This collection of lectures and articles was occasioned by the author's 70th birthday and his many decades of teaching in the English departments at the University of Montana and at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he is the self-proclaimed "apostle to the gentiles." The book explores the often conflicting paradox of being a Jew in America, reexamining literary classics within a Jewish context. Noting that for many years the English departments of American universities were closed to Jewish Americans as teachers, the book points out that eventually many Jewish American professors taught a new generation of students to read in new ways classic American writers like Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman, as well as canonical modernists like Hemingway and Faulkner. The 12 essays in the collection are entitled: "The Roots of Anti-Semitism: A View from Italy"; "Bloom or Joyce, Or Jokey for Jacob"; "Joyce and Jewish Consciousness"; "The Christian-ness of the Jewish-American Writer"; "Isaac Bashevis Singer, Or The American-ness of the American-Jewish Writer"; "Why Is the Grail Knight Jewish? A Passover Meditation"; "Styron's Choice"; "Going for the Long Ball"; "Growing Up Post-Jewish"; "The Many Names of S. Levin: An Essay in Genre Criticism"; "A Meditation on the Book of Job"; and "In Every Generation: A Meditation on the Two Holocausts." (NKA)