Benjamin Schreier (b. 1972) holds the Mitrani Family Professorship of Jewish Studies and a professorship in English and Jewish Studies at Penn State University, where he has directed the Jewish Studies Program and the graduate program in English. Since 2011 he edits Studies in American Jewish Literature, a journal published by Penn State University Press and one of the field’s central venues. His scholarship occupies the meeting point of literary theory, intellectual history, ethnic studies, and the sociology of academic knowledge, and across three monographs he presses a single sustained argument: that the categories scholars use to organize literature, above all the category of Jewish identity, are products of critical and institutional labor rather than reflections of a prior cultural essence.
Schreier earned his B.A. in English at Swarthmore College in 1994, graduating with High Honors, and completed his Ph.D. in English and American literature at Brandeis University in 2003. His training joined close textual reading to the theoretical currents that remade the humanities in the late twentieth century, among them post-structuralism, cultural studies, and the critical theory of identity and representation. That double inheritance marks all his work. He reads particular texts with care, and he reads the disciplines that read those texts with equal care.
His first book, The Power of Negative Thinking: Cynicism and the History of Modern American Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2009), takes cynicism as a category of literary and intellectual history. Schreier traces how skeptical and oppositional habits of thought shaped modern American writing, and the book already shows the concern that organizes his later career: the tension among identity, critique, and the cultural authority that lets some readings count and others fall away.
The book that established his reputation, The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (NYU Press, 2015), turns that concern on his own field. Schreier rejects the premise that Jewish American literature expresses a coherent Jewish communal self waiting in the texts to be found. He argues instead that “Jewish American literature” is a critical and institutional construction, assembled by scholars, critics, editors, and teachers who decide which writers belong and what their belonging means. Through readings of figures across the canon, among them Abraham Cahan (1860-1951), the New York Intellectuals, and Philip Roth (1933-2018), he asks what identity-based literary study does when it puts identity to work, and he treats the answer as a question about the discipline rather than about the writers. The book reached debates well beyond Jewish studies, touching canon formation, ethnicity, and the politics of identity in the academy, and reviewers noted the paradox at its center, that a sustained critique of the field also enriches it.
The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) extends the argument into a cultural and intellectual history of Jewish American literary study as such. Schreier traces how the field formed across the twentieth century and which institutional and political conditions gave it shape. He holds that labels like “Jewish American literature” are not neutral descriptions but artifacts of particular historical circumstances, and he asks whether identity-based frameworks still serve the reading of literature in a more mixed and connected cultural world. Read together, The Impossible Jew and The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature form one argument against essentialist accounts of ethnicity and identity in literary scholarship, and they place Schreier among a cohort of critics who want to rebuild the foundations of minority and ethnic literary study rather than add to its accumulated readings.
His other publications widen the frame. He edited Studies in Irreversibility: Texts and Contexts (2007), and with Jonathan Eburne he edited The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons (2017), a project that carries his interests into the politics and self-conception of contemporary American intellectual life. As editor of Studies in American Jewish Literature he has pushed the journal toward ethnic studies, secularism studies, political theory, postcolonial scholarship, and the critical study of identity, positioning it as a site for interdisciplinary work that situates Jewish culture inside larger social and theoretical arguments.
At Penn State he teaches across American literature, Jewish American literature, ethnic literature, American comedy, modernism, post-Holocaust literature, Jewish American film, contemporary political fiction, and the intellectual history of the New York Intellectuals, at both undergraduate and graduate levels. His teaching turns on close reading, theoretical self-awareness, and reflection on the categories through which readers assign value to texts.
A constant runs through the scholarship, the editing, and the teaching: the relation between literary criticism and institutional power. Schreier holds that a critic must read the assumptions and structures that govern his own methods alongside the texts those methods address, and this reflexive demand separates his work from more conventional literary history. His current research carries the program into new material. He is at work on a study of Palestinian American literature within the development of Arab American studies, and on a second project concerning Zionism and the institutional and cultural politics of the Jewish Studies field, both of which keep his long-standing question in view: how cultural categories form, gain authority, and govern reading inside the academy and beyond it.
The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History
Schreier mounts a fierce polemic against the standard methods of Jewish American literary history. He argues that scholars in the field isolate themselves in a self-imposed ghetto. This isolation happens because they take Jewish identity for granted. They treat Jewish literature as a simple mirror of a biological or sociological population. Schreier calls this approach a form of historicist nationalism. It presumes that a critic can always recognize a stable Jewish subject behind the text.
Instead of this comfortable historicism, Schreier proposes what he calls a critical semitism. This perspective treats Jewishness not as a fixed biological fact but as an active cultural medium and an object of desire. Literature does not merely reflect a pre-existing identity. It tests, disrupts, and resists ready-made categories. Schreier looks at the ways texts build the vocabularies that allow people to think about identity. He investigates the limits of classification where identity grows uncertain and spectral.
The book moves chronologically through major touchstones of the canon to demonstrate this theory. Schreier reads Abraham Cahan’s early work not as a simple story of assimilation but as an illustration of how migration destabilizes the very terms of recognition. He challenges the standard history of the New York Intellectuals. Right-wing critics often claim these writers naturally evolved into neoconservatives due to their Jewish heritage. Schreier counters that this narrative relies on a false, biological concept of responsibility to a state polity. Turning to Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, he shows how the text stages the anxious search for an external referent and reveals that the discourse of the Jew requires a constant critical supplement. Finally, he positions Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as a text where identity depends on the reader’s desire to locate it.
A critique of Schreier’s project highlights both its theoretical strength and its material limitations. He succeeds in shaking the field out of its complacency. He forces critics to question the racialist assumptions that often lurk beneath talk of culture and heritage. By connecting Jewish studies to broader critical theory and ethnic studies, he breaks down institutional walls. His focus on active desire rather than passive reflection restores a sense of political and aesthetic stakes to reading.
Yet this postidentitarian move carries a significant cost. By turning Jewishness into an unstable specter or a product of interpretive will, Schreier risks vaporizing the material realities of history. Writers like Cahan and Roth reacted to concrete social conditions, institutional discrimination, and specific communal struggles. Reducing their historical environment to an effect of textual desire minimizes the real pressures that shaped their work. If identity becomes purely spectral, the category loses its utility as a tool to analyze historical experiences, leaving the critic with an elegant theory that struggles to speak to the lived realities of the authors he examines.
If John Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct as per the below section, it undermines the entire foundation of Schreier’s The Impossible Jew.
Mearsheimer’s assertion that humans are fundamentally tribal, socially embedded, and shaped by an early “value infusion” opposes Schreier’s desire to dismantle stable ethnic categories.
Schreier advocates for a “postidentitarian” and “subjectless” approach to Jewish studies, drawing on critics who try to decouple ethnic fields from a concrete, identifiable human population. He argues that a text’s Jewishness should be viewed as a spectral product of interpretive desire rather than a reflection of real Jews. If Mearsheimer is right, Schreier’s theory is a textbook example of hyper-individualistic liberal delusion. In Mearsheimer’s view, humans do not operate as lone wolves or choose their identities from a menu of textual desires; they are born into social groups that shape their identities long before they can think for themselves. Schreier’s attempt to vaporize the biological and sociological reality of “the population” ignores the evolutionary and social fact that group survival depends on cooperation and shared, inherited tribal realities.
Schreier critiques the historicist mainstream of Jewish studies for its “anthropological expectation” that a body of literature represents a legible population. He calls this a complacent, nationalistic dead end. If Mearsheimer is right, this historicist “ghetto” is the only valid way to read literature. Literature should be evaluated through the lens of population, socialization, and shared tribal experience because authors are products of intense early childhood socialization within their specific group. You cannot separate a text from the collective survival engine of the society that produced the writer.
In Chapter 3, Schreier attacks right-wing critics like Ruth Wisse who argue that the Jewish New York Intellectuals had a cultural responsibility to a Jewish polity. Schreier prefers Lionel Trilling’s model of “self-conscious detachment from any position” and the preservation of individual imaginative freedom over collective affiliation. Mearsheimer’s framework suggests that Trilling’s detached, universalist individualism is a psychological impossibility. If humans are tribal at their core and reason is subordinate to socialization, then the New York Intellectuals could never strip away their early “value infusion.” Wisse’s argument that their identity naturally bound them to the fate of their group comports with Mearsheimer’s belief that individuals develop powerful, involuntary attachments to their group and are wired to cooperate for collective survival.
If Mearsheimer is right, Schreier’s book is an artifact of the post-Cold War liberal universalism it purports to critique. By trying to turn a concrete, historical group identity into an abstract aesthetic playground of “negation” and “unknowability,” Schreier is downplaying the social nature of human beings to the point of ignoring it. Mearsheimer would argue that no matter how much a literary critic twists textuality to make identity “impossible,” the tribal reality of human socialization will always dictate the boundaries of the group.
The Great Delusion
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
The liberal error, for Mearsheimer, lies in treating the person as a free-standing chooser of his own moral code, when the code arrives mostly from birth and upbringing. If this anthropology holds, what happens to Schreier?
Schreier’s argument moves in the opposite direction. He treats Jewish identity as made rather than given, and he treats the communal self that the field claims to read as the field’s own product. The category gets assembled by critics and editors and teachers, and a man might dismantle it by showing the seams. That is a claim about contingency. The thing the field calls a Jewish communal essence has no fixed reality. It can be built, and what can be built can be taken apart, or built otherwise, or set aside.
Run the two men against each other. Mearsheimer does not say group identity is fixed in its content. He says attachment to the group is near-universal, deep, and prior to reason, planted by socialization before the man can weigh it. Schreier’s construction thesis and Mearsheimer’s social anthropology might seem to meet here, because both deny a timeless essence and both grant that identity gets formed rather than inherited from nature. The agreement breaks on what the formation produces. For Schreier the construction is light, a critical and institutional artifact a scholar might expose and loosen. For Mearsheimer the construction is heavy, a value infusion welded to the man in childhood, carried below the reach of argument, defended sometimes to the death. Schreier shows that the academic category was assembled. Mearsheimer answers that the assembly of a category and the durability of a bond are separate questions, and that the bond survives the demolition of the category.
Mearsheimer’s account turns on the weakness of reason against socialization, and Schreier’s project is a project of reason. It asks a man to see through his inherited sense of who he is, to recognize the communal self as a construction and hold it at the distance critique requires. Mearsheimer ranks that capacity last among the forces that move us. He might read the anti-essentialist program as a late and local product of one particular socialization, the training of the theory-formed humanities of the 1990s, a group with its own intense value infusion and its own sacred refusal of essence. The man who learned to distrust group belonging learned it from a group. His cosmopolitan suspicion of the tribe is the marker of his tribe. On Mearsheimer’s terms the academic who announces that identity is constructed performs the membership badge of the cosmopolitan intellectual class, and he mistakes a socialized preference for the verdict of free reason.
Samuel Moyn (b. 1970), whom Mearsheimer quotes on the rise of human rights, sits near this point. The elevation of the rights-bearing individual over the inherited group is, for Mearsheimer, the signature liberal move, and Schreier’s loosening of communal Jewish identity belongs to the same family. It frees the person from the weight of the collective self. Mearsheimer says the weight does not lift, that the liberal who proclaims the autonomous chooser describes a creature who never existed, and that the social animal goes on cooperating with his fellow members and sacrificing for them after the theorist has declared the bond a fiction.
What survives for Schreier, if Mearsheimer is right, is narrower than the full anti-essentialist claim but firmer for the narrowing. Schreier might be correct about the academic category and wrong about the attachment beneath it. Jewish American literature as a field, a canon, a journal, a set of chairs, got built by men making choices, and Schreier maps the building with care. The error, on this reading, comes when the construction thesis migrates from the category to the bond, when the demonstration that scholars assembled a label becomes a suggestion that the communal self is similarly optional. Mearsheimer holds that the self is not optional. The group precedes the man, shapes him before he can refuse, and holds him after he thinks he has reasoned his way out. The category is paper. The tribe is not.
There is a cost to Schreier in this collision, and a cost to Mearsheimer. The cost to Schreier is that his rationalism might overreach, treating critique as a solvent strong enough to dissolve what childhood welded, and underrating the durability of the attachment his own readers carry into the seminar room. The cost to Mearsheimer is that he can prove too much, since an anthropology that makes reason nearly powerless against socialization struggles to explain Schreier at all, the man who did, in fact, turn his critical faculties against the value infusion of his own people and his own field. If socialization wins as completely as Mearsheimer says, the heretic should not exist. He does exist. Either reason can do more than Mearsheimer grants, or Schreier’s heresy is the socialized loyalty of a rival group, and the tribe he serves is the one that taught him to doubt the tribe.
The Set
Picture the world Benjamin Schreier moves through. It has rooms, and the rooms have addresses. The Modern Language Association convention in winter, a vast hotel given over to job interviews and panels and the slow theater of who greets whom in the lobby. The annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, where the Jewish studies people gather and the literature scholars form a wing of a larger hall that runs from Talmud to Holocaust history to Israeli politics. The seminar room at Penn State where the graduate students learn the trade. The pages of the journals, which are rooms too, with doors and gatekeepers. PMLA at the top of the literary hierarchy. American Literary History. American Literature. And the room Schreier himself keeps the keys to, Studies in American Jewish Literature, which he has edited since 2011, the field’s house organ, the place where a young scholar’s first essay on Roth or Ozick either appears or does not.
The people in these rooms share a formation. They came up through doctoral programs in English in the 1990s and after, when theory had won and the older philology had lost, and they carry the marks of that victory. They read Foucault in coursework. They learned to say that categories are produced rather than found, that the canon encodes power, that the critic’s job is to expose the operations a text conceals. Schreier’s own line runs Swarthmore to Brandeis to the chair at Penn State, and the line is typical of the set, the small liberal arts college and then the research university and then the tenure track at a flagship. The names around him in the field of Jewish American literary study form a recognizable company. Hana Wirth-Nesher, who wrote on language and the Jewish American text. Werner Sollors (b. 1943) at Harvard, whose work on ethnicity and consent and descent set terms the whole field still argues with. Michael P. Kramer, who debated with Wirth-Nesher over whether Jewish American literature even names a coherent object, a debate Schreier inherited and pushed further than either. Benjamin’s elders and contemporaries also include figures like Ruth Wisse (b. 1936), who holds the opposite pole from Schreier, the scholar for whom Jewish literature expresses a real and continuous national culture, and whose politics run to the defense of the Jewish people as a people. Set Schreier against Wisse and the field’s whole argument stands out in relief. She believes in the thing. He shows it was built.
What do they value? They value the unmasking. The highest praise in this set is that a piece of work is smart, and smart means it caught something the naive reader missed, found the seam, showed the construction, refused the obvious. A scholar earns standing by demonstrating that what looked natural was made, what looked innocent served power, what looked like a stable identity was a process held together by institutions. The set prizes theoretical sophistication, which means fluency in the vocabulary of construction and discourse and the critique of essence, and it holds in quiet contempt the work that takes its object at face value. To call a colleague’s book undertheorized is to wound him. To call it rigorous and self-aware is to bless him. Schreier sits near the center of what the set values, because his whole career performs the unmasking on the field’s own foundations, which is the unmasking the set admires most, the one that turns the tools on the home discipline.
Their hero system runs on the figure of the critic who sees through. The man who matters is the man who exposed an illusion others lived inside. The set tells its own history this way, as a sequence of demystifications, each generation pulling down what the last took for granted. The philologists believed in the text. Then theory showed the text was a site of power. The early ethnic critics believed in authentic ethnic experience. Then the next wave showed that authenticity was a construction. Schreier stands at the far end of this sequence, the man who turned the demystifying habit on the category of Jewish American literature and asked whether the field’s object had ever existed. To belong to this hero system is to want to be the one who saw furthest through, and the reward is a name that the next generation of scholars must cite, a place in the chain of those who advanced the critique. The body fails, but the citation persists, and the footnote is the set’s form of life after death.
The status games are mostly silent. Where you publish ranks you. A book with a university press, and the presses themselves are ranked, Harvard and Chicago and Princeton above the rest, NYU and Penn solidly respectable, and Schreier has published with Virginia, NYU, and Penn, a strong record that places him among the serious without placing him at the absolute summit. Who blurbs your book ranks you. Who writes the review and where ranks you. The invitation to the keynote rather than the parallel panel ranks you. The endowed chair ranks you, and Schreier holds the Mitrani Family Professorship, which marks him as a man the institution has chosen to honor. The directorship of a program ranks you, and he has run the Jewish Studies Program and the graduate program in English. The editorship of a journal ranks you highest of all in one specific way, because it makes you a gatekeeper, a man others must please, and Schreier’s long tenure at Studies in American Jewish Literature gives him that power over the field he critiques. The set plays these games while pretending not to, because open ambition reads as vulgar, and the proper pose is the disinterested pursuit of knowledge with the status accruing as a byproduct one never sought.
Their normative claims cluster around method. The set holds that a scholar ought to be reflexive, ought to examine the assumptions built into his own categories, ought to refuse the comfort of treating a constructed thing as natural. The cardinal sin is naivety, the unexamined belief, the scholar who writes about Jewish identity as though everyone knows what it is. The cardinal virtue is the critical self-awareness that turns the analytic eye on the analyst’s own tools. Schreier’s demand that the field face the made character of its object is a pure expression of the set’s normative order. He is not introducing a foreign standard. He is enforcing the set’s own ought with more nerve than most, applying to the field’s foundation the reflexivity the set preaches but often spends on safer targets.
Their essentialist claims are harder to find, because the set defines itself against essence, and a man trained in this room learns to flinch at any sentence that says a group is something. They will not say Jews are. They will not say literature expresses an authentic national soul. The flinch is so trained that it functions as the set’s deepest essentialism, the one thing they treat as given rather than constructed, the conviction that essences are always false and construction always the truth beneath them. They are essentialist about anti-essentialism. They hold, as a matter past argument, that the sophisticated position is the one that dissolves the stable category, and they do not turn the dissolving habit on that conviction. Schreier shares this. His work assumes, rather than argues, that showing a category was built settles something, that the constructed thing is thereby less real, less binding, less worthy of a scholar’s belief. The assumption is the set’s bedrock, and it sits under his project unexamined.
The moral grammar follows. To be good in this world is to be smart and self-aware and on the right side, and the right side means the side that questions power, exposes construction, and refuses the consolations of identity. To be bad is to be naive, complicit, undertheorized, or worse, to be a defender of the essence, a Ruth Wisse who believes in the people and says so, which the set reads not as a rival intellectual position but as a moral failure, a refusal of the critical maturity the set requires. The grammar lets the set treat a disagreement about method as a disagreement about virtue. The scholar who believes Jewish American literature names a real thing is not merely wrong in this grammar. He is unserious, sentimental, behind the times, a man who has not done the hard work of facing how categories are made. Schreier’s standing in the set comes from speaking this grammar with unusual fluency and aiming it at the largest available target, the foundation of the field, which earns him the set’s highest regard, the regard reserved for the man who turned its own sharpest tool on its own ground and did not flinch.
There is a tension the set carries and rarely names. Schreier and his colleagues make their living from the very category they dissolve. The chair is a chair in Jewish studies. The journal is a journal of American Jewish literature. The graduate students come to study a thing the field’s leading critic says was constructed and may not cohere. The set needs the category to fund the critique of the category, and the men who show that Jewish American literature was built draw their salaries from departments and programs and endowments that exist because someone believes the thing is real. The donors who fund a chair in Jewish studies tend to believe in the Jewish people the way Wisse believes in them, not the way Schreier does. The set lives on this gap and mostly does not look at it, and the not-looking is part of the moral grammar, because to look too hard would be to ask whether the whole enterprise rests on a belief the enterprise officially denies.
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)
Pierre Bourdieu gives us a way to read a scholar’s career as a series of moves in a game, and the game has rules the players rarely state. A field, in his account, is a structured space of positions, and the men who occupy those positions struggle over a scarce resource. In the academy the resource is symbolic capital, the right to be recognized as a legitimate authority, and the deepest stake of all is the power to define what the field studies and how. Bourdieu calls that power the principle of legitimate vision and division, the nomos of the field, the buried agreement about what counts as a real object and a serious question. Most players accept the nomos without thinking. They inherit it as doxa, the unspoken sense of the game that feels like common sense rather than like a position. Schreier built a career by refusing the doxa of his field out loud.
The field here is Jewish American literary study, a subfield of Jewish studies and of American literature, with its own journal, its own canon, its own chairs and prizes and graduate seminars. Its founding agreement holds that Jewish American literature exists, that it forms a coherent body of writing expressing a Jewish communal self, and that the scholar’s task runs to reading that self in the texts. Schreier attacks the agreement at the root. He argues that the category is made rather than found, assembled by critics and editors and teachers who decide which writers belong, and that the communal essence the field claims to study is the field’s own product. The argument is heresy because it names the doxa as doxa, drags the buried agreement into the light, and denies that the field’s central object has the reality the field assigns it.
Bourdieu teaches that heresy is a position in the field, and a productive one. The space of positions always holds an orthodox center and a heterodox margin, and the law that governs intellectual life rewards the man who takes the open rival seat over the man who crowds into the consecrated middle. The orthodox accumulate capital by doing the field’s normal work well. The heretic accumulates a different capital by contesting the terms on which the work proceeds. Schreier occupies the heterodox slot with discipline. Across The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (2015) and The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity (2020) he sustains a single heretical claim, and the claim gives him a position no orthodox reading of Roth or Cahan could supply. He is the man who says the object does not exist. That sentence is a brand, and in a crowded attention space a brand is worth a great deal.
Here the paradox opens. The heretic cannot leave the field. To overturn the nomos he must mobilize the players who live by it, publish in the venues they read, win the recognition they confer. His heresy depends on the orthodoxy it attacks for its sense and its charge. A man who denied that Jewish American literature exists from outside the field would be a crank. A man who denies it from the Mitrani Family Professorship of Jewish Studies, while editing Studies in American Jewish Literature, is an event. The NYU Press description of The Impossible Jew puts the logic in four words. He destroys to create. Bourdieu would read that formula as the signature of the heresiarch, who clears ground for a new vision of the field and installs himself as the authority over the cleared ground.
Consecration tells the rest of the story. The endowed chair, the journal editorship he has held since 2011, the directorships of the Jewish Studies Program and the graduate program in English, these are the field’s instruments for marking who holds legitimate authority, and the field has handed them to the man who questions its foundations. A field with enough autonomy can absorb its critics and convert their attacks into its own renewal, because the critique demonstrates that the field takes hard questions seriously, and the demonstration raises the value of the game. The heretic gets capital. The field gets proof of its vitality. The arrangement serves both.
Bourdieu uses the word habitus for the durable habits of perception a man acquires from his training and his trajectory, the feel for the game that shapes the moves he finds natural. Schreier’s formation joined close reading at Swarthmore and Brandeis to the theory that remade the humanities in the 1990s, post-structuralism and the critical study of identity, a training that teaches a man to distrust essences and to read categories as constructions. The anti-essentialist move comes to him as second nature, the way a different formation might make communal pride come as second nature. His weapon and his disposition match, and the match is no accident. The field rewarded the disposition with admission, and the disposition produced the weapon the field then rewarded again.
Schreier might be right that Jewish American literature is a construction. The claim can hold as scholarship and function as a position at the same time, and Bourdieu’s point is that the two run together. The denial of the object is also a bid for the authority to define the object, since the man who shows that the category was built claims the standing to say how it should be rebuilt, or whether it should stand at all. His recent turn toward Palestinian American literature and toward Zionism and the politics of the Jewish studies field reads, in this light, as the same move carried to fresh ground, the heretic extending the reach of his vision into the most contested material the field can offer.
The Sociology of Philosophies
Randall Collins (b. 1941) explains intellectual life as a sociology rather than a parade of free minds. Ideas come from people, people come in networks, and the networks run through master and pupil, rival and ally, across generations. Creativity is not the spark of a lone genius. It is the property of chains. A man does the work, but the chain hands him the tools, the problems, the rivals, and the charge of emotional energy that lets him think a new thought and believe it worth defending. Collins built the argument from a survey of the philosophical record across the world, and he distilled it into a law. He calls it the law of small numbers. The attention space of any field holds room for only three to six active positions at one time, no more, because the audience cannot track more than a handful of live arguments, and the rewards of recognition concentrate on the men who hold the open slots. The law governs who gets remembered and who vanishes, and it governs the moves a rising scholar makes if he wants a seat. Schreier reads as a man who found an open slot and took it.
The field of Jewish American literary study has an orthodox center. The center holds that Jewish American literature exists, that it expresses a Jewish communal self, and that the scholar reads the self in the texts. Collins predicts what happens around a strong center. The attention space fills, the consecrated positions crowd, and a man who joins the throng doing the normal work well competes against many others doing the same work, with thin rewards for each. The open slot lies elsewhere, in the position that negates the center. Schreier took the negating seat. He argues that the communal self is the field’s own construction, that critics and editors and teachers built the category, and that the object the field claims to study has no reality apart from the building. The position is contrarian, and Collins teaches that contrarian is where the energy is, because the rival seat sits empty while the orthodox seats are full.
The charge of the anti-essentialist position comes from the orthodoxy it denies. Collins makes this structural rather than psychological. A position carries intellectual energy in proportion to the strength of what it opposes, and an argument against a weak target generates little heat. Schreier opposes the founding agreement of his field, the deepest and most settled of its claims, and the opposition draws its force from the depth of what it attacks. A man who said Jewish American literature was a construction in a field that already believed so would say nothing. A man who says it where the belief in a communal essence runs strongest stakes out a real position, and the field’s attention turns toward him because the conflict is live. The orthodoxy supplies the energy. The heretic spends it. Without the strong center there is no charged margin, and Schreier’s position depends on the vigor of the view it rejects.
The network behind the man fits the frame. Collins holds that creative positions cluster where chains of intellectual contact concentrate, and that a scholar’s training network places him in the structure before he writes a word. Schreier formed at Swarthmore and then at Brandeis through the 1990s, inside the theory currents that remade the American humanities in those years, post-structuralism and the critical study of identity and the suspicion of essence. That network ran hot. It carried high emotional energy and a dense traffic of arguments about construction, representation, and the made character of categories once thought natural. A man trained in that network inherits the tools to dismantle an essence and the confidence that dismantling is the serious work. The anti-essentialist move toward Jewish American literature reads as the application of a network’s standard equipment to a field that had not yet felt its full force. Collins would say the position was waiting in the structure, and the structure produced a man fit to occupy it.
Emotional energy carries the argument from network to career. Collins uses the term for the charge a man draws from successful intellectual rituals, the focused encounters of seminar and conference and argument that leave a participant lifted and certain and ready to push his line. The contrarian who lands a position that the field must answer wins that charge, because the field’s response, even hostile response, confirms that his argument counts. Schreier’s heresy drew the field’s attention, and the attention fed the energy that let him sustain a single position across two books and a long editorship. The orthodox scholar grinding out competent readings in a crowded slot draws less of this charge, because his work provokes no answer and commands no center of attention. The contrarian provokes, and the provocation returns to him as the energy to provoke again.
The law of small numbers also sets a limit, and the limit shapes a career as much as the opening does. The attention space holds only so many seats, and the seat Schreier holds is the anti-essentialist seat in his subfield. Collins observes that men in adjacent positions compete for the same slot, and that the field will not seat two heretics making the identical move. Schreier’s move toward fresh ground, the recent turn to Palestinian American literature and to Zionism and the politics of the Jewish studies field, reads on this frame as the search for new attention space when the original slot has been worked. A position pays its highest returns when it is new. Once the field has absorbed the heresy, the heretic must extend the argument into contested material that the field has not yet metabolized, or watch the returns fall as the slot becomes familiar. The migration to harder ground is the contrarian protecting his charge.
‘A Big Misunderstanding’
David Pinsof writes that intellectuals tell a flattering story about why the world goes wrong, and that the story pays them. The story says the trouble comes from misunderstanding. Polarization, bigotry, war, unhappiness, all of it traces to people getting the facts wrong, and the cure is better understanding, which lifts the men whose trade is understanding to the rank of the most important men alive. Pinsof throws the story out. He holds that people understand what they have an incentive to understand, that stupidity tends to be strategic, and that the engine under human conduct is not bad belief but motive, the drive to climb hierarchies, run down rivals, and dominate others behind a moral screen. Pinsof splits the stated motive from the real one, the mission statement from the deed, and reads the gap between them as the place the truth hides. Turn that move on Schreier.
Schreier’s stated motive is candor. He presents his work as the field cleaning its own house, the critic who refuses the comfortable belief that Jewish American literature names a real communal essence, the scholar willing to show that the category was built and to ask his colleagues to face what they have been doing. The NYU Press line catches the self-image. He destroys to create. Read through Pinsof, the self-image is the mission statement, and the mission statement asks to be checked against the deed.
Pinsof would start with the form of the claim. Schreier tells a field that it has misunderstood its own object. The essentialists think they study a Jewish self in the texts, and Schreier says they have it wrong, that the self is their construction and they failed to see the seams. This is the misunderstanding story in academic dress. The field erred, the critic understands, and the man who understands moves to the front of the room. Pinsof’s essay warns against the story because of what it does for the teller. A scholar who exposes a misunderstanding casts himself as the one who sees clearly while his colleagues sit in fog, and the casting is a status bid before it is anything else.
Pinsof holds that people are not confused about their interests. The field’s essentialists are not victims of a brain-fart. They have reasons to hold the category together, and the reasons are not secret. The category supports jobs, journals, endowed chairs, donor relationships, communal legitimacy, the apparatus that lets a man earn a living reading Jewish books as Jewish books. They believe in the communal self because believing in it pays, and they would keep believing it under any volume of critique, because the belief tracks their incentives rather than their information. Schreier’s demonstration that the category was constructed treats their conviction as an error to be corrected. Pinsof would say it is not an error. It is a position held by men who understand their incentives all too well, and the critique that calls it a misunderstanding misreads interest as confusion, which is the standard intellectual mistake.
Then Pinsof turns the same blade on Schreier. If the essentialists hold their belief because it pays, the anti-essentialist holds his because it pays him. The contrarian slot carries status the orthodox slot cannot, the charge of the man who saw through what everyone else swallowed. Schreier’s deed, on this read, is not the disinterested pursuit of a true account of his field. It is a successful campaign to climb the hierarchy of his field by running down the men who built it, conducted under the moral cover of rigor and self-critique. The cover is the part Pinsof watches closest. A man who said plainly, I attacked my field’s founding idea because the attack was the open path to a chair and a name, would forfeit the moral standing the attack requires. So the motive comes dressed as candor, as service to the discipline, as breaking down the walls of the academic ghetto, and the dress is the tell. Pinsof’s Starbucks line applies without strain. The mission statement speaks of nurturing the human spirit. The firm sells coffee for profit. The monograph speaks of freeing the field for honest self-examination. The career accumulates capital.
Coalition work fills out the picture, and the recent turn supplies the material. Schreier moves toward Palestinian American literature and toward a critique of Zionism and the politics of the Jewish studies field. Pinsof reads these as alliance signals before he reads them as arguments. In the contemporary humanities, the anti-Zionist and anti-essentialist positions confer elite standing, and they mark a man as a member of the cosmopolitan academic coalition rather than the communal Jewish one. Pinsof’s account of bigotry and partisan hatred runs on zero-sum competition over status and over the coercive apparatus of the state, and his account of antiracism notes that the position confers elite rank while letting its holders resent their nearest rivals in the hierarchy. Apply the shape. The Jewish scholar who loosens Jewish communal identity and questions Zionism takes a position that lifts him among one coalition by separating him from another, the communal establishment that sits closest to him in the social order and competes with him most directly for the right to speak for the tradition. The derogated rival is not far away. He is the nearest neighbor.
Pinsof’s law of self-deception keeps the read from collapsing into a charge of fraud, and the distinction matters for fairness. He does not say the intellectual lies. He says the intellectual believes his own mission statement, because the belief is a weapon, and a man who sincerely thinks himself a truth-teller signals candor better than a man performing the part. Schreier need not know any of this. The frame predicts that he would experience his work as honest inquiry and feel the status payoff as the natural reward of being right, and that the sincerity is part of the equipment rather than evidence against the read. The denial is a feature. Pinsof builds it into the model.
The hole at the end of Pinsof’s essay closes the application. He says the world does not want to be saved, that you can study the hole you are stuck in to the last molecule and remain stuck, because the trouble is not ignorance and so knowledge cannot cure it. Schreier studies how his field built its category. He maps the construction with care across two books and a long editorship. And the field goes on building the category, hands him a chair for the mapping, and changes nothing, because no one in it wanted the category dissolved. The essentialists keep their jobs. The journal keeps publishing. The critic keeps his standing as the man who sees through it all. Everyone’s incentives are met, and the critique that promised to expose a misunderstanding turns out to have exposed no misunderstanding at all, only a set of men doing what their interests told them to do, the critic included. On Pinsof’s terms the field has no problem. What looks like its problem, its naive belief in a communal essence, is the solution to a different problem, how to keep the apparatus funded and staffed and legitimate. Nothing is broken. That is the trouble.
Turner on Essentialism
Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) spent a career hunting essences in social thought and pulling them out by the root. His target is the move that posits a shared collective thing, a substance held in common across many minds, and then treats that thing as the cause of what people do. Society, culture, the normative order, collective representations, shared frameworks, shared tacit knowledge, all of these name a supposed common possession, and Turner denies that the common possession exists. What exists is individuals. Each man acquires his habits through his own causal history, his own training, his own exposure, and there is no guarantee that what sits in one head matches what sits in another. The sameness gets assumed, not shown. When a scholar says a group shares a practice or a culture or an identity, he has helped himself to an essence, a hidden substance that does the explaining while escaping the demand to specify how it works or where it lives. Turner calls these explanatory fictions. They name the thing to be explained and dress the name as the explanation. Apply this to Benjamin Schreier, and the frame cuts toward him and against him at once.
The toward part comes first, because Schreier and Turner start as allies. Schreier denies that Jewish American literature expresses a Jewish communal self, a coherent essence sitting in the texts waiting to be read out. Turner makes the same denial about every collective essence, and he would welcome Schreier’s refusal of the communal self as a clean case of the general move he recommends. The field assumed a shared Jewishness, a substance common to Cahan and Roth and the rest, and built its readings on the assumption. Schreier shows the assumption was an assumption. So far the two men walk together. The Jewish essence is a fiction, and naming it as a fiction is the right first step.
The against part starts where Schreier stops walking. Turner’s argument does not halt at the natural essence. It turns on the substitutes, because the deepest finding of his work is that anti-essentialism keeps smuggling the essence back in under a new name. A man rejects the essence of the group and then explains the group’s products by appeal to culture, or discourse, or construction, or the field, and each of these is a fresh collective substance doing the old collective work. Schreier says Jewish American literature was constructed through the practices of critics, editors, publishers, and teachers. Turner would stop on the word practices and on the word field and ask what they name. A practice, in Schreier’s usage, is something shared across the men who carry it, a common way of building the category. That is the shared practice Turner spent The Social Theory of Practices (1994) showing cannot be a collective object. There is no thing the critics share. There are particular editors with particular habits, each acquired through a particular history, and the word practice papers a single substance over a distribution of separate dispositions that might or might not line up. Schreier traded the essence of Jewishness for the essence of the construction.
The trade runs through his key terms. Construction sounds like a process, a doing, a chain of causes a scholar might lay out step by step. In Turner’s reading it functions instead as a black box, an essence that explains without specifying. To say the category was constructed is to redescribe the category’s existence in the passive voice and present the redescription as a finding. The construction does no causal work that the word names. Who built what, in which year, through which act, with which effect on which reader, these are the questions a real account answers, and the collective noun lets a man skip them while sounding causal. The field is the worst offender. The field constructs, the field assumes, the field studies, the discipline maintains. Turner would say there is no field that constructs anything. There are men, and the field is the name we give to a rough overlap among their separate habits, an overlap we assume rather than measure. When Schreier makes the field the agent of construction, he installs a collective actor with intentions and effects, and the collective actor is an essence as surely as the communal Jewish self was an essence. He dissolved one and conjured another to do the dissolving.
Identity carries the same trouble, and the trouble runs to the center of his project. Schreier writes about identity and identification as his major theme, the made character of the self the field claims to find. Turner would press the question all the way down. If the Jewish self is not a shared substance, then neither is identity as such, and the word identity names no common thing that gets constructed or deconstructed. What a fuller account holds is particular men with particular self-understandings, formed by particular histories, no two alike, with the sameness across them assumed for convenience and never established. Schreier’s critique stops at the right place to indict the essentialists and the wrong place to spare himself, because the apparatus he uses to expose the Jewish essence, identity and construction and the field and institutional power, runs on essences of its own. He sees the substance in his opponents’ object and not the substance in his own tools.
The honest version of the project, on Turner’s terms, would read as biography and causal history rather than as the operation of forces. It would name a particular editor, trace where he learned his habits of selection, show whom he taught and what those students carried forward and how their habits diverged from his, and never assume that the men add up to a thing called the field with a will to construct. Schreier comes close in places. He names Cahan, names Roth, names the New York Intellectuals, names critics. The explanatory weight falls elsewhere. It falls on institutional power, on the discipline, on identity-based literary study, on the practices of the field, the collective nouns that carry the argument while the named individuals serve as illustration. Turner’s complaint is exact. The men are present as examples and absent as causes, and the causes are essences.
There is a reflexive sting, and Turner’s frame delivers it without the help of any other. Schreier built his standing as the scholar who refuses convenient essences and faces the constructed character of his field’s object. Turner shows that the refusal is partial, that the anti-essentialist retains a working set of essences he never turns the critique upon, and that the retention is what lets the critique proceed at all. A thoroughgoing application of Schreier’s own principle would corrode the ground he stands on, because construction and field and identity and practice would go the way of communal Jewishness, and the scholar would be left with particular men doing particular things for particular reasons, which is harder to write and impossible to brand. The half-measure is not a failure of nerve. It is the condition of having an argument to make. Pull the last essence and there is no thesis, only a long list of individuals.
The frame has its cost, and naming it keeps the application honest. Turner’s demand can dissolve every collective term, and a man cannot write history or sociology or literary study while refusing all collective shorthand. At some point a scholar says the field or the tradition or the practice, because the alternative is a catalog no reader can finish, and Turner grants the point. His test is not whether a writer uses a collective noun but whether the noun does causal work the writer can cash out, or hides the absence of such work behind a word that sounds like a cause. Schreier might survive the test in places, where his collective talk shortens a story he could tell in full if pressed. He fails it where the collective noun is the story, where construction and the field carry an explanatory load that no account of particular men ever arrives to support. The essence he exposed in his opponents is the essence he kept for himself, and Turner’s frame, applied to the end, leaves the anti-essentialist holding the substance he was sure he had abandoned.
Explaining the Normative
Stephen P. Turner aimed a second campaign at a target close to the first. Where his work on essences attacks the shared substance, his work on the normative attacks the shared ought. Normativism, as he names it in Explaining the Normative (2010), holds that a special domain of facts sits above the causal world, facts about what is correct, valid, required, binding, and that this domain explains how men agree, follow rules, mean the same things, and submit to standards. The normativist says people are bound by norms, answerable to reasons, governed by a shared sense of what counts as right. Turner denies the domain. What exists is habit, training, disposition, sanction, the ordinary causal traffic of men learning to do things and correcting each other. The normative is a layer the theorist adds on top, a posit invoked to fill a gap, and the gap it fills is the theorist’s sense that without an ought the agreement would be impossible. Turner calls the move a transcendental argument and treats it as a bluff. The bindingness is asserted, never cashed. It does no causal work the habits do not already do, and it launders contingency into necessity, converting what men happen to do into what they are required to do. Apply this to Schreier, and the question shifts from what he claims about his field to what he claims his field owes.
Schreier does more than describe. He charges. The essentialists have not merely built a category, they have failed to see that they built it, and the failure reads in his work as a fault, a deficiency, a lapse the field ought to repair. His signature demand is reflexive criticism. The scholar must examine the assumptions of his own method, must face the constructed character of his object, must refuse the convenient belief in a communal essence. Each must carries an ought. Turner’s frame asks where the ought comes from and what gives it force.
Start with the word wrong, because Schreier needs it. His critique holds that the essentialists got something wrong, that their readings mistake a construction for an essence, that they err. Wrong, mistake, error, these are normative terms, and they claim a standard against which the essentialist reading falls short. Turner presses the claim hard. Wrong relative to what, and what makes that standard binding on a man rather than one more trained habit competing with his? The essentialist learned his habits in his formation, acquired the disposition to read a Jewish self in the texts, and reproduces the disposition in his students. Schreier learned different habits in a different formation, the theory-formed humanities of the 1990s, and acquired the disposition to distrust essences and prize reflexivity. Two trained dispositions, two ways of reading, each reproducing itself through its own students and sanctions. To call one wrong and the other correct is to posit a normative fact that ranks them, and Turner says no such fact arrives. There is the standard Schreier prefers and the rhetoric that converts the preference into a verdict the essentialists stand convicted under.
The conversion is the part Turner watches. Normativism works by turning a habit into an obligation. Schreier values reflexivity, and his community rewards reflexivity, and out of the valuing and the rewarding comes a standard. Then the standard changes grammar. It stops being something Schreier favors and becomes something the field is bound to honor, a mark of serious scholarship the naive essentialist has failed to meet. Turner would identify the change of grammar as the trick. The reflexive demand presents itself as a requirement of good criticism as such, binding on anyone who would do the work properly, when it is the trained preference of a particular intellectual culture given the voice of necessity. Reflexivity is not superior by some normative fact. A community produces the disposition, rewards its display, and elevates it to a duty the outsiders are answerable to. The duty is the preference wearing a uniform.
The transcendental shape sits under the argument. Schreier’s case runs on a buried requirement. Good scholarship requires that the critic face his constructions, and without that facing the field falls into the error of essentialism. The requires does the work, and Turner asks for the receipt. Essentialist literary study runs fine on its own terms. Men do it, publish it, get hired for it, train others in it, and the practice reproduces itself across generations without collapse. In what sense, then, is it required to be otherwise? Only relative to the standard Schreier brings from his own formation. The necessity is an illusion produced by mistaking the failure to meet his standard for a failure to meet a standard the practice is bound by. The essentialists are not failing at the thing they do. They are doing a different thing, and Schreier’s requires names his wish that they would stop, dressed as a law they are breaking.
Turner’s long work on expertise sharpens the point, because Schreier is an expert claiming normative authority over a field. His books and his editorship and his chair give him standing, and from that standing he tells the field what it ought to recognize about its own object. Turner asks how such a claim gets cashed. The expert who says you ought to defer to my account of what is correct makes a bid for authority, and the normative clothing hides the bid. Schreier’s demand that the field face its constructions reads on this frame as a move to install his vantage as the one from which the field’s practice gets judged. The authority is real as power and unearned as a normative fact. He cannot show that the field is bound to accept his standard. He can show that he holds the position from which the standard issues, which is a different thing, and the normative talk runs the two together so that the power passes for correctness.
The reflexive turn arrives where it always arrives with Turner, and the normative version cuts a clean line. Schreier demands that the critic examine the assumptions of his method. He examines the essentialist’s assumption of a communal self. He does not examine his own assumption that reflexivity binds, that anti-essentialism is correct, that the field owes its categories a reckoning. Those oughts ride along unexamined, and they are the normativism, the residue of binding standards he never turns the reflexive question upon. A man who pressed Schreier’s own demand to the end would ask Schreier to face the constructed character of his sense that scholars ought to face the constructed character of their objects. The demand for reflexivity is a trained habit elevated to a duty, and the reflexive critic, so thorough about his colleagues’ assumptions, leaves his own deepest assumption, that there is a right way to do this and the others are failing it, standing untouched in the doorway.
A limit. Turner’s deflation of the normative threatens every evaluation, including the evaluations a critic cannot do without. A literary scholar has to say some readings are better than others, some careless and some careful, and if there are no normative facts then Schreier’s charge of error against the essentialists loses its ground, and so does any charge anyone might bring against Schreier, and so does Turner’s own complaint against normativism, which sounds like a claim about how theory ought to proceed. Turner has his replies. He is no flat relativist, and he holds that men can prefer and argue for their preferences without pretending the preferences are normative facts discovered in a higher domain. The reply tells where Schreier might survive and where he sinks. He survives where he frames his anti-essentialism as the more useful approach, the one he favors and recommends and will argue for, a habit he prefers and asks others to try. He sinks where he frames it as what the field is bound to see, what serious scholarship requires, what the essentialists stand in error against. The first is a preference a man can defend. The second is an IOU he writes against a domain Turner says is empty, and the note never clears.
Hero System
Two terrors sit under a life. The first is the body, the animal fact, the meat that fails and goes into the ground. The second cuts deeper in certain men. It is the suspicion that nothing about a life reaches past the flesh, that the name goes when the body goes, that the work was a way to fill the hours. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) built his picture of man on these two terrors and called the human answer a hero system. A hero system tells a man how to count. It hands him a path to significance inside a scheme that outlasts his body, and the scheme can be the nation, the faith, the bloodline, the cause, the book that stays on the shelf after the man who wrote it is gone. The hero system is a denial of death wearing the clothes of a purpose.
Schreier built his hero on a refusal. Where other men reach for an essence to belong to, a communal self that holds them and survives them, he made his name showing that the essence was never there. The field of Jewish American literary study believed it studied a Jewish communal soul living in the texts. Schreier showed the soul was built, assembled by editors and critics and teachers who decided who belonged. His heroism is the heroism of the man who will not be fooled. That posture has a long pedigree and a particular cost, and Becker gives us the tools to read both.
Every hero system rests on a story about something missing. The story names a lack, and the heroism repairs it or stares it down. Schreier’s story is the story of the absent essence. The field thought it possessed a thing, and the thing was gone, was never present, was only ever a construction men mistook for a substance. Take away the comforting essence, his work says, and the field will grow up. What remains when the illusion goes is the honest scholar, clear-eyed, facing the made character of his world without the crutch the others lean on. This is a subtraction story. It promises that you reach maturity by stripping away the consolations, and that the man left standing in the cleared field is the adult in the room.
Becker spent his life on the flaw in that promise. The cleared field is never empty. Strip one hero system and another moves into the space, and the man who subtracts the old consolation rarely notices that he has installed a new one. The demystifier has his own immortality project. It is demystification. He earns his significance by being the one who saw through what the others swallowed, and that role outlasts the body as surely as any creed. The believer wins his place in the scheme by belonging. The unbeliever wins his place by refusing to belong, and the refusal becomes a faith with its own saints and its own contempt for the unconverted. Schreier’s hero is the man who would not be consoled, and Becker’s question is whether that refusal is a consolation.
Hold the word at the center of the man. Call it honesty. Schreier’s honesty means facing the construction, refusing the essence, naming the seams in what looks seamless. He treats this as a near-universal good, the thing serious scholarship owes. The trouble is that honesty means a different thing in every hero system, and the differences run deep, and a man rarely sees that his honesty is the local honesty of his tribe rather than honesty as such.
Take a hospice chaplain at the bedside of a dying woman. Honesty for him does not mean stripping her of comfort. It means staying in the room when the prognosis is bad and not pretending it is good, holding her hand while telling her the truth she can bear, and the truth she can bear includes the promise that she is held by something larger than the disease. His honesty is presence under God, whose name he capitalizes and whose mercy he believes runs through the moment. To strip the dying woman of consolation would be to him a cruelty, not a candor. His hero system rewards the man who carries others toward the end without lying and without abandoning them to the void. Honesty here is fidelity.
Take a deep-sea welder, two hundred feet down, sealing a pipeline joint in the dark. Honesty for him means the weld that holds. He cannot fake it. The pressure tests the joint, and the joint passes or men die. His honesty is the refusal of the cosmetic, the surface that looks finished and fails under load. He earns his standing among the other divers by work that survives the test no rhetoric can talk past. His hero system has no place for the elegant argument. It has place for the thing that holds when the water presses in. Honesty here is the weld.
Take a woman who left a secular life and became observant, a baal teshuva keeping a kosher home she did not grow up in, learning the laws as an adult. Honesty for her means submission to a word she takes as given rather than made. She found her freedom in accepting that the obligations are not hers to construct, that the self is answerable to a law older than the self, and that the deepest honesty is the admission that she did not invent the good and cannot. Her hero system rewards the woman who bends her will to the revealed order and finds herself enlarged by the bending. Schreier’s honesty would call her essence a construction. Her honesty calls his construction a refusal to kneel. Each reads the other’s candor as evasion.
Take a quant at a trading desk who builds the model that prices the firm’s risk. Honesty for him means the number that does not flatter, the figure that tells the partners their favorite position will blow up. He earns his place by the unblinking estimate, the model that resists the wish. His honesty is the cold figure against the warm story everyone wants to believe. He and Schreier share a temper here, the suspicion of the comforting account, and they would still part on the question of where the comfort hides, because the quant trusts his number as a fact about the world and Schreier would ask who built the number and whose interests it serves.
Take a matador. The Spanish bullring has a word for it, the truth of the faena, the honest pass worked close to the horns rather than the safe pass faked at a distance. His honesty is the willingness to stand where the animal can reach him. He earns immortality, the only kind his hero system offers, by facing death in the afternoon and not flinching, and the crowd reads his courage in the inches between his body and the horn. Honesty for him is proximity to the thing that kills. Schreier faces no horn. His danger is the bad review, the unanswered argument, the slot that fills before he reaches it. The matador might find the scholar’s honesty bloodless, a courage with nothing at stake but reputation, and the scholar might find the matador’s honesty a vanity dressed as nerve. Both call their own version the real one.
Set Schreier’s honesty beside these and its shape comes clear. His honesty is demystification, the act of showing that what looked given was made. Inside his hero system this is the supreme virtue, the thing that separates the adult from the child, the critic from the dupe. He earns his significance by performing it across two books and a long editorship, and the performance grants him a name that will sit in the field’s footnotes after the body fails. The chaplain earns his place by fidelity, the welder by the weld, the baal teshuva by submission, the quant by the figure, the matador by the horns. Schreier earns his by seeing through. Each man calls his own coin honesty, and each spends it for the same wage, a stake in something that survives him.
How much of this does the man see? Schreier’s method is the demand for self-examination. He tells the field to face its assumptions, to turn the critical eye on its own categories, to refuse the convenient belief. He runs the demand on his colleagues with discipline. He does not appear to run it on his own hero. The reflexive critic, so sharp about the essentialist’s comfort, leaves his own comfort standing in the doorway, the comfort of being the man who exposes comfort. He sees that the communal self is an immortality project for the men who hold it. He does not seem to see that demystification is an immortality project for the man who performs it. The self-awareness is high in form and stops at the one place it might cost him. This is the common shape of the debunker. He audits every faith but the faith that he is above faith.
The shape of the hero, first. Schreier is the cosmic skeptic, the man who wins his place in the scheme by refusing every scheme but skepticism. He stands where the prophet once stood, calling the people off their idols, and the prophet’s old danger follows him, the danger of mistaking the smashing of idols for the absence of worship. He worships clarity. He serves it the way the chaplain serves God and the matador serves the bull, and his service buys him the same thing theirs buys them, a defense against the suspicion that the name dies with the body.
The unnamed rival, second. He defines himself against a man he rarely names, the consoled man, the scholar who reads the Jewish self in the texts and sleeps well, the believer in the essence. The rival is the figure who belongs without apology, who takes the communal soul as given and is warmed by it. Schreier’s hero needs that man to exist, because a demystifier with no one left to demystify has no role to play. He is bound to the essentialist the way the unbeliever is bound to the church he left, and the binding shows in how steadily he returns to the same target across a career.
The cost the ledger cannot price, last. The man who dissolves the communal self in others cannot keep it for himself. He showed the field that its belonging was built, and the showing left him outside the building he took apart. The chaplain has his God, the welder his crew, the baal teshuva her law and her table, the matador his crowd. Schreier has the clarity, and clarity is a cold thing to be held by at the end. He traded the warmth of the given self for the standing of the man who proved it was made, and the trade reads as a victory in every column the field can count. The column the field cannot count holds the thing he gave away, the home he might have lived in had he been willing to believe it was real.
The Voice
Read Benjamin Schreier in his own pages and a voice comes up off the paper at once, unmistakable and worked. Start with the sentence, because the sentence is where he lives. He writes long, and he writes loaded. A characteristic sentence opens on a claim, then qualifies it, then qualifies the qualification, then turns on a colon or a dash and delivers the point it has been circling. He packs subordinate clauses inside subordinate clauses, and he trusts the reader to hold the whole structure in mind until the close. The prose moves the way a man thinks aloud when he distrusts every simple version of what he means. He will not say a thing plainly if a plain saying would let a false ease slip in.
The diction runs to the theoretical, and he wears it without apology. Hegemonic, historicist, epistemological, interpellated, ethnological, autocritique, representativity. These are the working tools of the theory-formed humanities, and Schreier reaches for them as a carpenter reaches for the plane, not to show the tool but to take the surface off. The vocabulary marks his tribe and does his labor at the same time. A reader outside the seminar feels the door close a little. A reader inside hears a man fluent in the house language, using it to say something the house does not want said.
Against that density he sets a second register, and the contrast is the signature. He coins blunt, almost rude tags for the things he attacks. He calls the field’s self-image the JCC conception of Jewish studies, and the joke lands because the Jewish Community Center is the warm suburban building where Jewishness means bagels and a gym membership, and he means the field has confused that comfort for thought. He calls the 1950s arrival of Bellow (1915-2005) and Malamud (1914-1986) and Roth and Grace Paley (1922-2007) the breakthrough, in scare quotes, and then names it the primal scene of the field, borrowing Freud to suggest the discipline keeps reenacting a founding it cannot look at. He writes that a Jew is a Jew is a Jew when it comes to keyword searches, turning Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) into a jab at the field’s unexamined faith that it knows a Jew when it sees one. The high theory and the low jab work the same seam. He uses the fancy word to dismantle and the rude word to deflate, and a paragraph will swing from one to the other inside a single breath.
He likes the diagnostic metaphor, and the diagnosis is always of sickness. The field’s habits contaminate its discourse. Its clubbiness metastasizes. Its insiderism is insidious. He reaches for the language of disease and of bad faith because he reads the field as a body protecting a comfort it should have outgrown, and the medical figure lets him sound less like a colleague with a disagreement and more like a man naming a pathology others have agreed not to see. The reviewers caught the temperature. They call him relentlessly intelligent, frequently polemical, bracing, a passionate wake-up call, and one of them, less charmed, notes the easy dismissals, the quick swipe at a rival critic in passing rather than the patient engagement.
The Yiddish and Hebrew matter, because of how he handles them. He drops sholom bayis, peace in the home, and sinas chinam, baseless hatred, into the argument in italics, and he uses them against the people who use them. The field, he says, treats hard criticism as a breach of the peace, as a kind of baseless hatred among Jews, and so it leaves its arguments at the door and calls the leaving virtue. He takes the community’s own pieties, the words a rabbi might use to keep peace at a fractious table, and shows them working as a gag. A man raised near those words knows their weight. He spends the weight to make his point, which is a move available only to an insider, and he is an insider attacking the privileges of being one.
His rhetoric runs on direct address and the staged question. He stops to ask why anyone should care how old the field is, answers fair question, and proceeds. He poses the objection a hostile reader would raise and takes it on the chin in the open. This is the manner of a man who wants the fight in public. He says so. He opens the essay on the field by praising expressed antagonism and calling the willingness to have it out a lost art, and he closes it by saying that not taking the field for granted means having fights, and asking how else scholarly work could carry any dignity. The pugnacity is the point and the brand. Where his colleagues prize sholom bayis, he prizes the argument conducted loudly enough that the room must turn and watch.
There is a tonal split between the books and the op-ed, and the split tells you something. In the monographs and the field essays the sentences thicken and the theory runs deepest, because the audience is the guild and the guild rewards the difficult surface. In the Chronicle, writing against the recommendation letter for a general academic reader, the prose shortens and hardens, and he calls the genre dishonest and useless for everyone in a subtitle a child could parse. The man can write plain when he wants the blow to land on a wide audience, and he writes dense when he wants standing inside the field. The choice is strategic, not a limit. He knows two registers and picks the one the room rewards.
Irony coats most of it. He rarely states contempt outright. He lets the adjective carry it, the much-ballyhooed breakthrough, the self-congratulatory emancipation, the field patting itself on the back, the scholar primping for his fellow insiders. He builds a sentence so that the sarcasm sits in a single chosen word and the rest stays level, which lets him deny heat while delivering it. The aside in parentheses does similar work, a quick concession or a muttered perish the thought that signals he sees the obvious objection and finds it beneath a full answer. The manner is donnish, quick, a little superior, the voice of a man who has thought about this longer than you have and wants you to feel the gap without his having to assert it.
What you do not find is warmth toward the object. He writes about Jewish American literature with great energy and almost no affection for the comfortable version of it. The feeling in the prose attaches to the act of seeing through, not to the books or the writers or the people. When he quotes Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003) admitting that his criticism was never disinterested, that he wrote as a Jew about the movement that carried Jews to the center, Schreier is not warmed by the confession. He uses it as evidence, the field caught in the act of mistaking autobiography for scholarship. Even his praise tends to be praise for candor about interest, for a man owning the bias Schreier wants to expose. He capitalizes on honesty wherever he finds it and reserves his own for the demolition.
The whole performance has a cost built into its surface, and a careful reader feels it. The density that proves seriousness to the guild also walls the work off from the community it concerns, the Jews who fund the chairs and fill the JCCs and would not finish a paragraph of the prose written about them. The pugnacity that he frames as the recovery of a lost honesty also reads, at moments, as a man enjoying the fight for its own sake. And the irony that protects him from sounding merely angry also keeps a certain coldness at the center, the sense that the writer is never quite in the room with the thing he describes, always a half step above it, narrating the autopsy. He writes, near the end of that field essay, that Jewishness should center a community of critique rather than a community of interest. The line is the man entire. He would trade the warm room full of people who belong for a colder room full of people who argue, and he writes in the prose of the second room, to the second room, against the first.
