CONCEPTIONS OF IDOLATRY AND SECULAR ART IN CHAIM POTOK'S ASHER LEV NOVELS

This article analyses changing perceptions regarding idolatry and secular art in two major Jewish-American novels: Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev (1972) and The Gift of Asher Lev (1990). The analysis focuses on the ways in which Potok subverts, recasts, and reinterprets several key tropes from the intertextual reservoir of Judaic culture, along the lines of emphatically American concerns, in order to transform traditionally discursive rejections of visual art into affirmative themes for creative endeavours and spiritual renewal in Jewish-American life. In particular, this study demonstrates how the major didactic component in Potok's re-envisioning of Judaism's long-standing association of the visual arts with idolatry stems from the author's advocacy of the tenets of the American branch of Conservative Judaism, according to which the best aspects of modern secular culture are to be integrated with a non-literalist view toward conventional religious principles.