The New Diaspora

The New Diaspora, edited by Victoria Aarons, Avinoam J. Patt and Mark Shechner, is only the latest and largest of a series of anthologies that make a strong claim for these recent writers, most of them more unambiguously comfortable in their Jewishness than were their predecessors.

~Morris Dickstein, The Times Literary Supplement

This is an exciting, adventurous anthology of contemporary American Jewish fiction with an excellent introduction by the editors. It will redefine the field—radically revising and expanding the conventional parameters of the genre—and will undoubtedly find a large audience.

~David Brauner, reader in English and American literature at the University of Reading

This substantial, engaging anthology brings together almost 40 winners of the Wallant Awards for Jewish short stories,
spanning several decades. The title, referring to a "new" Diaspora—in this case the US and Canada—concerns the
current situation in which Jews now move about the world, sometimes at will and sometimes in response to familiar
oppressions. This dispersal means that Jewish writers will adapt and blend their old cultures with the new, North
American one, and in modern ways. The authors included represent, and provide fresh interpretations of, the contemporary Jewish experience. Though these stories address the problematics of what is "Jewish" in this age of assimilation, they do not provide easy answers, thus making this good reading and good literature.

~R. Shapiro, Choice

The New Diaspora is an ambitious project, bringing together thirty-six short stories about Jewish life in a massive collection featuring some of America’s best Jewish writers. There’s a variety of excellent writing here, Jewish in focus but also accessible to a wider audience, with stories that hit every emotion and should interest fans of any writing style.

~Jeff Fleischer, ForeWord Reviews

This remarkable collection of 36 stories from new and established North American Jewish writers, with many originating in Cuba, South Africa, Hungary, Egypt, France, Canada, and Russia, as well as America, reflects the panoply of interests and literary forms that characterize the variety of Jewish experience today. Realism, allegory, fable, comedy, protest writing, confession, history—they're all here with perspectives as different as their styles. In this anthology, culture, history, and identities intersect and remake themselves. Not to be missed, not to be skipped. Read and remember every page.

~Ira Nadel

The New Diaspora is a superb, and much needed, volume for anyone interested in understanding the complexity, richness, and diversity of the contemporary Jewish literary world with its emphasis on the complexity of the Jewish historical experience itself. The editors, Victoria Aarons, Avinoam J. Patt, and Mark Shechner, all senior scholars, are administrators and judges for the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. They have performed a real service in compiling a book that is fundamentally—as they put it—'about the tradition of storytelling itself.' This work is both timely and timeless.

~Alan L. Berger