Affiliated Identities as a Design Tool for a Jewish Literature Course

Abstract

My book Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature suggests a framework for understanding writers’ Jewish identity.1 The basic argument of Affiliated Identities is that Jewish writers often build, shape, and maintain their public identities as Jews by way of exhibiting ties with other Jewish writers. Much of this networking takes place as part of works of literature. I believe that this framework is highly pertinent for the pedagogy of Jewish literature in higher education, especially Jewish literature as a transnational multi-lingual phenomenon. In this short paper, I will suggest that instructors can use this idea as tool for designing courses or segments of courses. Thus, the teaching of Jewish literature can be planned around a certain author’s network of literary affiliations. At least in the American case, which was my focus, these ties are often international rather than restricted to a national canon (or even to a linguistic one). Thus, designing courses around the concept of Jewish literary networking will also establish Jewish literature’s multi-lingual and border-crossing nature in a way that is more organic than simply deploying a survey of “the best of” Jewish writing in a plethora of languages. Furthermore, Jewish writers also connect themselves to non-Jewish writers. Following these links can help show how Jewish writing is embedded in non-Jewish national and linguistic traditions. Let me give two American examples for what I mean. The idea of the course is to have an author or a text as the central node of a literary network and then explore (or let students explore) the other texts or authors that are once or twice removed from this central node. In the first example the center is an author, while in the second example it is a novel that works to connect its authors to other writers. Emma Lazarus is often credited as the founding mother of Jewish American literature. She is hardly a household name, but three lines she wrote are some of the most well-known lines in American poetry. They come from “The New Colossus,” a poem dedicated to The Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore” (Lazarus 2005, 48–9). Lazarus comes from a German Jewish and Sephardi heritage. Both sides of her family have lived in America before she was born and were largely assimilated. At the beginning of her career she