Jewish American Poetry

The question is whether there is something uniquely Jewish about the poetry of Jewish Americans. An examination of this issue would probably lead us to the possible themes in Jewish-American Poetry – angst, irony, self-doubt, nostalgia, parental ligature, a reverence for the text, for the word, for clarity etc. But what lies at the bottom of Jewish American Poetry is the question of marginalized exilic chosenness.


The ambivalent American Jew is now at the cross roads, caught in a confusion and a clear and apparent need to chose between integration and survival. This is especially so because the cultural community such writing must draw from and speak to has vanished as early as in the 1970s. After the immigrant years, the real Jewish heritage has become the memory of a memory for people, born after 1930. Nor could the historic, moral and religious weight of Judaism help them. There are the times when they are becoming more and more conscious about the incompatibility of integration and survival. There may be an exhaustion of Jewish content in their literature, but the generation of writers and poets who define post war American literature which includes names of Arthur Miller, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Allen Ginsberg, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Art Spiegelman, Jacqueline Osherow, Melvin Bukiet, Allegra Goodman, makes clear that Jewish American Literature continues to thrive. A chronological study of Jewish American Literature would reveal how it has chronicled and paralleled the Jewish American experience. It depicts the struggles of immigrant life, the stable, yet alienated middle-class existence that followed and finally the unique challenges of cultural acceptance, assimilation and the reawakening of tradition. Caught in a no man’s land between the universalism of American Culture and the particularism of Jewish Culture, Jewish American writers have in recent years, opted for the latter. Their recent strategies include negotiation between feminism and Judaism, the depiction of the Holocaust as a dominant force in American Jewish fiction and poetry have also become geographically diverse. The varied settings of contemporary Jewish American fiction and poetry have also become geographically diverse. The varied settings of contemporary Jewish American Literature reflect the geographical dispersion of Jewish Americans.

While Jewish American fiction has long been recognized as a fit subject for critical inquiry, Jewish American poetry has largely been overlooked in the past. But from Emma Lazarus to Allen Ginsberg, Jewish American poets have long been a presence in American poetry. Recent studies show that some attempts have been made to redress this silence. Once a group of isolated voices, their number and range has grown in the last 50 years to reveal a distinct American poetic transition.