The Impossible Jew

Benjamin Schreier’s The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History is an ambitious book. According to Schreier, the study of Jewish American literature has been mired in the same conversations for a very long time—even prior to its inception as a scholarly discipline. He writes: We need to displace the hegemonic temptation to read identity as the authorization machine of a biologic nationalism: though it may for now be all but impossible to disengage the thought of Jewish American literature as a field (like other identity-based literatures) from the biologistic thought of the genealogy or heritable cultural identity of the author as he or she stands as proxy for a categorically recognized historical subject, a responsible identity-based criticism must work to denormalize that linkage. (185-86) For Schreier, the historicist/anthropological critical biases that inform classes, programs, and departments in Jewish American literature have, in their rigidity and in their intellectual limitation, failed to understand or appreciate the fluidity of Jewish identity. On one hand, Schreier sees himself as an advocate for incorporating poststructuralist theory to open up discussions about Jewish American literature, to recognize how Jewish identity is resistant to the reifications that form the foundation of the scholarly institution. On the other hand, alongside his desire to “liberate Jewish American study” (1), Schreier also suggests that deconstructing readings of Jewishness as a signifier provides Jews themselves a new kind of freedom to break with the texts that have functioned as cultural inhibitors—prison houses of Jewish identity. Ultimately, Schreier questions whether any particular authority can define Jewishness or explain what it means to be Jewish.

Aesthetics · Art · Haskalah · Identity (music) · Jewish American literature · Jewish identity · Jewish studies · Judaism · Literature · Sociology · Theology · Zionism · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Jewish Identity and Society · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society