Salinger’s Jewish dream (and identity)

The Gothamist reports that New York’s Morgan Library will soon exhibit eleven J.D. Salinger letters, including one in which he  fantasized about visiting Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in “the faint hope that some kindly old Hasid from the eighteenth century would invite him home for matzoh ball soup or a cup of tea.”

This should put an end to the silly comments debating the legal status of Salinger’s Jewishness that were posted to an excellent Tablet article on Salinger.

Here’s the situation for Salinger and very nearly every other Jew today,

“For the Jew in the modern world Jewishness forms only a portion of his total identity. By calling himself a Jew he expresses only one of his multiple loyalties. And yet external pressures and internal attachments combine to make him often more aware of this identification than of any other.” (opening sentences from The Origins of the Modern Jew by Michael A. Meyer)