The American Jewish Inexperience?
Sholom Aleichem, Bintel Blog readers. (Your turn: Aleichem, Sholom). I’m currently on tour promoting “A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward”, so my posting will be spotty for a little while. But here’s something that could keep you busy for some time.
In the latest issue of The Nation, William Deresiewicz makes a connection between current fiction by Jewish writers (Chabon, Englander, Foer) and what he sees as the rather dismal state of American Jewry:
My own experience tells me that American Judaism has long been beset by a deep sense of banality and inauthenticity. To the usual self-contempt of the liberal middle class is added the feeling that genuine Jewish life is always elsewhere: in Israel or the shtetl, among the immigrant generation or the ultra-Orthodox. Jewish culture as lived by the non-Orthodox tends to feel bland and thin even to its practitioners — the last, worn coins of a princely inheritance… The most visible of the current generation of self-consciously Jewish novelists appear to be avoiding their own experience because their own experience just seems too boring.
Read the full article here.
Why I became the Forward’s editor-in-chief
You are surely a friend of the Forward if you’re reading this. And so it’s with excitement and awe — of all that the Forward is, was, and will be — that I introduce myself to you as the Forward’s newest editor-in-chief.
And what a time to step into the leadership of this storied Jewish institution! For 129 years, the Forward has shaped and told the American Jewish story. I’m stepping in at an intense time for Jews the world over. We urgently need the Forward’s courageous, unflinching journalism — not only as a source of reliable information, but to provide inspiration, healing and hope.
— Alyssa Katz, editor-in-chief
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