Imagined Non-Jews

Book excerpt: Racial passing has fascinated thousands of American readers since the end of the nineteenth century. However, the phenomenon of Jews passing as gentiles has been all but overlooked. This book examines forgotten novels depicting Jewish Americans masquerading as gentiles. Exploring two "waves" of publications of this subgenre—in the 1940s-1950s and 1990s-2000s—this book raises questions about the perceptions of Jewish difference during these periods.Looking at issues such as Whiteness, Americanness, gender, and race, it traces the changes in the representation of Jewish identity during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. Ohad Reznick’s Imagined Non-Jews is an important intervention in the scholarship on the literature of passing. This book also makes a significant contribution to Jewish American literary studies through thoughtful close readings of texts from the 1940s and 1950s, many of them little-known today, as well as multi-ethnic American fiction from the turn-of-the-21st-century, all of them featuring characters who conceal their Jewishness in order to pass for gentile. —Lori Harrison-Kahan, Boston College, author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary