David Herman
Bellow, Roth and Malamud
Summary
Saul Bellow famously referred to Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud and himself as the ‘Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of literature’, after the famous American menswear manufacturer. These three men were the great Jewish American novelists of the 1950s and ‘60s. They were part of the ‘new Jewish visibility’, a project similar to ‘adapting Yiddishkeit to modernism’. After Malamud’s death in 1988, Bellow and Roth were left to battle for the title of the greatest modern American writer. In this lecture, David Herman poses the question, who was the greatest of them all?
David Herman
David Herman is a freelance writer based in London. Over the past 20 years he has written almost a thousand articles, essays, and reviews on Jewish history and literature for publications including the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Quarterly, Jewish Renaissance, the Guardian, the New Statesman, and Prospect. He has taught courses on Jewish culture for the London Jewish Cultural Centre and JW3. He is a regular contributor to Jewish Book Week, the Association of Jewish Refugees, and the Insiders/Outsiders Festival on the contribution of Jewish refugees to British culture.