Irish writer Frank O'Connor said, "the literature of Jews is the literature of townsmen, and the greatest Jew of all was James Joyce." It cannot be coincidental that the great Modernist novelists were so deeply involved with Jewish themes and subjects: Marcel Proust was a Jew, as was Franz Kafka ("within us all it still lives," he said of the former ghettoes), while Thomas Mann wrote the greatest Jewish novel of the twentieth century, Joseph and His Brothers. We’ll discuss Modernism as the most significant development in the arts in the twentieth century, with illustrations of the roles played in it by Jews as both artists and as subjects.
