Review
Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation, by Emily Miller Budick
Shofar, Vol.19(2)
31 Jan 2001
Abstract
Her study of African-American texts is attenuated by two factors: [Emily Miller Budick]'s desire to look at works which "lift Jewish-black relations off the social axis into the realm of myth and psychohistory" (p. 169) (thus she includes the less familiar novel Lonely Crusade by Chester Himes [1947]); and the fact that two of the major texts she discusses, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Alice Walker's Meridian, carve out African American space that is intended to be "independent and autonomous of the white world" (p. 161). While offering many critical insights into these texts, Budick has a simple thesis: all of these writers create a Black scripture, a working through of African-American identity, intended to replace white Christian scripture and ultimately, therefore, displacing Judaic texts. One of the ironies of modern African-American literature for Budick is that the Holocaust metaphor initially rejected by the African-American community when employed by Jewish-American scholars (see Budick's section called "Plantations and Pogroms, Slavery and the Holocaust: Disentangling Black and Jewish History") has now been taken up and refigured by minority writers like Morrison and Walker. Because these texts do not acknowledge the "intertextuality of the Jewish-minority experience" (p. 166), Budick finds this adaptation problematic. However, it is this "bitter straggle over the trope of the Holocaust" that Budick believes "leads back again into the possibility of meaningful interethnic exchange" (p. 199).
Metrics
1 Record Views
Details
- Title
- Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation, by Emily Miller Budick
- Creators
- Doreen Saar
- Publication Details
- Shofar, Vol.19(2)
- Publisher
- Purdue University Press; West Lafayette
- Resource Type
- Review
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- English and Philosophy
- Identifiers
- 991021864211604721