THE IVORY SHTETL: THE UNIVERSITY AND THE POSTWAR JEWISH IMAGINATION by DANIEL PAUL ANDERSON JR. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation Adviser: Dr. Judith Oster Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY May 2012 2 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the dissertation of ________Daniel Paul Anderson Jr_________________ candidate for the __PhD_______________degree*. (signed) _____Judith Oster________________________ (chair of the committee) ___________Michael Clune_______________________ ___________Erika Olbricht________________________ ___________Robert Spadoni_______________________ ___________Molly Berger_________________________ ______________________________________________ (date) ___17 February 2012________________ *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ..............................................................................................4 Abstract ..............................................................................................5 Introduction ..............................................................................................6 Chapter One Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants: The City and the Dialogic University ............................................................37 Chapter Two A New Life: The Ruined University and the Jewish Conscience .............................................................86 Chapter Three Lionel Trilling and the Substance of Style ......................127 Chapter Four Philip Roth’s The Human Stain: From Athene to Athena ..........................................................................159 Conclusion ..........................................................................................199 Notes ..........................................................................................213 Bibliography ..........................................................................................218 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish, first of all, to dedicate this dissertation to my amazing wife, Kim. Without her support and willingness to do without me during evenings for weeks on end, this work would have never been completed and I hope that it stands as a testament to her graciousness. In addition, she was an indispensible creative resource for me. I am still in awe at her endless ability to listen to me free-associate, rant, and wrestle with this project and still offer me sound, brilliant advice. Likewise, our daughters, Ella and Nora, deserve credit for their patience in waiting for Daddy to finish his paper. I am a truly blessed man. I would also like to thank the Department of English at Case Western Reserve University, and, in particular, my advisor and mentor, Dr. Judith Oster. Judy has been a vital part of this project long before it began, and her expertise, patience, and insight were instrumental in its completion. I am truly humbled to have been Judy’s last dissertation student and her influence will live in me for the rest of my life. I wish her all the best in her retirement. Mazel tov! In addition, I would be remiss not to mention by name my committee, which gave me such amazing advice and support. Molly Berger, Michael Clune, Erika Olbrict, and Rob Spadoni, I am endlessly grateful to each of you. I have also been blessed by the intellectual and social community on the fourth floor of Guilford House. My fellow graduate students have been an endless source of inspiration, comfort, and knowledge and I will always be grateful for my time with that community. Though they are but a few of my friends, I want to particularly thank Ken McGraw, who showed me how its done, Scott Weedon, who has the amazing ability to somehow make me think I am smart, and Wells Addington, who, in spite of what he might tell you, knows a whole lot and graciously shared what he knows with me. (I want to particularly thank him for pointing me to the abracadabra in chapter 4!) To Donald, Ken, and the whole gang at Caribou Coffee. Much of this dissertation was fueled by the steady stream of coffee and root beer that you all provided. Many thanks. Finally, I was the beneficiary of indispensible departmental and collegiate support at Case Western Reserve University. I wish to thank the English Department for honoring me with the Arthur Adrian Fellowship, which made completing this project realistically possible. In addition, I offer my most profound thanks to Professors Martha Woodmansee and Kenneth Ledford and the College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship. That experience was more than instrumental in the completion of this project; it was essential. I am indebted to all. 5 The Ivory Shtetl: The University and the Postwar Jewish Imagination Abstract by DANIEL PAUL ANDERSON JR. This dissertation explores representations of university spaces in the work of several Jewish American artists and identifies an amalgamation of Arnoldian liberal humanism and Jewish American narrative art. Most critical accounts of Jewish American fiction identify the genre as a historical body of work that attempts to document the sociological reality of a particular ethnic experience. However, in the work of the Marx Brothers, Bernard Malamud, Lionel Trilling, Philip Roth, and the Coen Brothers, I identify an aesthetic value system that more closely resembles the cultural philosophy of Matthew Arnold than that of social realism. In the landscapes of these writers' and filmmakers' campus narratives, a battle between Arnoldian liberal humanism and the discursive machinery of political, social, and economic forces is waged. The artistic result of this conflict finds the artist weaving the ideologically driven, marginalizing discourses of politics and economics into the represented aesthetic, cultural object, thereby moving "Culture" from the margins back to the center in these educational landscapes. 6 Introduction “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary! She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies. Judah is gone into captivity because of affliction, and because of great servitude: she dwelleth among the heathen, she findeth no rest: all her persecutors overtook her between the straits.” — Lamentations 1:1-3 (King James Version) “And the eye travels down to Oxford’s towers. And near me on the grass lies Glanvil’s book— Come, let me read the oft-read tale again! The story of the Oxford scholar poor, Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain, Who, tired of knocking at preferment’s door, One summer-morn forsook His friends, and went to learn the gipsy-lore, And roam’d the world with that wild brotherhood, And came, as most men deem’d, to little good, But came to Oxford and his friends no more.” — Matthew Arnold, “The Scholar Gypsy.” “Well I thought my razor was dull until I heard his speech. And that reminds me of a story that’s so dirty, I’m ashamed to think of it myself.” — Groucho Marx 7 Perched outside the Cleveland Museum of Art, the imposing specter of Rodin’s Thinker stares solemnly down, as if pondering, not the Gates of Hell, but the fate of the city. This familiar nude, one of the last casts that Rodin himself supervised, is immediately recognizable. The furrowed brow, deeply set eyes, back ripped with muscle, and the huge hand upon which his head rests are all ingrained in Western culture. This particular cast of the famous statue however is unique. This thinker’s feet and the base he once sat upon are gone, and in their place, the statue fans out into the plume left by a bomb’s explosion. On March 24, 1970, an explosive device was placed at the base of the statue, and its detonation, though aimed at the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, instead toppled Rodin’s masterwork from its pedestal, projecting the shrapnel of its bottom half into the night. The perpetrators of this act of political vandalism were never identified, though Cleveland Police suspected a local cell of the Weather Underground in the attack. Nonetheless, the museum faced a dilemma regarding how to proceed. Its three options were to “1) obtain and display a replacement cast; 2) repair the sculpture by welding on newly-cast sections to replace the areas that were damaged; 3) mount and display the damaged sculpture” (clevelandart.org). Ultimately, the museum chose the third option, “largely because it preserved what was left of Rodin’s original work and because the damaged sculpture would bear vivid witness to a period of political unrest in the United States during the Vietnam War” (clevelandart.org). By responding to the tragedy in the way it did, the museum chose to take Rodin’s timeless masterpiece out of its hallowed halls outside time and place and literally bring it outside, into history. 8 This act does not, however, diminish the cultural aura of The Thinker. The statue has not become simply an object of political propaganda. Instead, the museum’s action rescued Culture from its attempted obliteration. By resolutely restoring the statue to is previous position with the damage intact, the museum ultimately re-asserted its centrality to contemporary culture, not contemporary politics. The Weather Underground’s