17 - Israel in the Jewish American Imagination

Summary

This chapter explores what do the general trends and major works reveal about specifically Jewish American cultural attitudes and self-conception, as American texts construct perceptions of Israel, Zionism, and Jewish national identity. It focuses on prose fiction, autobiography, and poetry written and published in English. Until the watershed era of the Holocaust and the establishment of statehood in 1948, many Jewish authors in the United States opposed Zionism, remained indifferent toward it, and/or were committed to other causes. In the second half of the twentieth century, when Israel's popularity rose among American Jews and when the righteousness of Zionism served as a central tenet of Jewish communal thinking, imaginative writers still devoted so little energy to the subject of the Jewish state. The late 1980s ushered in a new era in the literary treatment of Israel. Changing historical circumstances triggered a new set of responses and variable attitudes in relation to homeland and diaspora.