Awards

• Commended for National Jewish Book Award (American Jewish Studies) 2015

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.

Full Product Details

9780810131446

Table of Contents

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, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University andauthor of Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing

Author Information

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

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available