When God Is Your Favorite Writer

It was during the presidential election of 2000 that I finally discovered what kind of Jew I was. Asked to name his favorite political philosopher, George W. Bush thought a moment, and then replied "Jesus." An uproarious laugh erupted in my living room, as it did in living rooms across the Democratic swaths of the country –we would continue laughing for weeks, egged on by the media – but I felt my first kinship with the candidate. I thought to myself, "What's so funny about that? My favorite author is God." That was when I first struck on the idea of a writerly Jew.

Though the term 'writerly Jew' is clearly just the old familiar 'Jewish writer' with the words reversed, a writerly Jew is something altogether different from a Jewish writer; 'writerly Jew' is not a literary category at all. A writerly Jew is simply someone whose entire sense of herself as Jewish consists in stories. When a writerly Jew thinks of her Jewishness she thinks of these stories, and when she thinks of these stories she feels very Jewish.