CHARLES REZNIKOFF IN THE MENORAH JOURNAL: CROSS-NATIONAL JUDAISM, “EXILE,” AND “ZION”

Questions of group identity, among today’s most urgent challenges, were at the heart of the Menorah Journal’s concerns over a century ago. Launched in 1915 by the Menorah Society, which was established in 1906 as a Jewish col-legiate club at Harvard, the journal’s terms of debate are our familiar ones: Jewish and American; diaspora and Zionism; antisemitism and assimilation; Judaism as race, religion, peoplehood; traditional, Reform, Reconstructiv-ist, secular Judaism. The Harvard Menorah Society became the basis for a network of Jewish college societies across America, with the journal the communicative link among them. Committed to publishing in a wide array of areas across American Jewish cultural experience, it regularly featured poetry, and was the primary format through which Charles Reznikoff published his work over many years. This article examines his work as itself committed to, and enacting, the questions to which the journal devoted itself, in a pluralist and cross-national aesthetic in which the diversity of Judaic and American experiences confront, confirm, and conflict with each other.