Reading, James McNeill Whistler, 1879
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Susan Dwight Bliss, 1967
Midway through Anya Ulinich’s 2014 graphic novel, Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel, the eponymous protagonist — who, like Ulinich herself, is an American novelist and Soviet émigré — dreams that she is sitting beside Philip Roth on a bus. Lena’s gushy fangirl response (“Oh my god, Philip Roth, is this really you? … Listen, I love your books! You and I are so much alike!”) meets with hostility from the famous Jewish American writer. “You’re nothing like me!” Roth tells her. “First you’re a woman, and not even a pretty one! Second, you’re an immigrant!” Through her visual rendering of the characters, Ulinich suggests that she agrees that the two authors are different: an aged and scraggy Roth is drawn with rough, sketch-like strokes, while Lena appears in a vivid contrast of black and white, as if drawn in permanent marker. Lena quickly retaliates by attacking Roth, announcing that she “hated [his 2007 novel] Exit Ghost so much [she] threw it in a subway trash can.” Before Roth himself exits the text, as soon as we turn the page and the dream is over, he advises Lena to read The Magic Barrel instead of his work. This reference to Bernard Malamud’s 1958 short story collection, named for his magical realist fable featuring rabbinical student Leo Finkle, circles back to the title of Ulinich’s graphic novel, reminding us that Lena did not require Roth’s guidance. She, and Ulinich, had already laid claim to the magic barrel, emptying it of the one-dimensional images of women that pervade Jewish American men’s fiction of the so-called golden age and repurposing it as a container for agentic self-representations.
Ulinich is far from being the only contemporary Jewish American woman writer to position her work as an intertextual response to male-dominated, masculinist literary traditions and to imagine a space in which Jewish women’s writings, voices, and experiences are made central to literary history. We see such allusive gestures, for example, in a number of twenty-first-century novels by Jewish women, including Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife (2003), Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love (2005), Dara Horn’s The World to Come (2006), Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink (2017), Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble (2019), and Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed (2021). Analogous intertextual impulses underlie creative works of feminist exegesis, from E. M. Broner’s A Weave of Women (1985) and Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent (1997) to Anna Solomon’s The Book of V (2020) and Liana Finck’s Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her Creation (2022), in which Jewish American women authors rewrite familiar biblical stories from fresh, female perspectives.
In marking their departure from patriarchal traditions via masculinist intertexts first invoked and then thrown in the metaphorical subway trash can, these twenty-first-century women writers present us with a conundrum. The very act of pushing literary patriarchs aside in an effort to center women has the unintended consequence of reifying cultural reverence for the canonical male luminaries of Jewish American literature. The subversion narrative positions women’s writings as derivative and ancillary, suggesting that the only way to achieve recognition is through men: their books, their institutions, their aesthetics. The love-hate relationship to misogynistic patriarchs replays time and again in debates about Philip Roth. To cite one example, the 2021 virtual panel “Rethinking American Jewish Literary Studies in the #MeToo Era (or: Enough with Philip Roth),” sponsored by the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA, focused almost entirely on Roth (and the controversy over Blake Bailey’s biography), with panelists arguing, contra the parenthetical in the title, that Roth’s work should continue to be taught and studied. Despite the fact that the panel signaled an interest in moving away from the suppressive logics of the canon, going so far as to invoke #MeToo’s ethical imperative to highlight women’s stories and listen to their voices, women writers were rarely mentioned.
Our aim in editing Matrilineal Dissent was to curate a collection of essays that individually and collectively rethink the field of Jewish American literature by centering Jewish women writers and their wide-ranging contributions to American literary culture. As writers, editors, and readers, women have consistently been at the forefront of Jewish American literature. While remaining attentive to gendered constraints on production, consumption, and reception, our book’s reframing of Jewish American literary history shows women to be dominant players working within mainstream cultural institutions and creating institutions of their own. The perception that women are marginalized outsiders, on the fringes of Jewish literary production in the United States and in need of reparative critical attention, is due in large part to the way that literary history has been told: through the distorting lenses of patriarchy and misogyny.
By tracing alternative lineages of Jewish American writing, the essays in Matrilineal Dissent examine how women authors systematically write against reflexive and monolithic understandings of Jewishness in America and toward new modes of belonging to heterogeneous and emergent communities. Rather than taking the contemporary period as a starting point, as other anthologies have done, our book traces Jewish women’s writing in the United States back to the turn of the twentieth century. In situating texts as products of their historical moment while also locating enduring concerns that connect Jewish American women’s literature across time and place, the collection foregrounds relationality as a hermeneutic practice as well as a strategy of survival. It takes seriously the necessity of communities, literary and otherwise, in sustaining women’s writing and the power of literature to develop, nurture, and reimagine communities in turn. Exploring the political projects that grow out of and through Jewish American women’s writing, we situate their texts as tools and living practices rather than as ends in themselves.
Comprising critical assessments by established and emerging scholars as well as a moderated conversation featuring Mizrahi women writers, Matrilineal Dissent showcases critical and scholarly approaches that have redefined feminist literary study, from intersectional feminism and the #MeToo movement to queer theory and disability studies. The essays situate Jewish American women’s writing as products of communal and commercial networks that shape literary production, dissemination, marketing, and reception. Several of the contributions offer important reassessments of literature from the early and mid-twentieth century, highlighting middlebrow, Progressive Era, Yiddish, and second-wave feminist works that present alternatives to familiar assimilation narratives. Others engage with twenty-first-century texts, accounting for innovations in contemporary literary form and genre by considering, for example, the recent popularity of autofiction and graphic narratives. The fact that our collection incorporates so many different genres — among them, novels, periodical fiction, plays, poetry, autobiography, literary biography, and even screenwriting — testifies to how influential Jewish women writers have been in every facet of literary culture.
The misconception that Jewish women writers are secondary to the towering male figures of Jewish literary history is largely due to a particular breakthrough narrative. This narrative revolves around a “golden age” of Jewish American literature, and especially fiction, in which second-generation men writers (plus one or two token women) burst onto the literary scene in the post – World War II period and redefined what it meant to be Jewish, American, and Jewish American. This inaccurate version of Jewish literary history, with Ashkenazi Jewish men at the center, has exerted tremendous power and influence, holding sway not just in scholarship but also over so much of contemporary Jewish women’s literary production, as our opening examples of intertextuality suggest. Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel registers this tension, for instance, when Roth’s dismissiveness forces Ulinich’s protagonist into a position of either fawning supplication or explosive rebellion. More critical and expansive considerations of the canon offer generative possibilities for writers and scholars alike, bringing into focus alternative worlds of writing.
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In the recent graphic narrative, Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her Creation, cartoonist Liana Finck takes us back to the beginning by offering a retelling of the book of Genesis in which God is depicted as a woman. Finck’s God may have lost the gray beard, but her embodiment is still self-consciously specific: lounging in the clouds, she wields a star-shaped wand and wears a tiny crown suggestive of girl-power princess fantasies. The author’s note at the end of the book informs us that this playful vision of God emerged from Finck’s own girlhood: “Studying the Torah at Hebrew Day School, I thought of it mostly as a portrait of one childlike (and therefore relatable) character full of feeling and desires: God.… This book is an attempt to draw out that character as I saw her (since I started writing this book, it hurt to call God ‘him’) when I was young. Giving God a new gender — my own — was my first step toward reclaiming this work of literature for myself.” The childishness of Finck’s portrayal — together with the book’s epigraph from Jamaica Kincaid, in which she describes Genesis as “a book for children” — suggests that we must complicate narratives of feminist subversion as surely as Finck’s God must outgrow her princess crown. The reappropriation of God as a woman is just the “first step” toward more radical reconfigurations of identity that disrupt gender binaries and patriarchal systems.
In addition to creating a new origin story in which woman is the Creator, Finck takes a page out of the 1970s feminist playbook by recasting Lilith as a Miltonian hero. Let There Be Light depicts Lilith as a silhouette with a long, straight body and two thin ear-horn-antennae – somewhere between a snail’s and a cat’s. Finck’s shadowy Lilith reads like a genderless shape-shifter, more creature than human. When God invites Adam to name the creatures of Eden, Lilith refuses Adam’s name: “For your information, I am not named ‘woman,’ ” Lilith insists. “I am Lilith, monster of the night!” And while Finck’s God lies to Adam about her true identity to protect his fragile ego, assuring Adam, “I am an old man with a beard. You were right about everything,” Lilith absents themselves from the scene rather than accept Adam’s false image of them. When Lilith next appears, they are offering Eve the apple from the Tree of Knowledge in a scene that bears visual resonance with Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam.” The tuft of hair we glimpse springing from Lilith’s armpit as they hand the apple down to Eve is a winking feminist promise: this, too, is a real, fleshy body, one that the reader can inhabit, regardless of gender.
God is the grand mover of Finck’s Genesis, the charismatic artist who struggles with loneliness, self-doubt, and tempestuous emotion. But she is also an enabler and, it seems, primarily male identified. “We twist ourselves into knots in our desire to be liked by men,” declares a frame in the epilogue placed over an image of God prone on a cloud, looking down, like a pining, lovesick teen. But if this God may disappoint some feminist readers by favoring men, Lilith offers other possibilities, becoming a redemptive creator in her own right. At the end of the narrative, Lilith is transformed from a serpent back into their original “monster” shape, and the closing frame shows Lilith’s newly restored hands tenderly holding a lump of clay they have scooped directly from the earth. While the Lilith of second-wave Jewish feminism was an icon of women’s autonomy and self-determination, Finck’s Lilith challenges the category of “woman” itself — an intervention made possible, not incidentally, by the groundbreaking work of Jewish queer and trans writers such as Leslie Feinberg, Kate Bornstein, and Judith Butler.
Matrilineal Dissent thinks with Jewish American women writers who offer multiple, often contradictory ways to grapple with gender and Jewishness. Some of these writers work within and redefine established identity categories, while others move us toward more radical acts of dissent, invention, and self-naming, rejecting not only masculinist traditions but also well-worn feminist narratives. In devoting the pages of our book to them — and inviting more to come — we embrace their world-making endeavors, exchanging the magic barrel for the unformed lump of clay.
Annie Atura Bushnell is the executive director of academic programs at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. Her recent research explores Jewish women’s integration into and determination of white norms of femininity through feminist practice and theory.
Lori Harrison-Kahan is the editor of The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson; co-editor of an edition of Heirs of Yesterday by Emma Wolf; and co-editor of The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings, a Penguin Classics edition of journalism and fiction by Elizabeth Garver Jordan. She is also the author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary and a full professor of the practice of English at Boston College.
Ashley Walters is assistant professor of Jewish studies and director of the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture at the College of Charleston. She teaches courses on modern Jewish history, Jews and the American South, and women’s and gender studies.