They Ate Their Spam with Their Yarmulkes On

Young Lions/Old Tropes

Authors

  • Mashey Bernstein University of California, Santa Barbara Author

Keywords:

Leah Garrett, Jewish American war novel, The Naked and the Dead, Herman Wouk, Irwin Shaw, Jewish identity

Abstract

Mashey Bernstein reviews Leah Garrett’s Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel (Northwestern), a study of the war novels by Jewish writers that appeared from 1948 onward, among them The Naked and the Dead, Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions, and Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. Bernstein credits Garrett for taking middlebrow fiction seriously and for using Mailer as a yardstick, and he dwells on the rivalry between Wouk and Mailer. He faults her for accepting these thin, stereotyped Jewish soldiers as accurate portraits, for overlooking Mailer’s own comments on his limited knowledge of Jewish culture, and for lacking sociological context. The novels, he concludes, mark the end of an old genre more than its reinvention.

Author Biography

  • Mashey Bernstein, University of California, Santa Barbara

    Mashey Bernstein is a retired Professor of American Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he received his PhD for his dissertation on Jewish values in the fiction of Norman Mailer. He has written on various aspects of Mailer’s work for The Mailer Review, Studies in American Jewish Literature, The London Jewish Chronicle and San Francisco Review of Books. He maintained close ties with Mailer from their initial meeting in 1975 until his passing.

Downloads

Published

2016-09-28

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 1 (2016): 10th Anniversary Issue

Section

Book Reviews

How to Cite

Bernstein, Mashey. “They Ate Their Spam With Their Yarmulkes On: Young Lions Old Tropes”. The Mailer Review, vol. 10, no. 1, Sept. 2016, pp. 422–427, https://mailerreview.org/journal/article/view/585.