First, it’s important to acknowledge just how drastic the transformation was. Publishing, and US literary culture in general, was, once upon a time, viciously and openly antisemitic. While a few Jews had already succeeded as writers and in other culture industries, it is 1912—when Alfred Knopf got a job with the accounting department of Doubleday, Page, & Company—that is generally recognized as the first time an American Jew was offered employment by a major US publishing house.
Anti-Jewish discrimination didn’t disappear then. But, over the half century that followed, American Jews flourished in the book business. They founded Random House (later Penguin Random House) and Simon & Schuster, the two mammoth companies whose merger was recently stymied by the government. They also founded Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; Boni & Liveright; Viking; Pantheon; Farrar, Straus and Company; Basic Books; Grove Press; and many others.
Along with founding their own firms, around midcentury Jews also began to be hired, and began rising to leadership positions, at the major US publishing houses founded by non-Jews in the 19th century, like Doubleday, Harper, and Wiley. Jews were instrumental in innovations like the Book-of-the-Month Club and the popularization of mass-market and trade paperbacks. In the postwar decades, elite English departments finally began to hire them, and by the 1970s one estimate suggested that 13 percent of all English professors at the leading American universities were Jewish. Jews were even more conspicuous among the editors and critics whose reviews helped books get attention. There wasn’t ever an actual “Jewish literary mafia,” but it’s true that by the 1970s discrimination against Jews in US literary culture had become a thing of the past. Since then, it’s difficult to imagine a person being denied any role in any US publishing company, from the stockroom to the boardroom, because of their Jewishness.
This transformation of the field seems to have been permanent, too: later generations of American Jews have continued to thrive in publishing. As I finished research for my book on the subject a couple of years ago, I took a look around and found that people of Jewish heritage were at that time serving as the editors of the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, Poetry, the Paris Review, n+1, and Electric Literature; as the publishers, or top editors, of Simon & Schuster, Random House, Penguin, W. W. Norton, Akashic Books, Other Press, and Graywolf; and as the leaders at industry players like Kirkus. That’s not even close to a comprehensive list.
How can we explain this wholesale eradication of antisemitic prejudice in the publishing industry, when other forms of exclusion, like structural racism and patriarchy, have been so resilient in so many areas of American life?