Imagined Non-Jews

Jews Passing as Gentiles in Post-WWII and Multicultural American Fiction

Series: 

Author:
Ohad Reznick
Racial passing has fascinated thousands of American readers since the end of the nineteenth century. However, the phenomenon of Jews passing as gentiles has been all but overlooked. This book examines forgotten novels depicting Jewish Americans masquerading as gentiles. Exploring two "waves" of publications of this subgenre—in the 1940s-1950s and 1990s-2000s—this book raises questions about the perceptions of Jewish difference during these periods.Looking at issues such as Whiteness, Americanness, gender, and race, it traces the changes in the representation of Jewish identity during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. Ohad Reznick’s Imagined Non-Jews is an important intervention in the scholarship on the literature of passing. This book also makes a significant contribution to Jewish American literary studies through thoughtful close readings of texts from the 1940s and 1950s, many of them little-known today, as well as multi-ethnic American fiction from the turn-of-the-21st-century, all of them featuring characters who conceal their Jewishness in order to pass for gentile. —Lori Harrison-Kahan, Boston College, author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary
Copyright Year:
2024
E-Book (PDF)
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-70433-6
Publication:
05 Aug 2024
Hardback
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-68840-7
Publication:
08 Aug 2024
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Ohad Reznick, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia where he teaches Hebrew and Israeli literature and cinema. His essays appear in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, and MELUS.
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Two “Waves” of Jewish Passing Novels

Part 1
White Lies: Passing for Non-Jewish in Postwar American Fiction
 Introduction to Part 1

1 Passing: Motives, Techniques, and Outcomes
 1 Motives: To Be Past Caring or Caring about the Past

 2 Techniques of Passing and the Rejection of Jewish Difference

 3 Outcomes: Many Happy Returns


2 Fifty Shades of White

3 Resolving the Tension between Two Identities

4 Feminine Males and Marginalized Females

5 Art as Mirroring Identity: The Insincerity of Passing
 1 Wasteland: The Camera Cannot Lie

 2 Home Is the Hunted: Depicting Uncultivated Jews

 3 That Winter: An Open Book

 4 “The Lady of the Lake:” Con Artists


Part 2
Between Fiction and Reality: Passing for Non-Jewish in Multicultural American Fiction
 Introduction to Part 2

6 Passing: Motives, Techniques, and Outcomes
 1 Motives: Avoiding Anti-Semitism and the Memory of the Holocaust

 2 Passing Techniques: Performance of Non-Jewishness

 3 Outcomes: Indefinite Identities


7 Almost White but Not Quite American

8 Fluid Gender and Jewish Identities

9 Passing as Fiction: Questioning the Line between True and False Identity
 1 Family Fictions: Fiction Becomes Reality

 2 Old School: Questioning the Boundaries of Plagiarism and Identity

 3 The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank: Destabilizing Identities through (Auto)Biographies


 Epilogue: The Human Stain and Jews’ Precarious Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century


Works Cited

Index

Students and scholars of Jewish American literature.
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