Fagin, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech: The Postwar Reckoning with Literary Antisemitism

Abstract: The contemporary questioning of literary canons has a precedent in the limited moral reckoning with American antisemitism that occurred during the 1940s against the backdrop of Nazi Germany and its aftermath. The late 1940s American culture of anti-antisemitism included a literary component as the Holocaust created a heightened awareness of antisemitism that led critics and scholars to address a range of antisemitic portrayals that had once seemed benign or trivial but took on a more ominous cast in the shadow of Nazi Germany. This postwar logic suggested that failure to intervene in less violent forms of antisemitism could lead to genocidal tragedy. During the late 1940s and 1950s, classics by Shakespeare and Dickens were reassessed by American critics and scholars, as well as 1920s novels, including those by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But it was the 1948 cinematic remake of the Charles Dickens’s classic, Oliver Twist by the British filmmaker Arthur Rank—and the attention it garnered around the globe—that provided a touchstone for how Jews and other sympathetic readers responded to literary antisemitism in the immediate postwar era.