In this highly original contribution to the ever-expanding canon of American Jewish literary studies, Leah Garrett mines an underexamined archive of American novels about World War II by and about Jews who served in the American armed forces in both the European and Pacific theaters. Many of these novels were bestsellers from the late 1940s through the early 1960s and, as Garrett argues, crucially shaped American memory of the war as well as American attitudes about “liberalism, masculinity, and pluralism” (5). The popularity and influence of these novels, Garrett argues, “meant that the American Jewish soldier became a central icon of Jewishness in the postwar era” (5).

Garrett begins with a consideration of the category of “middlebrow,” which she persuasively demonstrates is an invention of the intellectual elite in the 1930s and 1940s, determined to preserve their status as guardians of culture in a moment when ethnic, racial, and religious outsiders’ access to books rapidly grew as a result of the democratizing force of the proliferating “paperback boom.” Garrett thus situates her subject as a critique of the postwar canon formation—both American and Jewish—from which many of her authors were excluded despite, or because of, their popularity. Garrett also sees her study as complicating the argument that American Jews were silent on the subject of the Holocaust until the 1960s (an argument that Hasia Diner, Eric Sundquist, and others have also compellingly dismantled). Rather, Garrett argues that the Nazi genocide, here described through the eyes of American Jewish soldier-witnesses, is such a powerful organizing force in these novels that we can trace a direct line from them to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, the contemporary embodiment of the centrality of Holocaust memory in American life.

The bulk of Garrett's analysis addresses the five novels by and about Jews that dominated the New York Times bestseller list in 1948: Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, Ira Wolfert's An Act of Love, Merle Miller's That Winter, and Stefan Heym's The Crusaders. A sixth novel, Martha Gellhorn's Point of No Return, was popular, though it did not make the bestseller list. Garrett contextualizes these novels in the conflicted and confusing currents of 1948, which for Jews included pride in the creation of the State of Israel, increasingly successful assimilation into middle-class American society, anxiety-producing debates over the Displaced Persons Act, and a recognition of the antisemitism latent in McCarthyism. Many of these novels therefore describe antisemitism in the army, but also feature multiethnic platoons (excluding African American or Asian American soldiers, who served in segregated platoons), in which the crucible of combat burns away prejudice. They feature courageous, patriotic, and fierce Jewish fighters (paralleling the New Jews of Zionist discourse), who can also be plagued with self-doubt and who recognize the humanity in others, even their Japanese enemies. By 1952, however, writers like Herman Wouk and Leon Uris represent a shift rightward, as Garrett reads The Caine Mutiny and Battle Cry as “calls for conformity” even as they challenge “racial and social injustice” (134). Garrett's concluding chapter turns to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 as an emblem of a “new liberalism,” as the novel champions a very different ethos of resistance, rebellion, pacifism, and individualism.

In a wide-ranging conclusion, Garrett returns to Norman Mailer, whose archive she uses productively throughout, and reconsiders him first in comparison to Bellow, whose “war novel,” Dangling Man, describes its protagonist's boredom, anxiety, and emasculation while awaiting conscription, and then in comparison to James Jones, the “greatest non-Jewish war novelist” and author of From Here to Eternity (1951) and The Thin Red Line (1962). Both of Jones's novels feature important Jewish characters, and Garrett argues that it is the archetype of the ethical Jewish soldier and his “complex masculinity,” created by Mailer, Shaw, and others that influences Jones's sympathetic representations. The Hollywood film versions of many of these novels downplayed their Jewish content as well as simplified some of the novels’ more complex and ambivalent representations of army service. It is startling to realize, as Garrett notes in closing, that “although Jews were only 3.5 percent of the population, they created the template through which Americans saw World War II” (226).

Garrett is a careful, methodical critic, and resists generalizations even as she clusters her texts into thematic and chronological categories like “the Pacific,” “the Holocaust,” “the New Conservatism,” and “the New Liberalism.” Each novel is described and addressed on its own terms, which on the one hand allows each text's complexities and contradictions to emerge, but on the other, makes it difficult to articulate an overarching interpretive claim about this archive. Garrett persuasively demonstrates the broad influence of these novels through the 1960s in transforming the image of the American Jewish man and contributing in crucial ways to the archetype of the Jew as insider/outsider. However, I would have welcomed some more critical engagements with the constructions of pluralism imagined by these writers. In particular, their inability or refusal to fully imagine the experiences of African American and Asian American soldiers and of women may well have had deep influence on the production of a postwar liberalism that excluded these very groups.

These are questions, perhaps, for succeeding scholars, for whom this will serve as an important expansion of available materials about the American Jewish experience. Garrett joins scholars like Lori Harrison-Kahan, Jodi Eichler-Levine, Joshua Lambert, and others, whose examinations of Jewish women's popular fiction, Jewish children's literature, and Jews and obscenity likewise implicitly critique the historical and genre-bound biases of American Jewish literary studies. Garrett's study is thus a significant contribution to this dynamic and reenergized field.