Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination

In the decades following World War II, many American Jews sought to downplay their difference, as a means of assimilating into Middle America. Yet a significant minority, including many prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals, clung to their ethnic difference, using it to register dissent with the status quo and act as spokespeople for non—white America.

In this provocative book, Jennifer Glaser examines how racial ventriloquism became a hallmark of Jewish—American fiction, as Jewish wr...