31 - Since 2000

Summary

When Michael Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize in spring 2001 for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, it was the first time that the National Book Award went to a work of fiction about Jews by a writer born after 1933. This chapter argues that the key developments for understanding the wave of writing about Jews that crested after the millennium were the institutional ones. The flourishing of Jewish American literature after 2000 resulted from its institutionalization: the marked increase in support for work within a range of relevant educational, social, media, and community organizations. Among the hundred most widely circulated magazines in the country, the only one currently publishing literary fiction on a regular basis is the New Yorker. Non-Jewish authors whose books are deemed to be of interest to the Jewish Book Council's audiences and Jews who have written books with no overt Jewish content regularly and without controversy take part in the Jewish Book Network.