As its subtitle implies, Benjamin Schreier's second monograph is nothing if not ambitious. The blurb for Schreier's first book, The Power of Negative Thinking: Cynicism and the History of Modern American Literature (2009), claims that it “makes a vital and wide-ranging contribution to our understanding of American literature, intellectual and cultural history, philosophy, ethics, and politics.” The Impossible Jew sets itself similarly grand objectives: to “liberate Jewish American study” (12) from its “self-imposed ghetto” (2); and “to reconstitute the canon of Jewish American literature … around the desire for an identity that we do not yet know how to recognize” (69). In keeping with this mission, Schreier deploys lofty rhetoric. His prose is peppered with peremptory prescriptions, characterized by a preponderance of modal imperatives: “Jewish American literary scholarship must attend more rigorously …” (9), “Criticism should trace the ways in which …” (29), “We must begin to think …” (32), “Jewish literary study should …” (32), “Criticism must take the form of …” (48), “critics of Jewish identity should not be content to …” (101), “let us set ourselves the goal …” (101), et cetera. When he articulates his vision for the future of literary criticism, it is in terms so convoluted and riddled with jargon that it is difficult to disentangle from the semantic spaghetti any single strand that might be digestible:

At one point Schreier describes his project in much pithier terms as “a critical counternarrative of Jewish canonicity” (19), but this formulation is itself problematic, raising the question of what “Jewish” might mean in the context of a critical discourse that has deconstructed the term so radically as to have effectively evacuated it of any meaning. The first fifty pages of the book are largely given over to dense theoretical formulations such as the one quoted above, to grandiose statements about “the responsibility of criticism” (27) and to dogmatic dismissals of methodologies which diverge from Schreier's criteria for constructive criticism. Hence “historicism is a banal, self-confirming dead end for identity-based literary study” (12). Indeed any critical approaches of which Schreier disapproves tend to be labelled “historicist,” “identitarian,” “biologistic,” “racialist,” “nationalist,” “statist” or indeed all of these at once, since these terms are often used appositionally, if not synonymously.

Schreier's arguments certainly do not lack conviction. But zeal is no substitute for scholarship and repeating a point emphatically does not make it any more persuasive. Most damagingly, Schreier's arguments are not as original as he believes them to be. His attack on Ruth Wisse's neoconservative “nationalist project” and the “identitarian logic” (16) that underpins it is effective but largely redundant, given the critiques of her work by scholars such as Bryan Cheyette. Indeed, the fact that there is no mention of Cheyette anywhere in Schreier's book is symptomatic of its most serious flaw. The first chapter of The Impossible Jew is essentially a manifesto in which he calls for what he presents as a revolutionary approach to Jewish literary scholarship that he terms “critical semitism,” which “would privilege in its readings analysis … of how texts deconstruct the givenness of Jewish identity” (56). Yet as long ago as 1992, in his first monograph, Cheyette was analysing what he called “semitic discourse” and discovering a “radical emptiness and lack of a fixed meaning” in its literary representations of “the Jew.”Footnote ¹ Similarly, when Schreier laments the unwillingness of Jewish studies (with the exception of one or two of his American friends and colleagues) to engage with adjacent fields, one is left wondering whether he is wilfully ignoring Cheyette's most recent work, which has been based on bringing Jewish studies into dialogue with postcolonial studies, or is simply unaware of it. This failure to engage with or even acknowledge the existence of scholarship that would at least complicate his arguments extends to other eminent UK-based scholars in the field, such as Nadia Valman, Axel Staehler and Ruth Gilbert, whose use of the term “Jew-ish” (after Jonathan Miller) to characterize a provisional, fluid set of “uncertain identifications” anticipates Schreier's own appropriation of the term to signify “the destabilizing variety of Jewish self-identification” (74) that he locates in Abraham Cahan's novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917).Footnote ² Perhaps the most conspicuous absence from the pages of The Impossible Jew is Alain Finkielkraut's seminal study of postwar Jewishness The Imaginary Jew (1994), to which Schreier's title seems to allude. Ironically, then, Schreier, the self-appointed scourge of insularity, “statism” and “nationalism” in Jewish studies, is guilty of the very crimes of which he accuses others. For Schreier, Jewish studies seems to be a field populated solely by American academics and the criticism of Jewish American literature appears to be the exclusive province of (mostly Jewish) Americans.

All this is a shame, because the book has many merits. Schreier's critique of the institutional inertia of Jewish studies, and of its marginalization of literary scholarship, and his diagnosis of a malaise in Jewish American literary criticism rooted in a self-serving intellectual protectionism are powerful, if somewhat unnuanced, and bode well for his own stewardship of Studies in American Jewish Literature. Moreover, when Schreier finally begins, after sixty-odd pages, to engage in literary-critical analysis (as opposed to theorizing about how it should and should not be done) he has some interesting observations to make, even if there is still a tendency at times to present his arguments without reference to other critics who have covered similar ground (he is hardly the first scholar to have noticed the way in which Philip Roth's “American Trilogy” conducts an “intensive investigation of narration” (155) or that the trope of “impersonation” is used to deconstruct normative notions of identity in Roth's The Counterlife). At its best The Impossible Jew is provocative in the best sense of the word. Too often, however, it is a frustrating and even infuriating book because Schreier expends so much energy flailing at literary-critical windmills, inveighing against a set of values and practices which he ironically reinforces through his own narrow definition of the disciplines he wishes to reform. The Impossible Jew admirably advocates the importance of a self-scrutinizing critical practice but this advocacy is fatally undermined by its own glaring blind spots.