Gendering Jewish Anxiety with Shaina Hammerman

Free admission with free garage parking on Pierce St between Ellis and Eddy streets.

Philip Roth and Grace Paley both debuted their short story collections in 1959. While each author has a distinct literary voice, they both figure into what came to be known as the “Jewish American Renaissance,” and each holds a place in the Jewish American literary canon. Their story collections expose some of the tensions that shaped mid-century American Jewish life, but do so in ways that are deeply gendered. We will discuss Paley’s “The Loudest Voice” in relation to Roth’s “Eli, the Fanatic” as two rich examples of the interplay between expressions of gender and Jewishness in American culture.

Shaina Hammerman is the author of Silver Screen, Hasidic Jews: The Story of an Image. She teaches Jewish studies, cultural history, and literature at the University of San Francisco and San Quentin State Prison. She holds a PhD in Jewish history and culture from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

Program made possible, in part, by Judy Baston.

Co-presented by the Philip Roth Society and the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco.