In today’s popular imagination, American Jews and guns, or violence, don’t go together. Fighting is seen as the business of Israeli Jews. Adam Kirsch reviews two novels and a collection of short stories that with varying success portray gun-wielding Jews. About the last, Jewish Noir, he writes:
These stories vary widely in quality and interest, but they have in common a certain aroma of wish-fulfillment. If the violence in Jewish Noir is frequently tongue-in-cheek, that is because violence is for most of these writers something purely imaginary and cinematic—more [Quentin] Tarantino than [Isaac] Babel. In the absence of actual violent anti-Semitism, of the kind that terrorized Jews for centuries, it is easy for American Jews to enjoy dreaming about beating up, stabbing, or shooting fantasy anti-Semites. There is a tendency in American Jewish literature to react against a legacy of Jewish passivity—in particular, against the image of Jews [supposedly] going “like sheep to the slaughter” in the Holocaust—by glamorizing violence. But the glamorizing of violence is a habit of comfortable civilians, not of actual soldiers—or actual victims.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/193937/jews-with-guns