We will read authors who may be regarded as writing Jewish literature, though they wrote in English, Yiddish, Russian, Italian, Hebrew, German, Polish, Spanish, and French. We will consider whether a coherent national story or literary tradition emerges through the prism of their idiosyncratic responses to their heritage and to the modern Jewish experience of exile, persecution, survival, immigration, assimilation, cultural renaissance, the holocaust, and the contested recovery of a long lost homeland; and whether one can uncover something like a “Jewish aesthetics” – of rupture, displacement, a distrust of the image – at work within Western Modernism. Authors may include Agnon, Ansky, Kafka, Bellow, Paley, Ozick, Olsen, Baldwin, Arendt, Levinas, Babel, Henry Roth, Primo Levi, Philip Roth, Arthur Cohen, and I.B. Singer.