Is Yale teaching Jewish writers?

A report from the English department, circa 2022

The untaught

Why would Yale’s English department not teach major Jewish writers? Why, when I counted in 2022, were Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud combined on one syllabus total? And why were these concerns dismissed when I brought them up?

There has been much writing lately about political diversity in academia, writing that is part of a conversation prompted, in no small part, by Donald Trump’s attack on academia, his attempt to paint it as a redoubt of left-wing CRT loonies. Trump, of course, wouldn’t know if Critical Race Theory were a post-punk band from Glasgow, and I promise you he could not spell Foucault (although he would capitalize it). He’s just being an opportunist. But if nothing else, the Administration’s crude policies have forced us to talk about groupthink and myopia in the humanities, which has no single cause but which is very real.

I have been reluctant to share the following story because there is nothing more tiresome than a disgruntled ex-, whether ex-spouse, ex-boyfriend or -girlfriend, ex-employee, or expat. When people leave a person, country, or institution, it behooves them to speak well (insofar as they are able) of whomever or whatever they have left behind. There are many reasons why: It’s not kind to gossip. It’s not healthy to dwell in the past. It’s boring to listen to others’ sour grapes.

When, in 2022, I left Yale College, where since 2006 I had been the founding director of the Yale Journalism Initiative (a terrific program, endowed by Steven Brill and Bob Woodward, among others, that matches students, often on financial aid, with media internships, and helps support them with financial assistance), and where I also taught English as an untenured “lecturer,” it was—I have since come to realize—because I was burnt out, and ready for the next thing in my career. The burnout was caused in part by COVID, which had reduced me to teaching to boxes on a screen and then, even after we returned in person, to students who were masked, and required to be distanced from me in a lecture hall, well past the point when this made sense from a public-health perspective (and at a time when they were doffing their masks to party, drink, and hook up on the weekends, as they freely admitted—and I did not blame them).

The burnout was also caused—and this was more at the front of my mind, at the time—by the ascent of an internal campus “cancel culture” that I feared could come for me. I was not alone in this fear; I had conversations with numerous colleagues also worried that if we slipped up somehow and offended a student, we could become the center of a campus-wide or even national news story.

But truth be told, I was less burned out by my students, who by and large were smart, inquisitive, and sensitive, than by my colleagues. Many seemed to me intellectually inert, simply uncurious. A lot of them went along with orthodoxies—lefty, Marxist, identitarian, multicultural, or otherwise—without even realizing that they were doing so, or bothering to summon defenses of them. To put it another way, if they had been combative but open-minded, strident but curious, assertive but self-deprecating—if they enjoyed a fight, and allowed they might change their minds—that would have been one thing; that would have been grand. But instead, they had sleepwalked (slept-walked?) into their orthodoxies, took them for granted, and didn’t want to be bothered about them.

So here’s the story, one of two or three stories that I sometimes tell when asked why I left Yale, where I had attended college and graduate school and taught, mostly very happily, for sixteen years.

In the fall of 2021, I wrote an email to a senior member of the department, to sum up what we had just talked about during a phone call; it was two or three paragraphs long. Here is the last paragraph:

On another note, I would add that, to judge from the (admittedly limited) OCI [course database] course descriptions, Saul Bellow has not been taught in at least five years, and Philip Roth perhaps once in the past 10 semesters.  Both are basically untaught. So are Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud, and Cynthia Ozick. Completely untaught. As is Anglophone Jewish literature generally. ([one professor does teach] Israeli literature in translation). It also occurs to me that I don’t think the department has ever had someone who specialized in Jewish American literature, even as a subfield. In all sincerity, I wonder if this is a topic for the DEI committee, or for a broader discussion of the underrepresentation of an important literary tradition, practiced by a people whose admission to Yale was quite famously restricted by quotas until just before our lifetimes.

The department member wrote a nice note back, saying that indeed they thought the department DEI committee (English had its own DEI committee; at least a few other departments at Yale did) would be the right venue for my concerns, and asking if they could forward my note. I said they should feel free.

The next month, December, I got a note back from two colleagues, co-conveners of said DEI committee. I reprint the relevant chunk here; I have redacted names of department members because my interests are not in individuals but in larger systemic questions:

Dear Mark:

Thank you for presenting your concerns on these critical issues … to the DE&I committee. We discussed your email at our meeting on November 19 at length. We all appreciate how mindful you are of diversity issues in the English Department: one of our main concerns is how we can build a more diverse and collegial atmosphere in the Department where we foster trust and communication without any institutional interference in our academic freedom.

In relation to your suggestion that Jewish literature is absent from our syllabi, we casually surveyed the 11 members of the DE&I committee at the meeting on Nov 19 on this, and were happy to learn that the following Jewish authors, scholars, and artists are currently being taught just on our curricula:

Gertrude Stein, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Emma Goldman, Ariel Levy, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Art Spiegelman, Claude Cahun, Cynthia Ozick, Albie Sachs, William Kentridge, Nadine Gordimer, Sigmund Freud, Allen Ginsberg, Judith Butler, Leslie Feinberg, Jordy Rosenberg, Jack Halberstam, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Aurora Levins Morales.

Our committee member [name redacted] in fact is giving a talk on Cahun and the trans & Jewish author Micah Bazant at Yale in December for this conference in Art History [link redacted].

We invite you to extrapolate from these results, and warmly encourage you to communicate with other colleagues in the English Department to find out more about the Jewish writers in their courses. From the above, it seems to us that Anglophone Jewish literature is certainly not absent from our curriculum.

That said, we all agreed that we would be keen to see a course on Anglophone Jewish literature in the English Department to complement the provision on the Judaic Studies Program. We have no doubt this would be a substantial and popular addition to the array of courses offered in the Department. We would lend the support of the DEI committee to any faculty member, including yourself, who might propose such a course of study…

With thanks for your hard work, and with warm wishes,

[co-conveners’ names redacted]

This response did not sit well with me. So I wrote back:

Dear [Colleagues]:

Belatedly: thanks for your reply to my letter ... forwarded to the DEI committee. I am glad for the response, but I fear it misses the point.

As I wrote [initially], “...to judge from the (admittedly limited) OCI course descriptions, Saul Bellow has not been taught in at least five years, and Philip Roth perhaps once in the past 10 semesters. Both are basically untaught. So are Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud, and Cynthia Ozick. Completely untaught. As is Anglophone Jewish literature generally…. It also occurs to me that I don't think the department has ever had someone who specialized in Jewish American literature, even as a subfield.” I did not claim that no Jews were taught—what I said was that the Anglophone Jewish literary tradition was not taught.

It’s bizarre to write back with a scattershot list of people who happen to have Jewish ancestry—including Freud, Emma Goldman, and the jurist Albie Sachs, and the expressionist artist William Kentridge, none of whom is principally a literary figure, as well as a host of perfectly admirable contemporary professors, well regarded in their fields but not part of the literary canon, and two New Yorker journalists—as if anyone with a Jewish last name disproves my point. That is not evidence that the tradition is being taught. If I wrote to point out that we are neglecting the works of Baldwin and Morrison, you wouldn't say, “Yes, but here’s a list including a contemporary Black professor at Berkeley, not to mention Colin Powell's autobiography, not to mention the photographer Gordon Parks”—that would miss the point entirely (and be offensive, to boot). Imagine if I wrote about the absence of Baldwin and Morrison and American Black authors, and you wrote back citing authors from Africa… I’m not looking for Jewish last names, but for the main canonical figures in an important immigrant and first- and second-generation tradition.

I am glad that Ozick is being taught somewhere here, as well as Allen Ginsberg. But my point stands: we don't teach the Jewish American literary tradition (which would include Roth, Isaac B. Singer, Bellow, Anya Yezierska, Michael Gold, Malamud, Ozick, Leonard Michaels, and contemporaries like Dara Horn, Joshua Cohen (as of yesterday, up for the NBCC Award in fiction), and David Bezmozgis (although he is Canadian)). What's more, as far as I can tell, we never really have. Asking a non-tenured non-specialist like me to teach one class is an inadequate reply. Rather, I’d like to ask for the DEI committee’s support in asking that the next tenure-line job created in the department be in American Jewish literature. Especially given the department's deep history of antisemitism—after Charles Feidelson’s appointment in 1946, it was decades before Jews were regularly able to get tenure—such a faculty slot is long overdue. Will you join me?

I’d be happy to discuss this with the committee.

Yours,

Mark

A month later, I got this reply from one of the co-conveners:

Dear Mark:

Many thanks for your email of January 21, which we had the opportunity to discuss at our DE&I committee meeting on Feb 4.

We are pleased that you have brought these matters to our attention. The DE&I committee exists precisely for the role you identify: to mediate between individuals and the broader network of office-holders and committees in the department, and to help colleagues and students find the most effective course of action in the university as a whole.

While we do not have—nor would we ever wish to seek—the powers to stipulate hiring policy in the Department, and while we don’t have university approval to determine the nature of tenure-track jobs, we are happy to support your argument for a tenure-track post in American Jewish literature in the English Department.

To this end, we plan to forward your email to the Senior Appointments Committee … which contributes to decisions on new hires, including the discussion of which subject specialisms require representation. In forwarding your email to that committee, we will of course attach a note to say we have discussed this at the DE&I committee and support your petition.

With best wishes…

I never heard from the senior appointments committee. But even if I had, that would not really resolve the issue, which was that the English department—one of the world’s best—had completely lost interest, collectively, in a major ethnic-American literary tradition. And—worse—when called on this fact, the committee responded with a letter that, in the best-case scenario, missed the point entirely. There was no recognition on the part of this committee that there was a Jewish-American literary tradition being overlooked.

So what was going on?

Of the ten members, one was a department staffer (think registrar or administrative assistant). Of the nine teachers/scholars on the committee (some tenured, some not), a minority were experts on American literature. One was a scholar of postcolonialism, originally from a British Commonwealth country, who told me, in an email later, that they had never read Roth. That surprised me, because I’d think if you’d read five American novelists, Roth would be one of them. But we all have blind spots, all have major books we have yet to read (I have not read Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway, Mansfield Park, Magic Mountain, any Proust … my list goes on). One of the other scholars, younger (I am guessing forty or so?), apparently scoffed at my letter (based on what two people told me), saying that they knew Roth to be a “misogynist” and so why would the department teach him? Two members of the committee were highly esteemed writers in their own right, deeply conversant with the American canon, and I suspect were sympathetic with my letter (one of them apparently defended me, in the meeting, against accusations from another that my letter was “trolling”). I have tried to get a more accurate, on-the-record recounting of how the committee meeting went down, but the co-convener I reached out to (who would have the minutes) declined to talk, even off the record.

And two members of the committee told me privately that they were embarrassed by the committee’s reply to me, and troubled by the politicization of the DEI committee, but they had felt outnumbered and in the minority.

For what it’s worth, I will add that, as far as I know, the committee was overwhelmingly white, and Gentile (one member had one Jewish parent). I raise this not to call out the committee for failure to be sufficiently diverse; if there are to be DEI committees, I believe their work can be done by well-meaning people of any hues and creeds. Rather, I wish to head off the notion, perhaps forming in some readers’ minds, that this was a case of black or Muslim or “POC” diversity-mongers indifferent to Jewish writing. As far as I could tell—and, again, ultimately none of us knows the identities of others—this was a case of white liberal/left secular Gentiles reassuring me that Jews were represented on syllabi. Twenty years ago—when the titans of the English department were Bloom, Bromwich, Hollander, Hartman, Brisman, Quint, etc.—it would have been hard to put together so Gentile a committee.

The decline of Jewish representation on humanities faculties has many causes, generally non-nefarious. And I believe that anybody, no matter their background, can understand, appreciate, study, and teach any literature. But I think it’s safe to say that, because of the makeup of the committee, as well as shifts in the discipline—what subjects are valued, what are devalued—I might have expected my letter to fall on deaf ears. These were, for the most part, not people who deeply knew the works of Roth, Bellow, or Ozick, or indeed Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, an immigrant who wrote primarily in Yiddish. I might as well have been trying to push Maori or Yupik literature onto the syllabus.

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Except, of course, that if I had been pushing Maori or Yupik literature, the committee would have responded with a greater awareness of its own limitations. They would not have written back with a scattershot list people with Maori last names, some of whom might have been filmmakers or sculptors, and said, “Look, Maori literature!”

Instead, what we had was a committee of scholars pronouncing on the vibrancy of a tradition that, in their department, was not vibrant but comatose. They did not know, and they did not know what they didn’t know. And because what they didn’t know was an aspect of Jewish-American culture, they did not care that they did not know, or cop to their ignorance when it was pointed out.

I am well aware that we are past peak interest in Jewish-American literary culture (which was likely 1975 or so). Indeed, eulogies have been given (usually by Jews) for Jewish American literature since at least 1977. David Bezmozgis (one of our best American writers, even though, okay, fine, he is Canadian) took up the topic in an insightful essay from 2014, “The End of American Jewish Literature, Again.” The extraordinary flowering of first- and second-generation literary ambition and energy that came out of the Jewish-American community in the twentieth century had to end, or at least diminish (the petals would fall off the flowers? not sure about the right metaphor…). And, having shown post-immigrant literature to be, often, the best kind of literature there is, it was not surprising when attention shifted to literature of the South Asian diaspora, say, or the black American tradition (not immigrant, but coming from the margins in some similar ways, like queer lit). That is to say, even if Jews were today producing Jew-ish books as good as those coming from the 1940s to the 1970s, it was not to be expected that the world would pay as much attention.

And yet, the point of an English department, a good one anyway, is to pay some attention to history. One reads Milton not because he is on the best-seller lists, or is the latest thing, but because he was one of the first things (in what is recognizably English, to modern ears), and inspired so many who came after. If we are serious about the American or Anglophone literary traditions, we’re not at liberty to be dismissive about Milton. That’s not to say there won’t be fads and vogues, for authors dead as well as living: Shakespeare was once in relative eclipse, as were the Romantic poets. Then they came back. But when they are in eclipse, the job of thoughtful people is to figure out how to bring them back into the light.

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Coda: I just ran a search on the Yale University syllabi for courses this coming fall. (Note: these syllabi are, as any prof knows, tentative; they sometimes mention authors who will not be on the final reading list, and sometimes omit authors who will be read. They are an approximation.) Toni Morrison was on nine syllabi, Jane Austen on four. Philip Roth is on one syllabus (in a class on Jewish “literatures” that deals principally with non-Anglophone authors, like Kafka and Celan); Allen Ginsberg, one; Henry Roth, zero; Saul Bellow, zero; Cynthia Ozick, zero; Bernard Malamud, zero; Leonard Michaels, zero; Grace Paley, zero.

If you have thoughts, drop me a line…

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