JDub Records

Today we’ve got a very special guest blog from author and perennial JDub favorite Adam Mansbach, who just received the California Book Award for Fiction for his recent novel The End of the Jews.  If anyone can talk about culture intelligently, it’s Adam–he’s a hip hop aficionado, professor of fiction and talented MC.  His previous novel, Angry Black White Boy, is a study of “race, whiteness and hip hop” that speaks to Adam’s willingness to boldly touch on subjects that many might not dare address.  In the following essay, originally meant for a Dutch Jewish Culture foundation, Adam applies that same charming brashness to the subject of Jewish culture.  Enjoy!

What is Jewish culture? Eight times out of ten, this is a trick question. The interlocutor is usually a Jewish organization, and the respondent Jewish and an artist, auditioning for the right to be a “Jewish artist.” Each party needs the other: the Jewish organization wants to attract young people to its fold, wants to be (or at least understand) ‘cool,’ wants access to populations for whom literature, music and ideas are more of a religion than religion.

The artist, meanwhile, wants support, wants an audience, wants to avoid throwing in the towel and applying to law school. Wants the seal of approval that says, “This art should be of interest to you, Jewish Community. You should buy it.”

I’ve answered this question frequently in the year since I published my novel The End of the Jews. I’d never answered it before that; I’d never been asked. This was my third novel, my fifth book overall. But Jewish artists, it seems, are only of interest to the organizations asking, “What is Jewish culture” when they’re producing work that is overtly, easily Jewish.

The result is that the output of many Jewish artists ­goes ignored, and the people producing it move farther away from ever thinking to call themselves Jewish artists.

This is nobody’s loss but the Jewish community’s. The artists will be okay; they’ll keep making art. But as long as the question of Jewish culture is really about who receives the blessing and who doesn’t, it won’t be very interesting.  Particularly because much of the richest, most provocative art will never be embraced as “good for the Jews,” and that’s what the question of Jewish culture all too often boils down to.

Were artists to yoke themselves to this mandate, the results would be abysmal. Why? Because art is about paradox, struggle, scouring the soul. This is why it so often comes from the margins of community, rather than the center ­- from people who feel ambiguous and conflicted, and from the pain and perspective that experience engenders. The complexities of a Jewish identity - the fact that you can feel culturally Jewish without being religious, or see Jewish as your ethnicity but not agree with the dominant politics of Jewish life ­- ensure that these margins stay well-populated.

This is central to understanding the huge Jewish contribution to American art in the 20th century. The names we venerate most highly - Bellow, Malamud, Roth, Mailer, Kazin, Allen, Bruce - resided on those margins. And yet they were indignant, as I am, about any definition of Jewish art that did not include theirs.

So what is Jewish art? It’s any art produced by anybody Jewish, regardless of the subject matter, the presence or absence of Jews or “Jewish themes,” or the manner in which Jews are portrayed.

Who’s Jewish? For these purposes, anybody who says “I’m Jewish.”

Why? Because I find it absurd to sit in judgment of, for example, a novelist’s level of faith, commitment, or Jewish knowledge- and that’s what happens if you try to whittle down the criteria.

I’ve seen it. Usually, the people doing it aren’t particularly well-versed in literature, especially that being published by young Jewish writers whose work doesn’t fit inside the box ­­- people like Peter Orner, Sam Lipsyte, T Cooper, Lauren Grodstein, Kevin Coval, Danny Hoch, and Keith Gessen, just to name a few friends off the top of my head. Why would they be? They’re too busy building the boxes.

The absurdity is compounded by the fact that these discussions, at least in America, take place at events organized largely as a result of the fear that Judaism is going to become extinct because young people aren’t participating in Jewish life.  Whether a functional Jewish community (whatever that means) can be built on the back of culture is a separate question. But if we attempt to regulate the parameters of Jewish art - rather than using our time to actually experience and discuss the content and aesthetics of that art! ­ - the only people who will continue to listen to the conversation are those for whom culture was never going to be a vital inroads anyway.

Artists have always fought for the right to speak universally - about the human condition, not just the experiences of their own persecuted tribes. On this point, the words of Bernard Malamud echo those of Frederick Douglass; Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison returned frequently to the topic in the wonderful letters they exchanged. The artist’s job is to explore, to push boundaries, to blaspheme in the pursuit of deeper faith. Any discussion of Jewish art must thus begin with the understanding that an artist has to lead with his art, not his Jewishness - and that the ways in which the two come together may be hidden, may be complicated, may even be the point.

Adam Mansbach is the author of The End of the Jews, winner of the California Book Award for Fiction.