Product Description

Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation explores the works of a range of black and Jewish writers, critics, and academics from the 1950s to the 1980s. By recording conversations both direct, such as essays and letters, and indirect, such as the fiction of Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Alice Walker, Cynthia Ozick, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin, this book shows how dialogue can engender misperceptions and misunderstandings, and how blacks and Jews in America have both sought and resisted assimilation. By analyzing the history of this discourse, the author explores the ways in which ethnic fiction works in interethnic America, the effects of identity politics, and the tensions and bonds created as African and Jewish Americans continue to construct their ethnic and religious identities in the United States.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #322203 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 264 pages

Review
"...Budick's book is a worthy addition to the quickly growing list of texts redefining the study of Black-Jewish relations." Jeffrey Melnick, American Studies

"Emily Budick begins this important book by challenging the cultural myth that in their struggle against social injustice, American Jews and blacks enjoyed a special alliance that went awry in the 1960s." Michael Nowlin, American Literature

"...the book eloquently voices a theme that runs throughout African American and Jewixh American relations...The most important contribution of Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation lies in its thorough, thoughtful tracing of these dialogues as it works out, in essay form, the vicissitudes of black-Jewixh relations." Contemporary Literature