After the Golden Age

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>For midcentury American Jewish novelists like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, the central theme of their work was the conflict between the New World’s promise of independence and the traditional demands of Jewish solidarity. A Renaissance of Jewish fiction in the 2000s, thanks to writers like Michael Chabon, Nicole Krauss, Dara Horn, and Joshua Cohen, is much more interested in Judaism as a religion, in Jewish tradition, and in the role of Israel in American Jewish identity. Today’s cohort of American Jewish novelists is the strongest since the mid-twentieth-century golden age, but this particularist focus means they are nowhere near as central to American literature.</jats:p>