Willy Loman and Postwar Jewish Insecurity

Abstract

Willy Loman’s cryptic Jewish identity, recognizable but absent, has long been considered an act of ethnic betrayal, evidence of Arthur Miller’s inauthenticity as a Jewish writer. However, as scholars recently have explored the undercurrent of anxiety running beneath the surface of postwar Jewish life, Willy’s feelings of rootlessness, and his worries over American success, seem now particularly “Jewish.” Arguing that Willy Loman represents a postwar Jewish-American identity crisis, not a suppressed Jewish essence, the article analyzes the reception of Death of a Salesman (1949) in the Jewish press, from the pulpit, and within the synagogue community. Throughout, Willy’s preoccupation with acceptance and his eventual self-destruction resonate uncomfortably with the nightmare of European catastrophe that American Jews were then processing. In this context, the article claims that Biff’s attempt to counter his father’s world of selling by laboring in Texas, an action usually interpreted through myths of the American West, may have been read by Jewish Salesman audiences through a discourse of postwar Zionism they knew well: namely, the resettlement of Holocaust refugees in the land of Israel.