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Professor Leah Garrett joins us to discuss her book Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel for the inaugural talk in our Alan S. Brown scholar series.

Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for the first time became the popular literary representatives of what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American. Revisiting best-selling works ranging from Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and uncovering a range of unknown archival material, Leah Garrett shows how Jewish writers used the theme of World War II to reshape the American public’s ideas about war, the Holocaust, and the role of Jews in postwar life. In contrast to most previous war fiction these new “Jewish” war novels were often ironic, funny, and irreverent and sought to teach the reading public broader lessons about liberalism, masculinity, and pluralism.

Leah Garrett is Director and Professor of Jewish Studies at Hunter College.

We Are Going to Be Lucky tells the story of a first-generation Jewish American couple separated by war, captured in their own words. Lenny and Diana Miller were married just one year before America entered World War II and Lenny was sent off to train and fight. Deeply committed to social justice, and bonded to one another by love, both vowed to write to one another daily. As Lenny made his way through basic training in Mississippi to the beaches of Normandy and eventually to the Battle of the Bulge, Diana struggled financially, giving up her job as a machinist to become a mother. The couple’s extraordinary letters, preserved in their entirety, reveal and reflect the excruciating personal sacrifices endured by both soldiers at war and their young families back home. After decades of gathering dust, the couples’ words have been carefully transcribed and thoughtfully edited and annotated by Elizabeth L. Fox, Lenny and Diana’s daughter.