A history of representations of American Indians in Jewish literature and popular media. In Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination, author Rachel Rubinstein examines interventions by Jewish writers into an ongoing American fascination with the "imaginary Indian." Rubinstein argues that Jewish writers represented and identified with the figure of the American Indian differently than their white counterparts, as they found in this figure a mirror for their own anxieties about tribal and national belonging. Through a series of literary readings, Rubinstein traces a shifting and unstable dynamic of imagined Indian-Jewish kinship that can easily give way to opposition and, especially in the contemporary moment, competition. In the first chapter, "Playing Indian, Becoming American," Rubinstein explores the Jewish representations of Indians over the nineteenth century, through narratives of encounter and acts of theatricalization. In chapter 2, "Going Native, Becoming Modern," she examines literary modernism’s fascination with the Indian-poet and a series of Yiddish translations of Indian chants that appeared in the modernist journal Shriftn in the 1920s. In the third chapter, "Red Jews," Rubinstein considers the work of Jewish writers from the left, including Tillie Olsen, Michael Gold, Nathanael West, John Sanford, and Howard Fast, and in chapter 4, "Henry Roth, Native Son," Rubinstein focuses on Henry Roth’s complicated appeals to Indianness. The final chapter, "First Nations," addresses contemporary contestations between Jews and Indians over cultural and territorial sovereignty, in literary and political discourse as well as in museum spaces. As Rubinstein considers how Jews used the figure of the Indian to feel "at home" in the United States, she enriches ongoing discussions about the ways that Jews negotiated their identity in relation to other cultural groups. Students of Jewish studies and literature will enjoy the unique insights in Members of the Tribe.

Popular authors such as Sholem Aleichem and Sholem Asch gained multilingual fame in the early decades of the twentieth century with short stories and novels that represented a world foreign to many Jewish and non-Jewish readers alike. But the first Yiddish writer to serve successfully as an interpreter and representative of this world was Morris Rosenfeld. Marc Miller examines the career of Rosenfeld, a key figure in the development of Yiddish literature, which was geared to American immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Rosenfeld's early "sweatshop" poems were designed to foment discontent within capitalism among the working class. Although he began his career as a protest poet, Rosenfeld—with almost no Yiddish literary tradition to draw upon—soon moved beyond the narrow, propagandistic dimensions of his early work to produce some of the most lasting poetry in the Yiddish language. He abandoned his calls-to-arms and shifted the focus of his poetry to the immigrant self. Instead of imploring workers to revolt against the upper classes, Rosenfeld began to lament the sad life of the immigrant worker who toiled and lived under brutal conditions. This new focus resulted in his widespread popularity that reached beyond his Yiddish-speaking, immigrant audience and earned him an international reputation as the representative of his time and place.

Central Conference of American Rabbis Spring/Summer 2021 Journal Published by CCAR Press, a division of the Central Conference of American Rabbis

Celebrating the various ethnic traditions that melded to create what we now call American literature, Whitman did his best to encourage an international reaction to his work. But even he would have been startled by the multitude of ways in which his call has been answered. By tracking this wholehearted international response and reconceptualizing American literature, Walt Whitman and the World demonstrates how various cultures have appropriated an American writer who ceases to sound quite so narrowly American when he is read into other cultures' traditions.

In Modernism the Morning After, Bob Perelman scrutinizes a number of long-held modernist dogmas in order to articulate a more capacious model for thinking about modernism-past, present, and future. Throughout his career, Perelman has focused on the persistence of modernist ambition in poetry, with all of its admirable articulations and tragicomic short-circuits. Poetry, it turns out, is not simply "news that stays news," as Ezra Pound postulated. Instead, as Perelman demonstrates, poetry often gropes toward whatever news can be found in the broader contexts of public speech-the cultural commons, the almost-real or much-too-real language of people and our hyperactive media. Book jacket.