Jewish Lit Isn't Dead, It's Written by Women

If you limit “Jewish writing” to a particular narrative of alienation—a narrative grounded in the great migratory wave from the 1880s to the 1920s, from poverty and persecution in Eastern Europe or Russia to new American lives (still often impoverished; more vulnerable on these shores to prejudice than life-threatening pogroms) in New York (or, in Roth’s case, New Jersey); a narrative built around ensuing self-focused conflicts of assimilation and identity and rebellion (almost always written by male authors and featuring male protagonists)—then, you are correct. “Jewish writing” may well be “over.” But your premise is so faulty—so lacking in recognition of what has been happening in Jewish literature since 1969 and Alexander Portnoy—that you are, in fact, wrong.