Israel and the New American Jewish Novel

Since its founding in 1948, Israel has played an important role in the Jewish-American imagination. But the Jewish state has come to mean very different things to different segments of the American-Jewish community. Perhaps not surprisingly, many 20^th-century Jewish-American writers steered clear of the topic, focusing instead on the Holocaust or on Jewish life in America. In the last five years, however, a new generation of Jewish-American writers, including Nicole Krauss, Nathan Englander, Joshua Cohen, and Jonathan Safran Foer, has turned its attention to the relationships between American Jews and the State of Israel.

Join Anthony Wexler for the 2017-18 Lipman Lecture in Jewish Studies as he answers these questions: What do these contemporary writers have to say about this fraught and complex connection? How do they imagine Israel’s influence on Jewish-American identity today?