Jews, Literacy, and American Freedom

    It’s not surprising that as illiteracy rates have risen in the West, so has antisemitism. In the 20th century, Jews were central to making America a literate country, and as literacy has dropped, prejudice and stupidity have taken their place. Whereas we once had William F. Buckley examining antisemitism in his book In Search of Antisemitism, we now have Candace Owens. As I am examining in a new book project, antisemitism hurts America and American culture.

    In the new book Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, author Gayle Feldman tells the story of Bennett Cerf, the man who founded Random House. Feldman makes the case that the Jews who entered publishing in America in the 20th century loved the United States and the bedrock ideas of Western philosophy, and passed that love onto the culture.    Cerf was part of what Feldman calls “an unofficial New York club,” the Jewish “book boys” (and one girl, Blanche Knopf). This included Simon and Schuster, Knopf, Harold Guinzburg, co-founder of the Literary Guild and Viking Press, and Harry Scherman and Robert Haas, who established the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC). “Although many wanted to fit in,” Feldman notes, “they also wanted to be noticed.”

    In 1925, Cerf and his colleague Donald S. Klopfer purchased the rights to the Modern Library, a collection of Western classics published by Boni & Liveright. Book expert Theia Griffin explained the impact of the Modern Library this way:

Editorial decisions at Modern Library helped create and underscore modern intellectual canon and the imprint was acclaimed for essentially democratizing literature. Authors’ works, re-introduced and newly introduced, helped bring many to the forefront: Melville, Dostoevsky, and Dos Passos, to name only a few. William Faulkner’s works were generally only available in Modern Library editions by the time he won the Nobel Prize in 1950. Modern Library performed the great service of ensuring certain works did not go out of print and resurrecting those that had. In addition to reprints, Modern Library’s list included works by O’Neill, Hemingway, Eliot, Jeffers, and Pound, drawing undoubtedly from Random House’s stable of authors.

    “Democratizing literature” is also a way of democratizing resistance to bad ideas, from communism to jihadism. Books make us resistant to coercion. Even though to most people the Modern Library indicated “the world’s best books,” notes Griffin, Cerf also published more modern stuff: “Titles such as Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, and W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage were found among the top 100 bestselling list. In line with original intent, Modern Library also published ‘the sophisticated and the subversive’ with titles such as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and the James Joyce epic Ulysses (including the complete court decision which allowed for its American publication.)”

    In 1927, Cerf and Klopfer decided that they would publish new quality books they liked and had picked at random. Thus Random House was born.

    Feldman observes that “the prejudice [Jewish publishers] encountered was a given, running the gamut from insidious to ugly to shocking and worse.” It even came from authors they published.  Author Ford Maddox Ford declared, “I don’t like Jews,” but then went on to admit that “the arts flourish in New York largely because of its Jewish population.… The only people I have found [there]—and I have not found them anywhere else … who really loved books … were Jews—and the only people who subsidized young writers during their early non-lucrative years.”

    I grew up in an Irish-Catholic house that loved James Joyce, Yeats and Edna O’Brien, yet Jews have always been an essential part of my education. Two Jews, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, created modern Marvel Comics, which was my entry into young reading. Then there was Mad magazine, written and drawn largely by Jewish people, which taught me satire and critical thinking. From there it was onto Modern Library classics: Common Sense by Thomas Paine, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare, Wuthering Heights.

    When I was in college and attempting to read Ulysses — not an easy book — my father suggested I try a different writer, Saul Bellow. Bellow, he said, was like the American James Joyce. Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March had been published in a Modern Library edition in 1965. Fifty years later, Bellow’s son Adam is my book editor. My life, and the life of the United States, would not be the same without Jews in publishing — never mind movies, comic books, medicine and art.

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