📖 The Jewish Imposition: Tracing the Burden of Representation through Jewish American Fiction

Jewish American authors in the 20th century and beyond have a complicated relationship to the fiction they write; most authors happily fall into one category or another, a novelist, a humorist, a mystery writer, a Japanese writer, and so on. But the term “Jewish American writer” is one often met with staunch resistance, especially in the 20th century. 

The question of whether one is a “Jewish American writer” means asking a myriad of identity questions that one might not wish to tackle. While the problem of categorization is not unique to Jewish writers of course, the complicated history of the terms as well their fraught construction imposes a distinct challenge on writers who face this categorization. 

In this dissertation, I analyze the ways in which Jewish American novelists have responded to, been affected by, or rejected what ethnic studies scholars call the burden of representation which manifests here as scholars, critics, and fans calling for these authors to write about and thus represent their Jewishness. 

The first chapter explores Joseph Heller’s career and how his drive to publish content that will sell ultimately took over his drive to resist exploring overt Jewish themes. 

The second chapter focuses on the much-examined Philip Roth, and his own resistance to writing about Jewishness, focusing mainly on Portnoy’s Complaint. I begin with the connections between Roth and Heller which I have discovered personally through research at Roth’s library in Newark, using his annotations of Heller’s books. 

Chapter 3 discusses Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble, where she reworks Portnoy’s Complaint with 21st century ideas about Jewishness and gender in mind. 

Chapter 4 deals with the most contemporary novelist Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed, which foregrounds exploration of queer Jewish identity. 

I conclude by showing how these concepts, which I rework in this context as the Jewish imposition, is in conversation with scholarly work on the burden of representation; in other words, I show that while this problem is unique, the overall imposition is in some ways universal.