Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Matthue Roth of MyJewishLearning interviews David Berman (former lead singer of the Silver Jews), poet and author of The Portable February here.

Josh Lambert (American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide) recommends “Ten Lost Treasures of American Jewish Fiction” on the JPS Blog here.

In her last blog, Joanna Smith Rakoff wrote about how, in her own way, Jane Austen wrote about being an undercover Jewish writer.

Laurie Colwin was, in a way, a sort of heir to Austen’s charms, even if her novels are the opposite of marriage plots: Her female characters struggle endlessly with the confines and meaning of contemporary marriage (contemporary, that is, circa the 1970s and 1980s; Colwin died, at 48, in 1992). Many, if not most, of her characters are Jewish, but none more interestingly so than those in Family Happiness, her most fully-realized novel and a sort of gloss on (or rebuke of) Madame Bovary , a novel about a happily married matron, Polly Solo-Miller Demarest, involved in an ongoing affair with a depressive painter. Who happens, of course, to be Jewish, though you mightn’t guess it if you hadn’t been told on the very first page.

The Solo-Millers are one of those old Jewish families–settled in New York even before the German banking dynasties, like the Schiffs and the Warburgs—“more identifiably old American than Jewish” with vast, dark uptown apartments, and summer houses in Maine, and traditions as labyrinthine and ingrained as any prep school. On Sundays, Polly and her brothers gather around their parents’ stolid dining room table for smoked salmon on toast points—definitely not bagels, that Oestjuden (Eastern Jewish) delight—and subtle chiding from their mother, who has so instilled in Polly her rigid ideas about women’s deportment and obligations that poor Polly almost has a breakdown, at one point, when she’s forced to go grocery shopping on a Sunday.

Polly is a wonderful character, struggling, all too humanly, not to understand but to suppress her conflicting desires for “comfort, order”—and danger and provocation. Colwin by no means ruminates on Polly’s Jewishness—or that of her family. But for me Colwin’s lack of chatter about exactly how and why the Solo-Millers are Jewish is precisely what makes them familiar and comprehensible as Jews: They exist in a milieu so thoroughly and completely Jewish that their identity (or religion) never comes into question.

It is simply woven into the fabric of their beings, as it is for so many American Jews. For Polly, her affair with the decidedly not-Jewish Lincoln, whose values and temperament are almost the opposite of those of everyone else in her life (everyone else being Jewish, of course), serves as a sort of questioning of her world, a pressing at its confines. In a way, the deeply iconoclastic decision she makes toward the novel’s end—I’m going to try not to reveal it—serves as metaphor for the sometimes uneasy, sometimes happy manner in which secular American Jews live sort of parallel lives, at once both fully American and fully Jewish (even if they don’t necessarily think of it that way).

In the next installment: Margaret Drabble’s pitch-perfect depiction of multicultural mid-1990s London.

Joanna Smith Rakoff’s new book, A Fortunate Age, is available now. She’ll be blogging all week for MyJewishLearning and the Jewish Book Council.

Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of A Fortunate Age and former editor of Nextbook.org, is guest-blogging for MyJewishLearning and the Jewish Book Council.

Some years ago, when I was a doctoral student in English literature, my more conservative-minded peers sometimes made fun of the critics who practiced a more theory-based form of analysis — the followers of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and, in this case, the movement known as “New Historicism” — by saying, with a sarcastic roll of the eye, something to the effect of, “Right, and in not commenting on the French Revolution, Jane Austen is really commenting on the French Revolution.” Titters would ensue.

They were referring, of course, to the famous lack of historical context in Austen’s much-loved novels, and to the critic Warren Roberts’ then-famous (or, in some circles, infamous) book on the subject, Jane Austen and the French Revolution. Roberts set out to prove that Austen was not just a frippery writer of proto-chick-lit novels about shabby genteel young ladies in search of husbands, but a politically- and culturally-engaged chronicler of the major events of her day, who very much had the French and American Revolutions on her mind while writing Mansfield Park.

As a scholar, I was on the old-fashioned side and, thus, happy to simply read Austen’s novels for pleasure, rather than scrutinizing dialogue for coded ideas about the Napoleonic Wars — which may well be why I dropped out of said doctoral program and began writing my own marriage plots. But, though I laughed along with my classmates whenever that French Revolution comment was uttered, I was secretly attracted to the idea that a writer’s silence on a subject might say as much as her explicit exploration of a subject.

And so it was that years later, when I took a job as books editor of the Jewish culture magazineNextbook (now Tablet), that I found myself drawn to fiction that was less than straightforward in its approach to Jewish ideas or, more often, identity. It was easy to discuss the Jewish content of, say, The Counterlife or Bee Season. What interested me more — and still interests me — were the ways in which, for instance, a character’s Jewishness comes into play in a novel (or story) that doesn’t necessarily center on things Jewish.

Thus, over the next three days, I’ll be looking at a few favorite characters from such fiction, characters who, to my mind, say as much about the state of Anglo-American Judaism (in the cultural, if not the religious sense) as those in more explicitly and obviously Jewish fiction, characters from a few novels of recent decades: Laurie Colwin’s Family Happiness, Margaret Drabble’s The Witch of Exmoor, and Jean Hanff Korelitz’s Admission.

Joanna Smith Rakoff’s new book, A Fortunate Age, is available now. She’ll be blogging all week for MyJewishLearning and the Jewish Book Council.

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Adam Mansbach, author of The End of the Jews, blogs for JDub Records on Jewish Culture here.

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Life of Pi author Yann Martel just sold the rights to his third book to Spiegel & Grau. The new book is an allegory about the Holocaust — involving animals. Read Jewcy’s post on the new book here. Read The New York Times article about the book here.

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Ariel Sabar, author of My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, wrote an essay for last Sunday’s New York Times: A Time to Put Aside the Armor.

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

1) The New York Times reviews Myths, Illusions, and Peace:Finding a New Direction for America in The Middle East (Dennis Ross and David Makovsky) here.

2)Erika Dreifus breaks down the new issue of Moment magazine here and includes a link to an article in which “three Israeli authors [A.B. Yehoshua, Naomi Ragen, and Etgar Keret] “shed the guise of fiction to tell us about their favorite places in the country they love.”

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Debra Nussbaum Cohen posted on the Forward‘s Sisterhood Blog this week about a forthcoming book from Jewish Lights Publishing: The Modern Men’s Torah Commentary: New Insights from Jewish Men on the 54 Weekly Torah Portions (Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, ed.). Cohen writes:

The Atlanta-based Rabbi Salkin gives a nod toward Jewish feminist scholarship, and writes in the introduction that feminism has pointed out that we see the world through a gendered lens. He also writes, “The great, often unspoken crisis facing modern liberal Judaism is the disengagement of its men.”

There is, to be sure, a serious problem of disengagement among young men in liberal synagogues, but Rabbi Salkin overstates it. Thoughtful analysts are more likely to say that the great crisis facing modern liberal Judaism is overall illiteracy and indifference.

The very idea of a book of men’s Torah commentary rankles some leading Jewish feminists.

To read the complete post, please click here.

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

In case you missed the earlier post on the National Book Award Blog’s summer project of blogging on each of the Fiction winners from 1950 to 2008, you can read it here.

This week: Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, the 1960 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.

The post includes reviews from Larry Dark, Patrick Rosal, Liz Rosenberg, David L. Ulin, David Unger, the other Fiction finalists from 1960, the Fiction judges from 1960, other literature news from 1960, and suggested links.

In his last blog, David Plotz, author of Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible, noted how perturbed he was by the idea of alienation in Jewish religious practice, and asked the question: “Is it time to start worshiping idols?”

Author Robert Wright is too polite to ask directly, but The Evolution of God poses an awkward question for Jews. His book goes to great lengths to highlight the contributions each of the three Abrahamic religions have made to the development of monotheism: Judaism for inventing it; Christianity for turning it into a global business model; Islam for refining that model. What Wright never quite grapples with, but we Jews must, is the question: Why is Judaism such a failure?

OK, it’s true that we’re here and all the assorted Molechites, Baalites, Edomites, Canaanites, and other wicked -ites who bedeviled us in the Bible are nowhere to be found. So we can feel pretty good about that. But God told us we would be more numerous than the stars in the sky. We aren’t! If you believe the census data in the Torah — though I don’t — the Jewish population has grown only sevenfold in the last 3,500 years, a period during which the global population has multiplied more than thousandfold.

And just compare us to Christianity and Islam! They’ve got a billion-plus adherents each. And they’re growing like crazy, whereas if you can add a single Jew to the global roster these days, you’re practically hailed as a hero.

So where did we go wrong? (Incidentally, I’m doing my part: Three kids! All with nice Jewish names.) The Evolution of God gives a few hints, more about what the Christians and Muslims have done right than what Jews have done wrong. In the case of Christianity, for example, emphasizing brotherly love, piggybacking on the communities of the Roman Empire to expand, and ditching unpleasant entrance requirements (circumcision, dietary laws) all grew the business.

So why have we been so demographically unsuccessful? One important reason, of course, is that we’ve been repeatedly targeted for extermination. But there are others. We’re very finicky about whom we accept, and theologically, we’re pretty rigid. There are only a few varieties of Judaism, but there are practically endless varieties of Christianity, ranging from Orthodox traditions that encourage iconography to Catholic traditions that venerate Mary, to liberation theologies, to throwback Amish and Mennonites, to a Mormon offshoot that supposes Jesus came to America, to a Unitarian tradition that rejects the Trinity.

The monotheism of Christianity has one simple principle—accept Christ and his resurrection, essentially—and allows worshipers to customize the religion in practically any way they see fit. Speak in tongues! Pray to saints! Do a Latin mass! Do a punk service! Christianity has managed to crush or swallow so many other religions because it’s so adaptable.

We’ve managed to avoid being crushed or swallowed. But we’ve also decided not to compete. (Christianity is Toyota. Judaism is Ferrari.) Judaism largely refuses to adapt to local conditions. One of the oddest moments of my life was watching one Japanese Jew chew out another Japanese Jew for bringing a shrimp-flavored snack on a school field trip: It is almost literally an impossibility to avoid shrimp and pork in Japan.

The idea that our poor co-religionists in Tokyo have to sweat every snack food ingredient is deeply poignant. Our rigidity is a useful survival strategy in a difficult, unfriendly world. It strengthens in-group bonding, and enables us to defend our identities in far-flung places. But it also makes us almost uniquely ill-equipped to entice new adherents. To put it into Wright’s framework: Maybe our god isn’t evolving.

David Plotz is the editor of Slate magazine. His new book Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible, is available now.