Monica Osborne writes for Jewcy.com:
In his review of Michael Chabon’s new novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases, William Deresiewicz says of the state of American Judaism:
My own experience tells me that American Judaism has long been beset by a deep sense of banality and inauthenticity. To the usual self-contempt of the liberal middle class is added the feeling that genuine Jewish life is always elsewhere: in Israel or the shtetl, among the immigrant generation or the ultra-Orthodox. Jewish culture as lived by the non-Orthodox tends to feel bland and thin even to its practitioners–the last, worn coins of a princely inheritance. (To those who have fled Orthodox backgrounds, like Englander and myself, that very different milieu tends to feel, for all its traditionalism, spiritually dead.) The most visible of the current generation of self-consciously Jewish novelists appear to be avoiding their own experience because their own experience just seems too boring. What is there to say about it? Better to write about a time or place where there was more at stake.
These comments come in the context of Deresiewicz’s remarks on the state of Jewish American literature, namely that the work of newer, younger Jewish American writers has little to do with Jewish experience.
