When she was finishing up her manuscript a few years ago, there is no way Jennifer Glaser could have known that the issue at its center—what happens when a writer from one ethnic or religious group speaks within a literary work for, or in the voices of, the members of another—would be all over the news in the months following her book's release. The phrase “cultural appropriation” barely appears in Borrowed Voices, but Glaser's study could not be more directly relevant to the debates under that heading that roiled the internet in the fall of 2016, set off by remarks given by the novelist Lionel Shriver at an Australian literary festival.

With its attention to the literary history of this phenomenon and by introducing the term “literary ventriloquism,” Glaser's study has the potential not only to contribute to the field of American Jewish literary studies, but also to move forward this national discussion, in that it gives those arguing about cultural appropriation on social media and newspapers' opinion pages insight into some key precedents.

Glaser's focus is on the literature written by American Jews in the decades after 1967. She argues that “transracial identification and interracial fantasies are central to late twentieth-century Jewish self-fashioning” and that, in this period, “Jewish intellectuals … often speak for others when what they really want to do is talk about themselves” (3). Why, specifically, would this have been the case after 1967? Glaser credits “the particular social and literary conditions of post-civil rights America” (6), and especially the influence of the Six-Day War in Israel and development of the Black Arts movement on the American Jews who had, by the early 1970s, established themselves as the dominant literary figures of the period.

Bernard Malamud's 1971 novel, The Tenants, the subject of Glaser's first chapter, is a perfect example of this phenomenon. It centers on the fractious relationship between a Jewish writer, who believes in the universal powers of art to speak for the oppressed, and an African American writer whose pronouncements closely echo those of Black Arts proponents. James Alan McPherson, one of the most distinguished African American writers of the postwar period, claimed, beginning in 1989, to have rewritten “certain sections of the novel,” after having read the manuscript and objecting that “the black people sounded Jewish” (23). While The Tenants has been discussed, and this claim has been mentioned, in some of the major works in the booming subfield of literary studies that considers the relations between Jews and African Americans, Glaser claims to be the first scholar to have consulted the correspondence between McPherson and Malamud, archived at the Ransom Humanities Center, to evaluate the validity of the claims. Having done so, she remarks that “McPherson's and Malamud's interaction took place rather late in the book's production process, when the novelist would presumably have been unable to make significant changes in the manuscript”; nonetheless, she confirms that their epistolary exchange focused on the problem of “how to accurately render black speech” (24). Contextualizing her reading of the novel in terms of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school strike, and some of the polemical exchanges between Jewish and African American intellectuals in the preceding decades, Glaser argues that the book marks the moment at which “the assumption among so many Jewish writers that white liberals could speak for the concerns of African American would no longer go unquestioned” (40).

The ensuing chapters of Borrowed Voices treat a series of texts—Lynne Sharon Schwartz's short story “The Melting Pot,” Hettie Jones's memoir How I Became Hettie Jones, and Lore Segal's novel My First American; Cynthia Ozick's “A Mercenary” and Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet; Philip Roth's The Human Stain; Ben Katchor's The Jew of New York and Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union—each of which stages richly complex verbal encounters between Jews and Americans of color, shadowed by the issues of miscegenation, the Holocaust, the culture wars of the 1990s, and controversies about Israel/Palestine. If there is substantial overlap between Glaser's selection of texts, and those covered in some important recent books in the field, like Jonathan Freedman's Klezmer America and Dean Franco's Race, Rights, and Recognition, Glaser does uncover some new ground. Especially striking are Glaser's pointing to the centrality of rabbi and sociologist Albert I. Gordon's writings on intermarriage in the brief submitted by lawyers for the State of Virginia charged with defending the state's law against interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia (1967), and Glaser's reading of Mr. Sammler's Planet in dialogue with Saul Bellow's journalistic reporting, for Newsday, on Israel's Six-Day War.

In a few places, however, Borrowed Voices seems too little grounded in broader American literary history. For one small but important example, it repeats the false and easily disproven claim that “the Holocaust was not widely discussed or represented in the immediate postwar years” (62) in America.

In a larger sense, Borrowed Voices gives us too narrow a sense of literary ventriloquism. The book attends admirably to scholarship on passing narratives and mentions William Styron's and John Updike's widely discussed works of ventriloquism, but it barely mentions how pervasive the practice has been throughout the history of American literature. African American writers like Chester Himes, Lorraine Hansberry, Willard Motley, James Baldwin, and John Oliver Killens made white (and sometimes Jewish) characters central to their narratives; Robert Olen Butler received the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for stories written from the perspectives of Vietnamese immigrants. One could point to dozens of other major examples, in virtually any period of American literary history, and while it would be unreasonable to expect Glaser to have attended to all of them, it would have strengthened her argument if she had more clearly situated her discussion of postwar Jewish writers' literary ventriloquism within that broader context, addressing what makes it distinct from or similar to that practiced by others.

That said, Borrowed Voices is rich with insights into the centrality of “speaking for the other” in the development of postwar American Jewish literature. As such, it has much to contribute to the ongoing conversation about cultural appropriation.