BOOKS
321
the question ofpostmodernism. For what is postmodernism in our present–
day culture but a concerted attack upon hierarchy, an attempted shattering of
the higMow distinctions that have been applied to genres and cultural prod–
ucts? Andy Warhol, Robert Venturi, Philip Glass, Don DeLillo, Thomas
Pynchon, Robert Wilson, and a throng of others have in the last decades
worked to sabotage the very alignments that Levine has been tracking so
carefully. To conclude such a stimulating excursus with thoughts about the
present state of things while ignoring this latest current-shift is to deprive
oneself- and one's readers - of resolution. Levine has a fine eye for cultural
nuance and for the sweep oflarger historical dynamics. He should look more
searchingly at the present to see how his saga continues.
SVEN
BIRKERTS
A
CONVERSION
LOVESONG: BECOMING AJEW. By Julius Lester.
Henry Holt and Co. $17.95.
After Sammy Davis, Jr., Julius Lester is probably the most fa–
mous black Jew in America. The reference to the song-and-dance man is not
meant disrespectfully; Lester himself invites the connection ("I wish I knew
another convert, a black one, but I don't know Sammy Davis"). A man of
many parts, Lester was a blues singer (with two albums of original songs to
his credit) and a New York City radio personality (host of "The Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution") before he joined the University of Mas–
sachusetts faculty in 1971. He has since become the only professor to win
all
three of that school's teaching awards. In addition to publishing collections
of poetry and black folktales, Lester files the occasional column of polemic
journalism; an article in
The New Republic
criticized Jesse Jackson'S
"messianism" and the "almost mass hysteria surrounding the Jackson cam–
paign" in 1988. An inveterate controversialist, Lester writes with a convic–
tion of his own singularity and , more important, a sure-fire instinct for the
jugular. Yet Lester's texts and his teachings are somehow ofless moment
than the spectacle of the self he has fashioned to accommodate the
contradictions in his nature. He is, I imagine, unique in having contrived a
way to internalize the conflict between blacks and Jews by being able to ex–
perience the rival claims of both sides. It's almost as if his career as a
controversialist were either an allegory or a parable of this condition.
