Abstracts of Papers
Ben Letzler:
"A sliced tomato you have maybe": Jewish-American Literature and the Question of Food
Nation, creed, race, and spirit, hollow terms often
carelessly invoked
to describe identity, are little help for defining
Jewish-Americanness.
Externals - a Jewish religious identity, a relation to or
memory of the
fate of European Jewry, or a militant national identity in
Zionism,
among other things - are frequently taken to define what is
"Jewish-American," when in fact they serve as surrogates.
But is there
an essential Jewish-American identity, and one that, rather
than
dwelling in past revelation and nationhood, exists,
peacefully and
vitally, in the present and the future? Citing texts of
Abraham Cahan,
Bernard Malamud, and Jeffrey Steingarten, the author
outlines te
response that there is: namely, that Jewish-Americanness,
in its
essence, is food.
A version of this paper has been published in:
Picturing America. Trauma, Reality, Politics and Identity in American Visual Culture.
Antje Dallmann, Reinhard Isensee, Philipp Kneis (Editors). Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007.
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