rather than American fiction.” In this perspective, our writers seem to invoke the Holocaust in order to pursue “other, more primary agendas” — notably the agenda of constructing “Jewish identity in the United States.” A work that seemed to an earlier American critic to develop a “strain of reverence toward Jewish historical experience” is understood in this perspective to serve the cause of “identity politics.” Critical attitude, here, bends the work of memory and mourning toward ego gratification.
Today, many American Jewish writers are struggling to recall a distant past, to clarify and to mourn its losses. The integrity, complexity and seriousness of that effort are harder to see from a critical perspective that assumes American writers’ self-serving exploitation of the Holocaust, that considers our language inauthentic and our culture deviant, that continues to ask whether “the story of the American Jew, in order to get itself going, may well have to rid itself of the past that binds it to Jewish realities no longer pertinent or desirable.”
These are first-rate Israeli critics. But their elegant and polished essays suggest that American Jews who have chosen to stay here, to live and write in English, among people who are not Jews, may have become a troubling puzzle to Jews who have made other choices.
The Menken case is the killer. Meyer Waxman, writing in 1940, declared Menken’s poetry “permeated by a deep Jewish spirit” and heard echoes of Kohelet in her secular verses. Renée Sentilles’s biography shows Menken was almost certainly not Jewish. She married a Jewish musician, published a few poems with Jewish content in Wise’s Israelite, plagiarized some of them from Penina Moise, and abandoned the role within three years. Waxman saw a Jewish soul because he needed to. The Saul Bellow case runs the other direction. Bellow kept telling critics that calling him a Jewish writer flattened him, and critics kept doing it anyway, hunting for hidden Jewish messages he had not put there. Both examples show the same operation. The critic’s identification overrides what the writer or the text supplies.
This Janet Burstein piece in the Forward is the trigger Kramer almost names but does not quite. She reviewed the Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, which Kramer co-edited, and accused him and several other contributors of treating American Jewish writing as inauthentic and deviant. She wrote “our language, our culture” to mean American Jewish, and Kramer caught the slide. The essay is his counter. He says the move from “American Jewish writers” to “our language” is the narcissism, and the function of the move is to shut down the critical perspective that would take Jewish American difference seriously. So the essay is not a quiet editorial statement. It is a confrontation. He names Burstein in a footnote and quotes her at length. The editor who placed this in the issue knew what was being done.
Kramer stops at “critical style.” The four diagnostic questions tell you why the style exists. Critics who depend on the Jewish American studies field for status, income, and protection cannot afford readings that displease the coalition that rewards them. The signals of coalition membership include treating Bellow as a Jewish writer over his protests, finding Jewishness in Menken’s verses, naturalizing the Wissenschaft inheritance, and treating accusations of “inauthentic” as a closing move rather than an opening one. What a critic gives up by reading Lazarus through Longfellow, or Menken as a non-Jewish performer of Jewishness, is membership. Kramer is in a position to say this because he has already been read out. He made aliyah, was labeled an “Israeli critic,” and was told his perspective on American Jewish writing was hostile. The essay is partly a defense of his right to read the literature without coalition penalty.
