Overview

Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for the first time became the popular literary representatives of what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American. Revisiting best-selling works ranging from Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and uncovering a range of unknown archival material, Leah Garrett shows how Jewish writers used the theme of World War II to reshape the American public’s ideas about war, the Holocaust, and the role of Jews in postwar life. In contrast to most previous war fiction these new “Jewish” war novels were often ironic, funny, and irreverent and sought to teach the reading public broader lessons about liberalism, masculinity, and pluralism.

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9780810131750

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Reviews

A masterful exercise in excavation by a superb literary and cultural historian. Here is an extraordinary tour of literary terrain so familiar and accessible to the common reader and so marginalized in literary criticism. Leah Garrett opens up for us a crucial chapter in American Jewish cultural expression with consistent intelligence and an infectious enthusiasm. --Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing

Theoretically sophisticated and probing, Young Lions is full of insights that are of interest to the literary scholar, the historian, and the student of Jewishness and of American ethnic relations. --Werner Sollers, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and of African American Studies at Harvard University and author of The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s.

A masterful exercise in excavation by a superb literary and cultural historian. Here is an extraordinary tour of literary terrain so familiar and accessible to the common reader and so marginalized in literary criticism. Leah Garrett opens up for us a crucial chapter in American Jewish cultural expression with consistent intelligence and an infectious enthusiasm. Steven J. Zipperstein, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University andauthor of Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing

A fascinating study of war novels both familiar and forgotten and a fresh interpretation that illuminates previously hidden aspects of these once popular books, Leah Garrett s lucid study will change how we think about World War II, the Holocaust, and American Jews. Deborah Dash Moore, author of GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation

Author Information

Leah Garrett is Loti Smorgon Professor of Contemporary Jewish Life and Culture at Monash University in Australia.

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