North American Jewish novels of the mid-twentieth century were largely concerned with explorations of identity and in particular with tensions between secular society and Jewish tradition. A number of high-profile writers appeared to have set themselves in opposition to their Jewish heritage. In the eyes of many, authors such as Chaim Potok (1929–2002), Saul Bellow (1915–2005), and especially Philip Roth (1933–) appeared to be committed to the demystification of Judaism and the deconstruction of Jewish life, revealing it warts and all and emphasising its disoriented secularism. Although some interpreted this phenomenon as an attempt to normalise the Jewish people, many others believed that they went too far in undermining Jewish values. One literary critic recalled that the ‘Jewish book-buying public were shocked and hurt to find [Jewish] writers representing their institutions as shams, their communities suffused with pettiness, spite, lust, hypocrisy, and pretence’. Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism and himself highly critical of unreflective loyalty towards Jewish tradition, believed that the impact of North American Jewish literature had had a highly detrimental effect on Jewish life in North America in general:

Certainly, many works of literature published in the decades around the midcentury were concerned to formulate North American Jewish cultural identity in painfully secular terms.