Observation ·
Johanna Kaplan’s Serious American Jewish Comedy
By Ruth R. WisseThe characters in her new story collection are fully formed creatures of that transitional 20th-century moment between European Jewish survivors and American forgetters.
American Jewish literature
Latest Mosaic Content for American Jewish literature
Response ·
Bellow Was So Jewish He Could Travel Any Distance Without Risking That Allegiance
His reputation will fall and rise with his people's.
Response ·
Why Bellow Was the Least Jewish Writer of the Golden Age of American Jewish Fiction
By Adam KirschThe great theme of his work is resistance to spiritual constraint, the soul’s freedom as the highest value.
Response ·
Bellow Between Hebraism and Hellenism
By Hillel HalkinBellow's whole career as a writer was devoted to this dichotomy, sometimes veering toward one pole, sometimes toward the other, but never losing sight of both.
Monthly Essay ·
What Saul Bellow Saw
By Ruth R. WisseThe Jewish writer who became America’s most decorated novelist spent his early years prodding the nation’s soul. Then, sensing danger to it, he took up the role of guardian.
Observation ·
Nicole Krauss’s New Novel Plants a Forest. It Fails to Thrive.
By Jonathan LeafForest Dark is dazzling and promises insight into, among other things, contemporary Israel, but in the end it doesn't deliver.
Observation ·
Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist
By Michael WeingradA just-reissued classic explores an unfamiliar realm of Jewish experience—and is a great American tale besides.
