Literary Criticism as Anything But Literary Criticism - Imagining Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Contemporary American Literature - Facing Black and Jew: Literature as Public Space in Twentieth-Century America - Book Review

Judaism, Fall, 2002 by Robert Philipson

(6.) Chester Himes, Lonely Crusade (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947).

(7.) Saul Bellow, "Looking for Mr. Green," in Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories (Rpt. New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. 85-109; Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King (New York: Viking Press, 1959); Bernard Malamud, "The Angel Levine," in The Stories of Bernard Malamud (Rpt. New York: Plume, 1984), pp. 277-289, and "Black Is My Favorite Color," in The Stories of Bernard Malamud (Rpt. New York: Plume, 1984), pp. 73-84.

(8.) Lorraine Hansberry, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (New York: Random House, 1965).

(9.) Bernard Malamud, The Tenants (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971); Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet (New York: Viking Press, 1970).

(10.) Paule Marshall, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1969); Alice Walker, Meridian (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); John A. Williams, The Man Who Cried I Am (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967); and John A. Williams, !Click Song (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982).

(11.) Lore Segal, Her First American (New York: Knopf, 1985); John Edgar Wideman, "Valaida," in Fever: Twelve Stories (New York: Penguin, 1989), pp. 27-40; Gloria Naylor, Bailey's Cafe (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992); and Ishmael Reed, Reckless Eyeballing (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986).

(12.) Saul Bellow, The Dean's December (New York: Harper & Row, 1982).

(13.) Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror, producer, Cherie Fortis; directed by George C. Wolfe (Hipster Entertainment, Inc., Alexandria, VA: PBS Video, 1993).

(14.) Chester Himes, Lonely Crusade (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947); John A. Williams, The Man Who Cried I Am (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967).

(15.) Malamud, "Black Is My Favorite Color," or Grace Paley, "Zagrowsky Tells," in Later the Same Day (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985), pp. 151-175.

(16.) Malamud, "The Angel Levine."

(17.) Ed Bullin, "The Taking of Miss Janie," in Famous American Plays of the 1970s, edited by Ted Hoffman (New York: Dell, 1972); and Stanley Elkin's remarkable short story, "I Look Out for Ed Wolfe," in Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 37-66.

(18.) "it's impossible to love/a Jew": Nikki Giovanni, "Love Poem"; "another bad poem cracking/steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth": Amiri Baraka, "Black Art," The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996), p. 1884.

(19.) Here are a few choice lines about Jews from Baraka's 1960s poem, "The Black Man is making new Gods":

   These robots drag a robot
   in the image of themselves, to be
   ourselves, serving their dirty
   image. Selling fried potatoes
   and people, the little arty bastards
   talking arithmetic they sucked from
   the arab's
   head.
   Suck you pricks. The best is yet to
   come. On how
   we beat you
   and killed you
   and tied you up.
   And marked this specimen
   "Dangerous Germ
   Culture." And put you back
   in a cold box.