When Irving Howe persuaded Saul Bellow to translate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Gimpel the Fool” for his anthology of Yiddish fiction in 1953, none of these men can have guessed that two of them—Bellow (1976) and Singer (1978)—would become Nobel laureates within the next 25 years or that Howe’s anthology would stay in print into the next century. This convergence of the scholar/critic with the Yiddish writer and the American novelist in the immediate aftermath of World War II is a capsule of the course in which we will track the migration of Jewish American literary culture from the work of pre-World War II immigrants to the American-born writers (comedians, songsters and movie makers) whose curious obsessions would do so much to define American popular and literary culture in the post-War period. Although I divide the syllabus between what I am calling “Immigrants” before the War and “Americans” after, we will focus as much on what binds the generations as on what divides them. Indeed, Singer’s “Gimpel”, written in Yiddish and in New York City by a recent immigrant at the very end of the War, is an excellent emblem of continuity and change in Jewish American writing. The pre-War generation will be represented by Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Anja Yezierska, Henry Roth, Clifford Odets and Al Jolson’s Jazz Singer (1927), the first “talkie.” The post-War period will include Singer and Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Chabon and the recent Coen Brothers’ film, A Serious Man (2009). Lecture, discussion, short essays.