It’s hardly a surprise that many New Jewish writers of the under-40 set share in the growing communal attraction to orthodoxy. And yet most such writers, including myself, are ardently secular bacon-eating Chosen People. So why our fascination with a religion that’s so alien to us, so incompatible with the values by which we live?

Our shift toward Judaism is an effort to solve the dilemma now facing all of American Jewry: How does one live Jewishly in an age of boundless cultural miscegenation? By signing up for Torah class, we admit that Jewishness must be more than an accident of birth, more than a mere ethnic identity to be assumed or discarded at our pleasure. In an age of infinite choice, we have chosen Judaism, and this sets us apart from other people.

To explore adherence to religion is to explore a community of shared value and purpose we have irretrievably lost. It is also to suggest that amidst the ancient and arcane, secular Jews might find what we are searching for: meaningful identity as a communal people, and the conceptual tools to make sense of an endlessly disorienting world.

Jews who attempt to reclaim the certainties of scripture and the community of the shtetl are the subject of Nathan Englander’s short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. In “Gilgul of Park Avenue,” Christian Charles suddenly comprehends that he is Jewish. What follows is a series of slapstick moments: informing the wife, arguing with the shrink, convincing the rabbi. The story ends with Charles staring pleadingly into his wife’s eyes, wishing she could truly see “the profound clarity he had only so recently come to know.” What is this clarity that Englander’s new Jew has found? It is the clarity of belonging, a clarity that secular Jews imagine would be theirs if only they lived in the world of Fiddler in the Roof.

Yet even as we crave Tevye’s certainties, we New Jews know that we are too deeply modern to accept Judaism’s strange and non-negotiable truths. Even though we yearn for the spiritual certainties of our ancestors, we are unable to accept the beliefs upon which those certainties stood. For us, returning wholesale to antedeluvian religious faith means giving in to nostalgia and passivity.

Toronto writer David Bezmozgis touches on the conflict between ancient yearnings and modern sensibilities in the final story of his collection Natasha, in which the narrator begins attending regular services at the one-room synagogue of an old people’s home. Bezmozgis writes: “Most of the old Jews came because they were drawn to the nostalgia for ancient cadences, I came because I was drawn by the nostalgia for old Jews.” This is not religion. It is nostalgia in its purest distillation: pathetic, self-serving, deluded.

But we cannot abandon our traditions or get past our yearning for external direction, and so we struggle to suck the marrow from Judaism without surrendering to laws that feel outmoded and pointless. The best of the New Jewish writing reflects that struggle. Consider, for instance, Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision. Kunkel’s character (never identified as Jewish or otherwise) hilariously lurches from one a
dventure to another searching for a commitment he can make. I’m critical of the middle-class coming-of-age genre (see "The Death of Edge") but as the New York Times Book Review put it, Kunkel “manages to make the whole flailing, post-adolescent, prelife crisis feel fresh and funny again.” He does so because he focuses not necessarily on the answer, but on the futile hilarity of the search. Though it’s arguably not a Jewish novel because the word Jew doesn’t appear in it (whether Jewish writers who don’t write overtly Jewish stories qualify for Hebraic lit status is a debate we can have another day), this book feels like it could or should be about the many feckless 20-, 30-, and even 40-something Jews who spend the bulk of their days searching for something they can legitimately call their own.

A similarly themed, indisputably Jewish book is Jonathan Goldstein’s Lenny Bruce Is Dead. Recently released in the United States, this fractured novel crafts its own unique, millennial sensibility, taking no prisoners in its attempt to articulate a new generation’s Diaspora experience of Pez dispensers, matzo balls, Archie comics, Bat Mitzvahs, and soft-porn-inspired masturbation frenzies. Essentially plotless, this book is a reprieve from the methodically storied texts that dominate the New Jewish literature. Basically, a guy named Josh moves back in with his dad after his mom dies of cancer. Josh spends most of his time jerking off and remembering past loves, past pop culture moments, and other general instances of adolescent weirdness. Oh, and toward the end the Moschiach arrives and everybody’s happy about it except Josh, who kinda ruins the whole thing.

Josh’s Judaism is dark, sardonic, regretful, nostalgic, and funny all at once. It doesn’t feel affectedly edgy: “Josh decided to say kaddish. He tried to get Kaliotzakis to come with him. ‘You could use a little religion,’ said Josh. ‘I could use a piece of ass,’ said Kaliotzakis.”

Similar elements are at play in Nelly Reifler’s short story “Julian,” part of her collection See Through. Preteen Julian’s father is dying of cancer; before dinner, Julian watches him fall down in the back yard. These are the afflictions of the middle: domestic, universal, divorced from any ethnic or religious specificity. At the table, Julian’s religious uncle wonders aloud how God can regularly allow the horrible to occur. “If anyone knows, please tell me.” No one, of course, has an answer; no one less devout would even ask the question. Meanwhile, as if to remind us of the irresistible carnality of the modern world, Julian and his male cousin, the Jews of the future, fondle each other while looking at a dirty magazine. Give me more of this kind of writing: the kind that walks the line between edgy and potty-mouth, that longs for the past and admits how much that past disgusts us; writing that acknowledges the impermanence of the present without agreeing to it; writing that never stops asking what is it, now, to be not just a Jew but a human being.

If the New Jewish writing’s treatment of religious observance teaches us anything, it’s that the problem of our identity in the age of Jewish middlism is no more likely to be solved by sudden pronouncements on one’s sexual inclinations than it is in the sudden discovery of one’s passion for Sukkahs and Sufganiot. We emerging Jewish writers need to find ways—as Goldstein does—to connect pop culture individuality to our yearning for deeper substance. We need to keep trying to understand how the secular and the holy can merge, crafting new traditions for an authentically present Judaism.

And so the ongoing project of New Jewish writing must lay the groundwork for the next generation. I’m thinking here about my own baby daughter, and about my brother’s three children, growing up in an Orthodox Jewish enclave, eating kosher, attending private religious school, but also watching every Disney release and playing endless battles on Gamecube. They have cable TV, the Internet, and daily doses of God. Will their generation shake off the malaise of the 20th century and find a way to really and truly live as Jews without giving up the right to decide what and how and who to believe? Is such a thing even possible?

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In school I read Anne Frank, watched filmstrips full of emaciated men and women in dirty striped pajamas, and stumbled upon a Polish book with a grey cover filled with pictures of heaps of dead bodies. It was enough. I know what happened.

But I can’t seem to avoid the Holocaust. It plagues the books I read, the New Jew hipster salon conversations I’ve been lured into—it even seeps into my own writing. Its presence lingers in every word written by Jews in the last 50 years. Younger Jewish writers inevitably put their own morbid twist on, say, the classic coming-of-age story of a weird girl or boy shipped off to summer camp. In the New Jew version, awkward adolescence and its cruelties have a potent backdrop: a camp-wide game in which the kids must find a way to escape deportation from the Jewish ghetto to the death camps. (Ellen Umansky’s story “How to Make it to the Promised Land,” in the anthology Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge, depicts such a scenario. I read the story with fascination; in my own novel, I include a scenario, based on my summer camp experiences, in which campers must sneak into British-controlled Palestine or be deported back to Europe and certain death.)

After 1945, the German critic Theodor Adorno wondered: Can there be poetry after the Holocaust? In the context of a new wave of youngish Jewish writers, the question is this: Can there be Jewish writing after the Holocaust that isn’t about the Holocaust?

“He was called to the Torah, and before reciting the blessing he reached into his tallis bag, removed the silencer, aimed it at his temple, and pulled the trigger. A Jewish brain shot out from his head and splattered all over the unscrolled sheepskin as though the synagogue had just hosted its first animal sacrifice.” So begins Thane Rosenbaum’s Golems of Gotham, a book that epitomizes the awkward sub-genre of Jewish literature we might call “Holocaust Style.” Here is New Jewish writing that evokes the time of the Holocaust but does not attempt to realistically portray what life was like during that era. With this approach, Rosenbaum and others attempt to avoid glamorizing the Holocaust via nostalgia, by showing us how such events continue to temper and infect the present day. Holocaust Style tends to mix, as Rosenbaum’s book does, modern, gritty, urban activities with nostalgic magical Yiddishisms. It’s a perfect recipe for self-reflexive postmodern new-Jew “edge.”

It’s not that the works in the genre of Holocaust Style are failures. Many of them are surprisingly beautiful. Joseph Skibell, for instance, in his book A Blessing on the Moon, tells the story of Chaim Skibelski, who enters this book with a bullet to the head, having played his part in a vicious pogrom. Skibelski lives on. After his rabbi turns into a crow, he ends up wandering through a fractured landscape that’s part Talmud, part Burroughs, part Chagall, looking for a way to help his fellow Jews assume their rightful place in the World to Come.

Skibell’s capacity for creating wonderment and humor amidst the tragedy of a bloodstained Eastern Europe remains a hallmark of the New Jewish writer’s approach to the Holocaust. Foremost among those books is Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. Again, we have a first novel about the events of the Holocaust steeped in self-referential longing and improbable magic. Skibell has his forebear-narrator Skibelski; Foer has himself as storyteller. Neither author shies away from being irreverent and salacious, even within the context of the Holocaust. While Skibelski is aroused by a sickly Polish girl whose family has occupied what used to be his house, Foer’s great-grandfather pleasures the shtetl’s virgins and old women. Life goes on before, during, and after, as our New Jewish writers lustily describe.

These Holocaust Style books and others like them (such as, I freely admit, sections of my own novel) emerge from a Jewish society that is groping for a new identity in the middle. We now have the luxury of stopping to contemplate what has happened and how our starved, ugly past can be reconciled with our bloated, privileged present. This is the hallmark of Holocaust Style writing: middle-class characters who evoke the familiar theme of “finding yourself,” with all the guilt and befuddlement that accompany the endless search through the tragic history of the Jews’ victimization. These reflections on the Holocaust and its meaning are less about remembering what happened, and more about our collective desire to give purpose to individuals living in the feckless present day. We assume, audaciously, that we can make up for our survival by somehow making peace with the past. Optimistic and opportunistic, the shtetl ghost and the latter-day peasant link arms and shimmy across the ashes in a dance of reconciliation choreographed by the smart-ass young writer with an MFA and a keenly developed nose for saleable nostalgia.

Why is a new generation of Jewish writers so obsessed with the Holocaust? Because the Holocaust is the only unique unifying symbol we have. In an era of fractious sects, cults, values, and politics, at a time when articulating what it is to be Jewish is as complicated as figuring out how to daven in space, the Holocaust provides writers with a particular voice and an identity. But in the process, we hide from our own reality as unthreatened middle-class Jews. By obsessing on the tragic past, from Passover to the Holocaust, we infuse our uninspired present day with a tragic vitality that it doesn’t deserve.

In the anthology Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer, Thane Rosenbaum contributes an essay in which he both defends his approach to writing about contemporary Jewish life and nicely defines Holocaust Style: “I am a post-Holocaust novelist, which means that I rely on my imagination—my capacity to reinvent worlds and reveal emotional truths—in order to speak to the Holocaust and its aftermath, one generation removed from Auschwitz. I don’t write about the years 1939 to 1945… Instead I focus on the looming dark shadow of the Holocaust as a continuing, implacable event; how it, inexorably, is still with us.”

My interpretation of Rosenbaum’s statement goes like this: We shall not give up the Holocaust. We shall insist that it is still with us, because that will give our writing depth and resonance. But in clinging to the Holocaust, what are we missing? What would, say, the great Philip Roth be writing about if he had not returned to the mid-part of the 20^th century to imagine an antisemitic U.S. President with Hitler sympathies?

Looking at my own inadvertent Holocaust Style writings, I can see that they emerge from a source of deep yearning and a place too carefully considered for comfort. In the new Jewish writing, the Holocaust is both our natural birthright and that which we have to make us more “other” in an age when “otherness” earns book deals and talk-show appearances. We use the Holocaust to imbue ourselves with identity, to beat off the specter of assimilated averageness. In the process, we rely on familiar tropes, often failing to fully grapple with the state of the world and the reality of contemporary Jewish life.

Sometimes, we use the Holocaust because we have to—because the Skibelskis and Niedzvieckis are calling us from the grave. But sometimes we use the Holocaust because it’s all we have left to give our Judaism nobility. It’s the grisly birthright that makes us better than the rest of the aspirants in creative writing class. They have their racism, sexism, environmentalism, Catholicism, veganism, alcoholism, and we—triumphant survivor Jews who didn’t actually have to survive anything—we have that dark horror which can never be trumped.

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Every writer wants to push boundaries. We all want to be “edgy.” I’m sure I’m not the first writer who has found himself lying awake at night wondering who he has to pay to get banned, seized, and censored. But with over a million copies in print of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” (once the subject of an obscenity trial), with Jerry Seinfeld making out during Schindler’s List and Larry David mocking Holocaust survivors on national television, I and my fellow young Jew-writer brethren face a more difficult question: What conventions are left to challenge, what (l)edge is there left to inch out onto?

Jewish writing in the 20th century has invariably been labelled “on the edge.” In the Diaspora, and most specifically in the North American Diaspora, the “edge” has come from being outsider immigrants making their way through a suspicious, separate, antisemitic populace. As 29-year-old novelist Dara Horn says in the recently released anthology Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer, “Even people my age seem to have internalized the idea that what makes us Jewish is the fact that other people either secretly or explicitly hate us.”

Horn, part of a new generation of Jewish American writers, has good reason to be surprised at this “internalization.” There is plenty of evidence to suggest that “other people” in North America do not hate the Jews. Increasing rates of conversion to Judaism, the Vice Presidential candidacy of Senator Joe Lieberman, Spielberg’s films, the widespread availability of new-Jew kitsch in the form of slogan-bearing T-shirts, and 1970s Bar Mitzvah picture books all suggest what few would be able to successfully contradict: Jews are mainstream in America, as popular and unthreatening as bagels, Bubby, and borsht.

Clearly, we writers—and the Jewish community in general—need another way of thinking about North American Jewish life and identity. We look to the new-Jew writing vanguard to do for us what the great Jewish authors of the 1950s and 1960s did for previous generations of alienated Jews. But we find that our new writing fails us. With few exceptions, it continues to portray the North American Jew of Ginsberg’s era. Our composite personality is no longer that of the perpetually marginalized neurotic, dominated by traditional parents and rejected by the outside world. So why cling to an edge on which the Jewish people no longer teeter?

In Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge, editor Paul Zakrzewski collects the work of 25 New Jewish writers. A better subtitle for the book might have been “Jewish Fiction from the Middle.” The book’s characters are suburban teens, comfortable college students, flaky journalists, and newly minted professionals. These characters ingest intoxicating substances, have sex out of wedlock, ruminate on their irritating families with their annoying traditions and religion, and otherwise do what every other character in every other “edgy” novel by a hot new writer does, Jewish or otherwise.

What passes for “edgy” New Jewish writing has the oddly familiar tone of flailing effort. Consider the following excerpt from a Lost Tribe story in which Ellen Miller writes of a line of cosmetics for pale Jew babes called “Shtetl Girl”: “A blood-red lipstick, Pogrom, for when I was feeling impetuous…, an extravagant perfume, christened…with a musical, tintinnabular name, Kristallnacht… and advertised with the slogan, For Those Unforgettable Nights Out…. Before bedtime I’d soak a cotton ball in a clear, liquid astringent, The Final Solution…. Then I’d apply an overnight moisturizer—Crematorium—to help slow the formation of wrinkles caused by millennia of anxiety and persecution.”

Here is edge, of a sort. It’s Philip Roth’s Portnoy on ketamine, even more self-absorbed and ironic, and subject to astonishing bouts of verbal diarrhea. But did a single rabbi respond to Miller, as they did to Roth, by railing from the pulpit and issuing thundering Semitic fatwas against everything the book stood for? Lost Tribe emerged and nobody so much as blinked.

Which means we young writers have a big problem: We are mainstream, middle-class, and oppressed primarily by such horrors as Bar/Bat Mitzvah lessons and dim memories of Zadie’s herring breath. I say this with the utmost sympathy. In search of my edgy voice, I’ve gone through such stages as binge drinking, avoiding the dating of Jewish girls, claiming support for the Palestinian cause, and loudly challenging my friends and co-workers to confront their obvious anti-Semitism. Nothing took. In my cosmopolitan East Coast world, I had difficulty finding disapproval for my attempt to reject the conformist comforts of suburban Jewry, and equal trouble locating any meaningful anti-Semitism. If no one is going to oppress me, what do I have to write about?

There are many talented writers caught in this nexus. Some of them, like Gary Shteyngart, are capable of writing about not a whole lot with great wit and verve. Shteyngart is our Jewish Jonathan Franzen. Both authors give us a breakout book that focuses on a young man shrugging off overbearing parents and travelling to a mythical Eastern European economy being plundered by the new world order. If one finds Shteyngart’s book ultimately more poignant, it is because Shteyngart’s Russian immigrant seems to have an effortless claim to the authentic pathos of otherness both authors seek to convey.

That said, among recent Jewish novels, Joshua Braff’s first book best exemplifies the many problems endemic to New Jewish writing. Braff’s The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green is an enjoyable first-person story that flirts with both of the standard themes: Jew boy rebelling against dad and the religious establishment; Jew boy not fitting in to non-Jew society. But Braff can never settle on one particular dilemma. Perhaps this is because the Jewish establishment in the book doesn’t seem all that oppressive and overbearing, nor does the suburban New Jersey the Greens live in.

I don’t mean to pick on Braff in particular; his novel is simply an example of an entire genre of explicitly Jewish coming-of-age-in-the-middle-class novels—books like Adam Langer’s 1970s period piece Crossing California, in which a seventh-grader shocks her teacher by praising the Ayatollah. As a genre, it’s indistinct from an entire group of non-Jewish books on the exact same subject: vaguely defiant suburban kid copes with psychological blows from dysfunctional parents and society.

Like many of these middle-class bildungsromans, The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green never clarifies what, exactly, our sensitive narrator is so upset about (other than his freakishly annoying soon-to-be divorced dad). Ultimately, Braff’s book works itself up to an appropriately vague final epiphany: Jacob, on his way to read from the Torah at shul, starts to run. To or from, we’re not sure. “Where the hell,” the narrator asks, “is that kid going?”

Where is that kid going? With anti-Semitism no longer an issue in our lives, where do Jewish writers go now? How do we portray what remains distinct—and, despite all the comfort and success, distinctly unsettled—about Jewish American life at the beginning of the 21^st century? For a start, we writers need to stop trying to prove that we can howl the loudest. “Edgy” is just another speciality cable channel, film festival, youth-oriented publisher’s imprint. The New Jewish middle whispers a quiet, complicated narrative about fitting in when your whole identity derives from not fitting in. We’ve become like everyone else, and, in the process, lost our ability to see ourselves. Who can tell that tale?

The post The Death of Edge appeared first on Jewcy.