The Situation of the Jewish Writer
All discussions pertaining to the Jews must begin with some very gloomy observations. The Jews are, everywhere, a minority group, and it is a particular misfortune these days to be a minority group in the United States. A conscious member of such a group is necessarily overconscious: he is distracted by race and religion, distressed by differences…
“The Situation of the Jewish Writer” appeared in the February 1944 issue of the Contemporary Jewish Record (a predecessor to Commentary magazine, published by the American Jewish Committee). Isaac Rosenfeld’s contribution was part of a series titled Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Jewish Writer, which asked eleven young Jewish intellectuals to consider how their Jewish heritage affected their American identity. The other contributors were Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Delmore Schwartz, Muriel Rukeyser, Clement Greenberg, Louis Kronenberger, Albert Halper, and Ben Halpern. Rosenfeld, whose potential remained unrealized when he died of a heart attack in his thirties, argued that the Jewish writer is a “specialist in alienation,” situated at the margins of both traditional Jewish and dominant American culture. The essay was subsequently included in his posthumous collection, An Age of Enormity (1962).
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