20 - American midrash

Summary

By the end of the tumultuous 1960s, a new vision of American Jewish writing emerged. Instead of the sociological fiction and psychological critique of immigrant assimilation, at the heart of novels such as Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, religious issues and a Judaic rather than a secular Jewish perspective began to inform American Jewish fiction. As the father tells his son, Reuven Malter, in 1967 in Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, “It is strange what’s happening. And it is exciting. Jack … joined a synagogue. He is helping … put up a new building so his grandchildren can go to a modern synagogue and have a good Jewish education. It is beginning to happen everywhere in America. A religious renaissance, some call it.”

As American Jews rediscovered their roots and planted new synagogues throughout the land, they founded Jewish schools, developed Jewish summer camps, visited Israel in increasing numbers in the heady days after the triumph of the Six Day War, and funded Jewish Studies programs at colleges and universities. These events and activities reinforced the new agenda for American Jewish literature, which took hold in the 1970s in a renewal of interest in classical Jewish texts, including the Bible, traditional parables, Hasidic tales, and midrashim. The rekindled interest in classical Jewish learning had an American turn and developed into an American midrashic style, which began to inform the fiction of the younger generation of writers.