The Temple of Culture Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America [Paperback]

From the beginning of modern intellectual history to the culture wars of the present day, the experience of assimilating Jews and the idiom of culture have been fundamentally intertwined with each other. Freedman's book begins by looking at images of the stereotypical Jew in the literary culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and America, and then considers the efforts on the part of Jewish critics and intellectuals to counter this image in the public sphere. It explores the unexpected parallels and ironic reversals between a cultural dispensation that had ambivalent responses to Jews and Jews who became exponents of that very tradition.

Acknowledgements
Preface
1. The Jew in the Museum
2. The Temple of Culture and the Market for Letters:The Jew and the Way We Write Now
3. The Mania for the Middlebrow: Trilby, the Jew, and the Middlebrow Imaginary
4. Henry James and the Discourses of Anti-Semitism
5. Henry James among the Jews
Afterword: Beyond the Battle of the Blooms

A very smart study that investigates the evolution of `the Jew' in liberal culture worship in an admirably thorough and perhaps even definitive manner. It is also engagingly written throughout, managing the hat-trick of cultural theoretics without even the slightest hint of awkward, jargoned prose....[Freedman's] examination of how the mid-to-late-century New York Jewish intelligentsia became messily entangled in this web is chock full of excellent research and fascinating `insider' narratives, as well as nuanced insights into where the profession sits today in terms of these academic Jewish psycho-dramas....Freedman's renewed interest in Henry James forms the centerpiece of this study....[He develops] some compelling readings of the Jewish characters and their associated implications throughout James's writing, leading to the most central example,The Golden Bowl. --IEnglish Literature in Transition: 1880-1920

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