Modern Jewish Women Writers in America »

Evelyn Avery, Professor of English and Director of Jewish Studies at Towson University, has published Rebels and Victims: The Fiction of Richard Wright and Bernard Malamud, The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud, and many articles on Jewish American women writers. She is an Associate Editor of Modern Jewish Studies and on the editorial board of Studies in American Jewish Literature.

After forty years of feminism, views of the traditional Jewish family, religion, and gender roles have changed. In the process a new literature has been created, new paradigms born, and many Jewish women writers have been reevaluated, reclaimed, and renamed, with their Jewish heritage often overlooked or misinterpreted. Modern Jewish Women Writers in America includes groundbreaking essays and interviews with scholars and authors who reveal that despite pressures of assimilation, personal goals, and in some cases, anti-Semitism, they have never been able to divorce their lives or literature from being Jewish.

PART I: THE EARLY YEARS - IN SEARCH OF THE PROMISED LAND: 1910-1950s * Re-Thinking Mary Antin and The Promised Land--Jules Chametzky * Anzia Yezierska: Between Two Worlds; Bound to the Old, Longing for the New--Evelyn Avery * Edna Ferber, Jewish American Writer: Who Knew?--Eileen Watts * PART II:THE ROADS DIVERGE - ASSIMILATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS: 1960s-1990s * "My Own Design": Finding Identity in Anne Roiphe's Writing--Melanie Levinson * Johanna Kaplan: The Author and Her Fiction--Nahma Sandrow and Carol Iannone
• Norma Rosen's Jewish Journey--Anne Shapiro
• PART III: THE COVENANT CONFIRMED?: 1990s-2000 * Cynthia Ozick's Puttermesser Papers: From Whimsy to Wisdom--Sarah Blacher Cohen
• Rebecca Goldstein: Tension and Ambivalence--Anna P. Ronell * Dancing Before the Bride: An Autobiography--Miriyam Glazer
• Fantasies of Change in Allegra Goodman's Fiction--Victoria Aarons * PART IV: INTRO INTO THE 21ST CENTURY: THE PENDULUM SWINGS * In Hitler's Embrace: "Love" between Jews and Germans in Binnie Kirschenbaum's Fiction--Susanne Klingenstein
• "Writing Between Worlds"--Tova Mirvis
• Across the Generations: A Conversation--Evelyn Avery & Tova Mirvis
• Annotated Select Bibliography, Jewish American Women Authors--Eileen Watts