Exiles on Main Street Jeish American Writers and American Literary Culture [Hardcover]

How have Jews reshaped their identities as Jews in the face of the radical newness called America? Julian Levinson explores the ways in which exposure to American literary culturein particular the visionary tradition identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitmanled American Jewish writers to a new understanding of themselves as Jews. Discussing the lives and work of writers such as Emma Lazarus, Mary Antin, Ludwig Lewisohn, Waldo Frank, Anzia Yezierska, I. J. Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe, Levinson concludes that their interaction with American culture led them to improvise new and meaningful ways of being Jewish. In contrast to the often expressed view that the diaspora experience leads to assimilation, Exiles on Main Street traces an arc of return to Jewish identification and describes a vital and creative Jewish American literary culture.

. . . Exiles on Main Street is an original contribution to the continuing story of the creative encounter between Jewish writers and America.Summer 2009

Julian Levinson is the Samuel Shetzer Professor of American Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of MichiganAnn Arbor. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Levinson's well-researched book makes a significant contribution to studies of Jewish American Literature and Jewish Cultural continuity.2007. . . a standout work in the field of American Jewish Literature . . . Levinson is well-attuned to the critical trends and thinking that are prevalent in the world of literary scholarship and applies them to the book's selected authors and texts in a way that is fresh and thoughtful. . . December 12, 2008

Contents
Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1. Breathing Free in the New World: Transcendentalism and the Jewish Soul
1. Songs of a Semite: Emma Lazarus and the Muse of History
2. Ecstasies of the Credulous: Mary Antin and the Spirit of the Shtetl

Part 2. Battling the Nativists:l3Ê