The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature
By Josh Lambert
Yale University Press £28.00


In The Literary Mafia, Josh Lambert offers an unconventional perspective on what is often perceived as a golden age for Jews in American literature. In the decades after World War II, as high-profile Jewish authors won the glittering prizes and topped the best-seller lists, there was also a veritable moment of emancipation for Jews as editors, reviewers, and literature professors.

It is with these people, rather than mainstream figures such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and so on, that Lambert is most concerned.

Contemporary observers noticed dramatic changes to the demography of American publishing.

In some quarters, there was talk of a Jewish “literary mob”, whose power and prestige threatened “the future of intelligent writing”. Allegedly, the industry was being remade in the interests of Jewish readers and writers, to the detriment of other sections of American society.

Proponents of this conspiracy theory included some people, whom you might have expected to have known better: Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, we’re looking at you.

Other commentators quickly rubbished the antisemitic bigotry. Lambert, too, denounces the idea of the Jewish literary mafia as “false and even pernicious”, and yet, as that interesting word “even” indicates, there is more to it than that.

Perhaps rather startlingly, Lambert seeks to rehabilitate the idea of a “literary mafia” as a description of how kinship networks operate in intellectual culture.

Opponents of the conspiracy theory often appealed to notions of objective literary merit to explain why Jews succeeded in American literature.

Meritocracy has become an unfashionable idea in political philosophy, and Lambert has the notion in his sights. He claims that it was appropriate for Jews in publishing to pursue “interested” agendas that reflected their background as Jews, and that such behaviour can be a progressive force in cultural history.

In truth, it is impossible to summarise Lambert’s position adequately in a short review, since he usually hedges whatever he asserts with multitudinous qualifications. His account shows that Jews often did not favour other Jews (especially Jewish women writers), while many Jews succeeded without significant help from other Jews.

Individual examples are made to bear a lot of weight. For instance, around 25 pages are devoted to the once-revered literary critic Lionel Trilling’s efforts to support three Jewish protégés. Interesting material perhaps, but is it really that interesting?

It is possible to agree that kinship support can sometimes legitimately affect the development of careers, without accepting the larger political and sociological inferences that Lambert seeks to draw.

On the other hand, I feel obliged now to mention that the opportunity to write reviews for the Jewish Chronicle came to me in the first place through a personal connection. Is that significant? I couldn’t possibly comment.