25 - Jews on America’s Racial Map

Summary

This chapter first surveys a range of primary sources and identifies historically significant residents of a fictive locality within the larger terrain of Jewish American literatures. It addresses the constitutive yet supplementary role played by more recent literary criticism and literary history in a narrative about that district's development and internal tensions. The non-English literature mapped itself onto native grounds, drawing from both recognized literary influences and the world of folklore, and even translating into Hebrew and Yiddish African American sources, both traditional and contemporary. The chapter lists some selected examples of American Hebraists whose poetry and fiction also installed themselves as both precursor and belated addition to the canon of literary Jews writing about blacks. The recent cartographies that situate Jews and blacks otherwise than strictly literarily or reimagine Jews in relation to other ethnocultural Others on America's racial map, offer a set of new coordinates.