LIT 164JJewish Writers and the American City

An examination of some major Jewish writers and their responses to the American city. Major writers: Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, J. Kaplan, Philip Roth. A look at Yiddish and other minority writers, and including sociological and historical materials on the American city. The course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.

• JEWISH WRITERS AND THE AMERICAN CITY: NEW YORK SPRING 2026 - American Jewish literature has been primarily a literature of the city, and particularly of the gateway city for the vast majority of Jewish immigrants to the United States: New York. By 1930, there were nearly two million Jews in the city, a quarter of the its population, and the largest aggregation of Jews in one place in the history of the planet. Alternating between memoirs and fiction, this course examines the Jewish encounter with New York from a variety of perspectives: trauma and nostalgia, depression and exhilaration, alienation and enchantment. More than a mere setting, the city functions in these narratives as a realistic, psychological, and sometimes phantasmagorical embodiment of some of the most unsettling crises of identity experienced by Jews in America. Among the highlights: Henry Roth's "Call It Sleep" (1934), the greatest novel of the Jewish immigration experience, narrated from the perspective of a six-year-old boy, and Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Jews and the American comic book industry, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" (2000), based on research the author conducted in the archives of UCSC's McHenry Library, and now the basis of an opera performed by the Metropolitan Opera in New York!

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