Fiction, Jewish or otherwise, needn't be in-your-face to be enjoyable and of literary merit. Dara Horn's well-received debut novel, In the Image, focuses not on liver-shtupping or Holocaust-related "shock" humour, but on biblical tropes, such as Job and, as the title suggests, the divine image in which, according to Genesis, we are all created--all without being sentimental or preachy. As anti-Semitism, the Israeli/Arab conflict, wallowing in Holocaust memories, and the "forbidden" aura around non-Jewish mates all fade from relevance, my intuition says that more Jewish authors like Horn will emerge, concentrating on the search for a meaningful (not necessarily Orthodox/Conservative/Reform) Jewish spiritual life.

yes, hal: you are the only writer who can't sleep at night because you are furiously trying to dream up ways to be more "edgy."  
disclaimer: when this piece was first considered for jewcy, i argued vociferously against it.  not because its points couldn't possibly be valid (if made by a writer who has read enough contemporary jewish fiction to articulate properly, that is), and not because i happen to be the author of a recent collection of short fiction set in jewish contexts and oft-described by critics as, indeed, "edgy".  but because, simply, niedzviecki is an extraordinarily lacking lit-crit aspirant.  derek rubin's century-spanning "who we are" anthology is broad-based and wonderful, but not at all useful to this discussion.  "lost tribe" is interesting and useful, but not remotely enough on which to base these sort of generalizations.  no one has ever claimed that joshua braff is anything other than a marginal celeb writing lad-lit.  the simplistic take on shteyngart is just sad. 
the goal of serious fiction is to fully inhabit lives that are not quite but maybe almost possibly our own; to breathe life into worlds and tell the whole truth about characters.  to see how far into the complicated mess of an almost-person we can get.  it is not, nor has it ever been, to "shock".  like seeking revenge through fiction, seeking edginess just stinks to high heaven.  (trust me on this: i teach undergraduate creative writing.)  ginsburg was shocking because he told his own whole truth in a time when no one else had the balls to do so.  and please: let us not romanticize the consequences for the brave souls who do such things.
some authors whose work would be useful to this discussion, to name but a very few:  binnie kirshenbaum, shalom auslander, sam lipsyte, julie orringer, rachel kadish, shira nayman, jennifer gilmore, etgar keret, allegra goodman, elizabeth mccracken, david bezmozgis, aaron hamburger, daphne merkin, tova mirvis, aimee bender, amy sohn, thisbe nissen, jonathan lethem.  
hal, man, listen: it sucks that you weren born too late to cavort with roth and bellow and malamud and bruce jay friedman.  bummer that your efforts to thwart some old standard of american jewish upstandingness by lusting after shiksas are about three decades stale.  you want to be "edgy"?  try letting the self-aggrandizement and navel-gazing and ambition drop.  try telling your own simple, naked truth.  that's what any meaningful writing does, be it southeast asian lit, african american lit, white man lit, queer lit, canadian lit, jewish lit, muslim lit, spanish lit, or mutt lit.  and it's about as shocking, as edgy, as raw, as rare, and truly as threatening as any literature ever gets.

I'm glad to see, Elisa, that you understand how much reading it takes to know the first thing about the current state of Jewish-American fiction (this bodes well for you as a novelist). In addition to the group of contemporary writers you mention, an informed perspective on this topic requires some serious attention to critics who have understood, more or less, what's at stake in Jewish-American fiction: Irving Howe's various comments on the state of the art, as well as, of course, a heavy dose of Leslie Fiedler, would be a good place to start with that.

What depresses me is not that there's nothing to write about for contemporary Jewish writers; Dara Horn's a good example of how much there is out there that a smart author can put to use. My problem is that audiences and editors seem to be showing a marked preference for slick and silly crap over historically- and theoretically-grounded, intelligent fiction. More and more the money in Jewish literature seems to congregate far away from any sort of thoughtfulness or perspective. I'll admit that maybe this is just the same old pessimism that's always around in literary circles, but sometimes I can't help but feel it's getting worse. This week's embarassing example: Nextbook, probably the best funded (and often the most intelligent) Jewish publication on the market at the moment, can't even figure out whether the great A. M. Klein is a man or a woman (check their homepage, about halfway down in the digest section). To me, that's just pathetic.

That is pathetic, that Nextbook of all publications would get Klein's gender wrong. I suspect it's because he was Canadian. After all, Canadian literature (Jewish or otherwise) is obviously of no significance internationally. All we ignorant canucks do is write about our snow and igloos and end every sentence with "eh." No sense even considering a Canadian author for a Nobel price in literature or a similar international honour; we're not American, European, or Third World enough to cut it in the literary community. Eh? :-p

Look, I'm not saying Dara Horn's the best thing that's ever happened to literature, and she certainly has her limitations (I'd agree that her characterization is lacking, and her prose is often pretty wooden, too)... but what I wrote is that she's an example of the breadth of material there is for a young Jewish writer to draw from, provided he/she is smart enough. Horn is a fluent speaker of Yiddish and Hebrew, understands the history of Yiddish-speaking Jews in America and Eastern Europe, and makes some valiant attempts to share that knowledge with her readers (most of whom I assume are too lazy to spend the time it takes to learn to read Yiddish). If you actually read her latest novel, you'll see that she's not pro-Chagall; her whole point is that it's one of the tragedies of the 20th century that Yiddish writers like Der Nister get forgotten while idiots like Chagall get rich and famous. I agree with you that it's unfortunate that the only way she can find to package this valuable stuff is in unconvincing and artificial narratives, at least so far. But if you want something other than "easily digestible dipshit nuggets of mythological jewish culture," you're going to need people, like Horn, who have spent the time to read through the archives in Yiddish and other languages, because the real thing isn't available in anthologies or in translation. Shaping that knowledge and perspective into lasting art is the next step, and it ain't easy; but at least Horn's giving it a real shot. That's more than can be said for a lot of the navel-gazing idiots with book deals.

I don't think every writer wants to be edgy -- I think most of us just want to tell good stories that cause people to feel something. When I sit down to write a new story or novel -- or when I'm awake at night pondering either -- the last thing that comes to mind is how far I can push the threshold of things. And maybe the result is something edgy or different or surreal anyway, or maybe it all ends up as terrible awful crap, but that's for some critic to decide, not for me to go in search of. I think as soon as someone starts trying to find an edge the result, more typically, is that the work comes off feeling inauthentic. We write what we write and if there's some kind of emotional truth behind, if there's some kind of empathetic response that readers get, well great. But trying to be edgy? Forget it -- I'm happy to just write what presents itself to me. In terms of Jewish writers, when you look at someone like Aimee Bender, for instance, you have someone who does not write about the Jewish experience in general but whose writing is clearly occupying a different state than most. Does her religion or culture play a role in that? Should it? Or what about Jonathan Goldstein's debut, Lenny Bruce Is Dead. It does ponder judaism and suburbia and does so in a stream of consciousness way that is certainly aside the norm -- edgy even -- but, having read the book, I can tell you that what is edgy and odd can also be confusing and difficult.

Finally, I'm not of the belief that Jewish writers need to do anything or that all of our works must somehow reflect our cultural or religious backgrounds. Writing what you know is boring and redundant. I'd rather write what I don't know, exploring worlds that aren't filled with kugel and a firm place in the upper middle class. It's not incumbent on Jewish authors to do anything but write their books and stories. It's not up to Steve Almond or Sam Lypsyte or Bernard Cooper or Marge Piercy or Scott Turow or me to constantly present a miror to our culture for the world to relish. It's fiction, after all. Who can tell the tale, then? Everyone who is already doing it. It is not a proprietary right..  

even if there was a collectively agreed-upon burgeoning cultural truth happening at this very moment -- which there isn't -- it'd be ridiculous to sit down and try to capture it in fiction.  the best any writer hopes for is, as tod points out, a good story, told well and convincingly, about the precise characters who comprise it.  if a larger, edgier, more universal story gets told in the process, great! another thing hal ignores (and a lot of us tend to forget) is that when roth was first published (in fact, for at least his first three or four books and even well up through Portnoy), much of american jewry DESPISED him.  rabbis sermonized about how awful roth was.  he was demonized, boycotted, spat upon.  difficult truths about who and where we collectively are as jews, as human beings, as mortals: usually not a hit at your mom's book club.

that Hal wound up writing three essays on Jewish writing. Expect to see the next two in the coming weeks. And Tod, Jonathan Goldstein's novel ends up figuring heavily in the third essay, for a lot of the reasons you mention.

Hope I'm not giving anything away. I'm really curious to see if his other two angles on the topic elicit similar responses.

This website: www.vehiculepress.com/jewishlitdebate.html And a beautiful book recently published by this company called The Rent Collector by B. Glen Rotchin. It was a finalist for the Amazon.ca/Books In Canada First Novel Award.

you dumb fucks really need to get out of new york or l a. there's a whole other world out there where every goddamn thing written above means absolutely nothing.

In theory, I like the idea of American Jewish writers claiming new territorial ground, but does edgy for the sake of edgy lead us down a path toward something like the completely horrible HEEB? I guess I'm still not clear on what Hal ultimately wants, given the present context.

where in the world does the telling of stories not matter?  i was under the impression that every society in the history of humanity had a narrative tradition.

I think Hal makes an excellent point. The Jewish success in America (and Canada too) comes at the ellision of the difference intrinsic to Judaism, the whole apartness that is central to kashrut, for example. In all the gazillions of examples of ethnic fiction about the anxieties of not fitting in, is there an example of this Jewish dilemma, of success that renders identity invisible, of negotiating the demands of history and contemporary society? And I'm not talking about radicalizing rediscovery stories or bal teshuva narratives. You've all read more than I have, so I'd appreciate the tip.

How do you come to the end of something when you never found the beginning? There really is no point to this piece. Which is not to say that "fellow young Jew-writer brethren" can't look to Niedzviecki for the appropriate glasses to wear or the best places to hobnob with published authors. But for lack of a better analogy...him writing about edge is just as informative as the book Lenny Bruce never wrote on the travails of conformity.

Less antisemitism? There is more now - much more, I think Jews are hiding their heads in the sand if they don't see it. The Passion would have never made it, if the black people were always shown in a group with Satan in the foreground , or demon faces were superimposed over black children's faces - but this is how the Jews were portrayed, yet it was scooped up by the Christian right, and sold in Best Buy with a free coke. Will people boycott Gibson's new movie in protest of his antisemitism? - I doubt it. I think the writer is living in a hole, maybe he associates only with people who are not antisemitic and has not been reading the newspapers lately.

As someone just finally making time to read fiction again, I am finding the above interesting and enlightening, but I must confess that I am quite fed up with hepcats sneering at the suburban experience -- sorry to be sensitive, but it's done to death, quite a turn-off, and wrong in so many ways.

In some ways maybe Hal is right.  In the world of New York Times readers who eat brioche french toast for brunch on weekends, it's getting pretty difficult for a Jewish writer to find a way to be shocking.  However, in the Jewish world, it's all too easy to be shocking.  I think we can all readily identify which sacred cows are ripe for the tipping.  From my own experience, I'm continually surprised that anyone finds what I say or write shocking or controversial, though they often do.
Elisa brings up a good point when she asks if it's necessary to be shocking or "edgy" if you want to be literary.  Maybe it is necessary, but only if the way in which a writer shocks his or her reader is with the truth, not necessarily the trash.  The world of violence, kinky sex, drug abuse, tattoos, shit, racism, etc. can be as false as store-bought apple pie or Laura Bush's sunny smile for the TV cameras.  Yes, there are times when I need my nose rubbed in life's miseries.  And then there are other times, for example our current one, in which I could use a little reminder that despite President Bush, the war in Iraq, the threat of climate change, etc., etc., to be alive and to hope and to love is a sacred privilege.  Now that's shocking.
Finally, I don't see how Gary Shteyngart writes about nothing.  Have you read Absurdistan?  It's about nothing less than the current politcal and economic order of our planet.  That's not nothing.