October
22,
2004
MHC
Newsmakers
Juried Showing The unveiling of a portrait of a prominent Rhode Island judge,
by professor of art Bonnie Miller, drew high praise and a story
in the September 9 Providence Journal. According to the Journal piece by Edward Fitzpatrick, “About 270 people, including
U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter, turned out for the
unveiling of a portrait of the only Rhode Islander on the 1st
U.S. Circuit of Appeals—Judge Bruce M. Selya. Selya, 70,
of Providence, said he is not retiring and that yesterday marked
the first time a portrait has been dedicated to an active 1st
Circuit judge.” Miller’s portrait work is extensive
and includes a number of high-ranking Boston jurists. In addition
to portraiture, Miller also frequently exhibits her work—including
landscapes and equestrian works—at a number of galleries
locally and in New York City.
Still A New World English professor
Donald Weber looks at current Jewish-American writers in a September
17 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education and finds that
the immigrant experience—and
a perennial engagement with America as a new world—inspires
the current generation of writers with the same intensity as
their forebears. As Weber notes in “Permutations of New-World
Experiences Rejuvenate Jewish-American Literature,” fears
that assimilation would diminish the literary power of contemporary
Jewish-American literature have proved unfounded.
According to Weber: “Twenty-seven years ago, in a now-famous introduction
to Jewish-American Stories, Irving Howe offered a gloomy prediction about Jewish-American
literary expression. A year after his elegiac 1976 chronicle of the migration
of East European Jews to America, World of Our Fathers, Howe announced the
apparent exhaustion of a once-flourishing Jewish-American fiction. The sheer
absorptive power of ‘Americanization’ would
distance later writers, Howe argued, from the shaping crucible of the immigrant
experience.
“ ‘Nostalgia, return, hatred, nausea, affection, guilt — all
these are among the familiar, urgent feelings which memories of immigrant streets,
tenements and (most of all) families can stir up in the American Jewish writers,’ he
wrote. In the wake of inevitable memory loss (‘America makes one forget
everything,’ cautioned the advice columnist for the Yiddish
Daily Forward
in 1908), Howe asked if there would remain ‘a thick enough sediment of
felt life to enable a new outburst of writing about American Jews.’ Would
we again see the genre looking as robust as it did in the 1930s, with Henry Roth’s
harrowing immigrant novel, Call It Sleep, or in the 1950s, with the arrival of
Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and the young Philip Roth?
“Howe was not optimistic. Surveying the contemporary literary scene in
the 1970s, he found relatively little in what he termed the ‘post-immigrant
Jewish experience’ for the imagination to draw on; indeed ‘its usability
for the making of fictions’ seemed virtually over. A generation later,
however, his prediction—now dubbed the ‘Howe Doctrine’ by students
of Jewish-American literature—seems to have been dead wrong. Rather than
chanting the mourner’s kaddish over the presumed demise of Jewish-American
fiction, in the past few years we have witnessed a Jewish literary flowering
by a rising generation of writers who have made, in Morris Dickstein’s
description, ‘their Jewish fantasies, feelings, and experiences absolutely
central to their work.’ ”
Weber has just completed Haunted in the New World: Jewish-American
Culture from Cahan to “The Goldbergs,” to be published in 2005 by Indiana
University Press. The book explores the ways modern Jewish writers and makers
of popular culture have responded to the challenge of adjusting to America,
voicing their imaginative encounter in accents of resistance and celebration,
irony, and longing.
Test Fails Test An article in USA
Today about a Bates College
study casting further doubt on the usefulness of SAT scores in
admissions mentions Mount Holyoke as one of “two dozen
selective schools” that have made submission of test scores
optional. In “Some Find SATs Don’t ‘Define
Quality’” in the October 1 edition, Alvin P. Sarnoff
wrote that a study by Bates College found little difference between
the academic performance of those who submitted SAT scores and
those who did not. Bates, which made submission of test scores
optional 20 years ago, found that graduation rates and grade-point
averages for the two groups are similar. “We have to get
out of this box where America feels SAT scores define quality,” Bates
vice president William Hiss told the paper. “Colleges feel
constrained in admitting students who have done everything right
except have stratospheric scores.” MHC is in the second
year of its own three-year study of the effects of its SAT-optional
policy, funded through a $290,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation.
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