On any given night in New York City, there's a wealth of celebrations, galas and receptions celebrating Jewish life in its various forms. One Monday night, I was at the Pierre Hotel for a reception honoring the winners of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish
Literature, the largest-ever Jewish literary prize and one of the largest literary prizes in the nation. Across town, at the Museum of Natural History, many of my Jewishly committed friends were at a reception/gala celebrating
Hillel and its funders.
At the Rohr reception, the buffet and cocktail hour provided a chance for literary novices like myself to mingle with the luminaries of Jewish journalism, literature and thought. I recognized journalism professors, Jewish leaders, philanthropists, fellow Jewish Week columnists and former colleagues from Jewish organizations I worked with over the last decade. The crowd was also speckled with younger faces--those of emergent leaders, writers and academics whose interest in Jewish literature was steeped in a contemporary sensibility or flavored with pop culture awareness. But it started me wondering about generational priorities.
Does Jewish literature matter? Naturally, the National Jewish Book Council, the Rohr family, the writers and aspiring authors amidst the crowd, and myriad others who prize their books-lined shelves, think it does. (This writer herself admits to being a little dumbstruck by an encounter with Jonathan Safran Foer.) Articles about what constitutes a Jewish writer abound, and authors labeled with the moniker have grappled with its resonance and/or lack thereof. While book groups exist for people my age, most group discussions I've attended haven't been about a specific piece of literature. Rather, they've been about Jewish culture and identity; any mention of literature was incidental, not the primary objective.
I wasn't invited to the Hillel event, but many of my friends and colleagues were. If I had had the choice between the two events, would I have chosen Jewish literature? I like to think so. Jewish literature is important to me. Nearly every book I own has some Jewish content. But despite the devotion of the faithful to the resonance of cultural meaning and intellectual stimulation that exists within the covers of Jewish books, it's harder to parlay that into a gala event's worth of youthful enthusiasm.
But across the park, there was a celebration of all things young and vital--college campuses, birthright israel trips, student activism and spirituality...something so contemporary and youthful is a tough competitor for Jewish literature, which, in many books, invokes the impact of the Holocaust. The youthful literature lovers among us can only hope for the convergence of the classical and the contemporary, and for the publication of ideas old and new in the literature of tomorrow.
