American Hebrew Literature : Syracuse University Press : 9780815632511 : 0815632517 : 28 Feb 2011 : Over the last one hundred years, the story of Jews in the United States has been, by and large, one of successful and enthusiastic Americanization. Hundreds of thousands of Jews began the twentieth century as new arrivals to a foreign land yet soon became shapers and definers of American culture itself. One of the clearest expres­sions of this transformation has been the quick linguistic march of those immigrant Jews and their children from Yiddish to English. In this book, Weingrad presents a counter-history of American Jewish culture, one that tells the story of literature written by a group whose core identity was neither American nor Jewish American. These writers were ardently and nationalistically Jewish and, despite their adopting a new country, their linguistic and cultural allegiance was to the Hebrew language. Producing poetry, short fiction, novels, essays, and journals, write