I think worth noting also Dr. Harap's readiness to consider women writers
and women characters a major factor in the web of literary expression
documenting American-Jewish life. It is impressive to see him calling our
attention to Clara Yavner in Abraham Cahan 1905 novel The White Terror
and the Red; Clara, he observes, "is among the distinctly new figures . . . in
all American fiction" and is "of special interest because she anticipates the
new place of the Jewish woman in radical fiction of the first decades of the
century -- the courageous, effective, able Jewish woman labor organizer
and socialist." Dr. Harap notes with approval James Oppenheim's incor-
poration into his 1911 novel The Nine-Tenths of a "recognition that the
waistmakers' strike in 1911 had brought forward perhaps for the first time
in the United States the 'New Woman,' the active and heroic participant in
labor struggles and the struggle for a better world." The illumination of
Jewish women by non-Jewish writers is not overlooked. He takes into ac-
count, for instance, Albert Edwards (né Arthur Bullard), who in 1913 pub-
lished Comrade Yetta, a novel about Jewish radicalism, and speculated
about Jewish "single-mindedness and consistency of purpose" in contrast
to "Anglo-Saxon . . . compromise and confused issues."

In general, it may be said, Dr. Harap is fully and commendably alive to
the documentary potential, the documentary implications, of fiction by non-
Jewish writers. He is as much interested in Judeophobic writers like Frank
Norris, Owen Wister, Edith Wharton, Jack London, and David Graham
Phillips as he is in more sympathetic fictionists like Mark Twain, William
Dean Howells, O. Henry, Thomas Nelson Page, and Dorothy Canfield
Fisher. He understands that, "to achieve a comprehensive picture of the
status of the Jew in our literature . . . it is not enough to study how the Jewish
writer regarded his own Jewishness." He wants us also to "look at the way
. . . non-Jewish writers depicted the Jew and met the challenge of anti-Sem-
itism." As Dr. Harap points out, "the responses varied widely."

Readers may rely on Dr. Harap for formidable learning, and also, it is a
pleasure to add, for a most accessible expository style. It is an honor to
help bring these volumes to print; they will in time to come, I am confident,
be recognized for the classics they are.

Jacob Rader Marcus
American Jewish Archives
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
Cincinnati, Ohio

-xii-