As literacy rates have dropped in the United States, antisemitism has risen. This is tragic, as probably more than any other people, Jews were leaders in American publishing over the course of the 20th century. They helped make America a literate country. Literate people don’t fall for poisonous ideas.
In the forthcoming book Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, author Gayle Feldman tells the story of the man who founded Random House. Feldman makes the case that the Jews who entered publishing in America in the 20th century loved the U.S. and the bedrock ideas of Western philosophy, and in passing that love onto the culture, made America a freer, more prosperous, and stronger country. Books helped inoculate us against totalitarianism and prejudice.
In 1925, Cerf and his colleague Donald S. Klopfer purchased the rights to the Modern Library, a collection of Western classics that included The Mayor of Casterbridge, the poems of John Milton, Plato’s works, and the Bible. In 1927, the two men began publishing general trade books that they had selected at random, thus the name Random House. Cerf’s list would eventually include James Michener, William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, Dr. Seuss, and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. In 1933, Cerf won United States v. One Book Called Ulysses and became the first in the United States to publish James Joyce’s unabridged Ulysses.
MAGAZINE: PRAISE JESUS, BE FOND OF JEWS
As book historian Henry Toledano once put it, “Modern Library books were the only inexpensive editions of serious literary works that were widely distributed and readily available in bookstores and major department stores throughout the United States prior to the advent of quality paperbacks in 1953. For most readers of serious books, the Modern Library was the most tangible representation of the literary canon in the American cultural marketplace.”
Bennett 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, cofounder of the Literary Guild and Viking Press Harold Guinzburg, Harry Scherman, and Robert Haas, who, with Scherman, established the Book-of-the-Month Club. “Although many wanted to fit in,” Feldman notes, “they also wanted to be noticed.”
Feldman adds 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.”
Perhaps the greatest Jewish author of the 20th Century was Chicago’s Saul Bellow, winner of every major literary award and the author of masterpieces such as Herzog and The Adventures of Augie March. Bellow’s books are deeply, profoundly American and, as with many works of genius, hard to simplify. His son Adam Bellow — a friend and my own publisher — understands how Jews in publishing spread literacy and love of America even as they were often vilified.
“Jews found their way into publishing beginning in the early 20th century as part of a wider push into American professional life,” Adam says. “But no one goes into the book business in order to get rich, and publishing was then a sleepy backwater traditionally considered a gentleman’s profession. Jews brought to publishing new verve and marketing savvy, what you might call a garment center mentality combined with a deep reverence for high culture and the liberal values that are in effect a secular legacy of our Judeo-Christian heritage.”
Adam notes that “while many Jews went into publishing, they didn’t do so as Jews per se but as proponents of literacy, culture, intellectualism and universal human rights. Thus Alfred A. Knopf, who started his company in 1915, never published Jewish books but was known instead as a literary publisher who introduced American readers to the works of great European authors, just as Leonard Bernstein later introduced several generations of young Americans to classical music.”
RESTORING AMERICA: THE RIGHT MUST OFFER YOUNG CONSERVATIVES SOMETHING BETTER THAN HATE
Adam explains the “very Jewish impulse, one that you might say combines gate crashing with high-minded cultural aspiration. When my father started out as a writer in the 30s he was told that the novel was an English art form and a Jew couldn’t write one properly. He responded by breaking through in The Adventures of Augie March with a streetwise literary voice that changed the way novels are written.”
Indeed, reading Saul Bellow was a life-changing experience for me in college. My father, a journalist, sent me to Bellow when I was struggling with Joyce. “Bellow is like Joyce,” my father said, “except he’s a real American.”
