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Examines the phenomenon of Exodus and its influence on post–World War II understandings of Israel's beginnings. Despite the dramatic circumstances of its founding, Israel did not inspire sustained, impassioned public discussion among Jews and non-Jews in the United States until Leon Uris's popular novel Exodus was released in 1958. Uris's novel popularized the complicated story of Israel's founding and, in the process, boosted the morale of post–Holocaust Jewry and disseminated in popular culture positive images of Jewish heroism. Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel's Founding Story examines the phenomenon of Exodus and its largely unrecognized influence on post-World War II understandings of Israel's beginnings in America and around the world. Author M. M. Silver's extensive archival research helps clarify the relevance of Uris's own biography in the creation of Exodus. He situates the novel's enormous popularity in the context of postwar America, and particularly Jewish American culture of the 1950s and early 1960s. In telling the story of the making of and the response to Exodus, first as a book and then as a film, Silver shows how the representation of historical events in Exodus reflected needs, expectations, and aspirations of Jewish identity and culture in the post-Holocaust world. He argues that while Uris's novel simplified some facts and distorted others, it provided an astonishingly ample amount of information about Jewish history and popularized a persuasive and cogent (though debatable) Zionist interpretation of modern Jewish history. Silver also argues that Exodus is at the core of an evolving argument about the essential compatibility between the Jewish state and American democracy that continues to this day. Readers interested in Israel studies, Jewish history, and American popular culture will appreciate Silver's unique analysis.

This article reviews and compares the literary fictions of the United States and New Zealand, as they have sought to respond to the ‘occupation,’ 1942–1944. During the period in question, approximately 100,000 United States Army and Marine Corps servicemen landed and resided in New Zealand, where they undertook final preparations for the island campaigns of the Pacific War. In the aftermath of the war, American fiction writers wrote of the social and cultural difficulties endured by New Zealand civilians, but New Zealand writers took longer to come to terms with the events.

Leon Uris (1924–2003) was one of the first and most successful American novelists to reach a mass audience while openly identifying as a Jew. He also was never embraced by literary critics nor granted membership among Jewish literary elites. This paper argues for a second look at Uris, not to valorize, but to recognize the complexity in his aesthetic and moral choices, even as the limitations and unpopularity of these choices remain evident. A key perspective for debating Uris's legacy is found in his sudden emergence from unknown war veteran to bestseller due to the publication of Battle Cry (1953), a semiautobiographical World War II novel which follows a Marine squad through training and savage fighting in the South Pacific. Uris's winning formula was to transfer a sense of grievance and precarity—something he well knew as a disadvantaged high school dropout—into an account of sacrifice and valor, aspects of war he witnessed in brutal combat. Readers of Battle Cry were presented with an opportunity to identify with the characters' aspirations, irrespective of their fate. Understanding the Jewish presence in Battle Cry is essential for grasping Uris's narrative facility. Jewish characters play an important role in expressing Uris's models of aspiration. Exploring Battle Cry 's success makes a case for including Uris in the canon of noted Jewish American authors, not necessarily as an exalted presence, but as a voice for a Jewish \"street\" sensibility attuned to a troubling aspect of war and deserving of a hearing.

The relationship with Israel is an increasingly complicated issue for diaspora Jews. Philip Roth's texts show a complex and critical positioning of American Jews towards Israel from as early as the 1960s. Analyzing Portnoy's Complaint (1969), The Counterlife (1986), and Operation Shylock (1994), I argue that Roth portrays a complex, critical, and often uncomfortable Jewish-American relationship with Zionism and Israel. His ongoing engagement is as urgent, even if less prominent, as is the constant re-debating of Jewish-American identities throughout Roth's oeuvre. This suggests that Israel is a constituent, if problematic, part of his negotiations of contemporary Jewish identities. Roth explores the role of Israel in the Jewish-American identity politics by way of generational positioning, the question of politics, power, and violence, expectations of diaspora loyalty, and, most prominently, the meaning of language as an identity marker as American English and Hebrew are set against each other.

According to Dyer, \"Two examples of people who have counted as white under particular historical circumstances are the Irish and the Jews\" (52). [...]the propagation of the American Dream myth can be a way of avoiding discussion of the systemic barriers to economic development for African Americans. [...]Zuckerman, trying to come to terms with his new fame, thinks to himself, \"You are not Paul Newman, but you're no longer who you used to be either\" (137), reminding the reader of Newman's role as Ari Ben Canaan in the 1960 film version of Exodus. [...]there is Alvin's television appellation the \"Jewish marine\" which chimes with Uris's own past and the image of the pugnacious Jew he wished to promote.

In \"Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry,\" Paul Breines has distilled a warlike conception into an archetypal figure whom he pithily labels \"Rambowitz. In Leon Uris' \"Exodus, Rambowitz-like characters are juxtaposed with their polar opposite, a type characterized by a wealth of wonderfully onomatopoetic Yiddish words. Gonshak discusses this figure, a kind of \"anti-Rambowitz,\" with perhaps the best-known term from this linguistic group: schlemiel.

This dissertation concerns the legacy within the Jewish American imagination of two related ideas: the pseudoscientific belief in the Jewish body’s inherent physical difference, and the conviction, shared by rabbis, sociologists, and Jewish advocacy organizations in the second half of the 20th century, that Jewish-gentile intermarriage threatened Jewish survival in America. The Jew’s association with illness and debility is central to the Nazi race theories that undergird the Holocaust; the postwar American anxiety over intermarriage responds to that destruction. Fearing that intermarriage may yield a second, “silent” Holocaust through assimilation, American Jewish leaders metaphorically equate exogamy (out-marriage) with genocide.I argue that the postwar fiction of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth attempts—not always successfully—to imagine a Jewish American life freed from the self-hatred traditionally directed toward the Jew’s body and his presumed inclination toward intermarriage. In chapter one, I demonstrate that Bellow’s fiction after Augie March overcomes his early squeamishness about representing the Jewish body; a noted caricaturist of the human form, the mature Bellow creates flamboyantly flawed, pained Jewish characters whose defiant bodies replace the antisemitic stereotype of Jewish inferiority with positive images of an embodied Jewish identity. In chapter two, I argue that Roth offers a model of Jewish identity that accepts intermarriage, assimilation, and other forms of attenuated Jewishness. While postwar sociologists and Jewish leaders fret that intermarriage signals the end of one’s Jewish belonging, Roth creates a cast of protagonists who remain Jewish despite their detachment from traditional institutions of Judaism.