E-Books →Postwar Stories How Books Made Judaism American

Drawing on several archives, magazine articles, and nearly-forgotten bestsellers, Postwar Stories examines how Jewish middlebrow literature helped to shape post-Holocaust American Jewish identity. For both Jews and non-Jews accustomed to antisemitic tropes and images, positive depictions of Jews had a normalizing effect. Maybe Jews were just like other Americans, after all.
At the same time, anti-antisemitism novels and "Introduction to Judaism" literature helped to popularize the idea of Judaism as an American religion. In the process, these two genres contributed to a new form of Judaism-one that fit within the emerging myth of America as a Judeo-Christian nation, and yet displayed new confidence in revealing Judaism's divergences from Christianity.