The single most consistent topic in American Jewish fiction is exogamy—that is, marriage outside the faith. As Leslie Fiedler noticed back in the 1950s, it is not surprising that the American Jewish novel “must be a problem novel, and its essential problems must be identity and assimilation. . . . What is unexpected is that these problems be posed in terms of sexual symbols. . . . it is in the role of passionate lover that the American-Jewish novelist sees himself . . . and the community with which he seeks to unite himself he sees as the  shikse [non-Jewish girl].” There’s just one necessary emendation to Fiedler’s perspicacious insight: Jewish women novelists
have been just as likely as their male counterparts to write stories of exogamy, and those books usually allegorize the Jewish community as a desirable Jewish woman and the American community as a pursuing sheygets [non-Jewish man]—which puts a different spin on what Fiedler calls “assimilation,” one which helps to complicate his terms: when Jews and Americans come together to produce a new cultural hybrid, who’s assimilating whom, exactly?