An argument can be made that the history of Jewish American literature begins on July 6, 1854, when the first issue of Isaac Mayer Wise’s weekly The Israelite rolled off the presses of Dr. Charles F. Schmidt & Co., in Cincinnati, and I’d like to elaborate that argument as an introduction to this collection of essays.1 True, I myself have argued otherwise about the origins of Jewish American literature, in this journal and elsewhere, and I don’t mean to renounce those arguments.2 But the emergence of a Jewish periodical press in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century constitutes a landmark in Jewish American literary history, a new beginning for self-conscious reckoning with what it meant to be both Jewish and American. Yes, some bits of that sort of Jewish American writing came earlier: a few poems and hymns by Penina Moise, say, and a few addresses by...

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