Moderated by Alana Newhouse, the arts editor of the Forward, the panel of four Jewish writers addressed the question of what it means to be a Jewish writer, whether we even consider ourselves Jewish writers, and how being Jewish affects and inflects our writing. For me, this is a hard question to answer. I don't think of myself as Jewish or as anything in particular when I sit down to write. Of course I am a lot of things--Jewish, male, American, the husband of a wife, the father of two daughters, the son of two parents, one of them quite elderly, and on and on--and these things are so much a part of me that it's not a matter of thinking about them. They are me; they make me who I am. Being Jewish on some level probably affects everything I do, but I don't see it as a question of being conscious of being Jewish as I do those things.

I was raised in an observant Jewish home, and one of the things I said last night during the panel is that, as a novelist, I am very interested in time, and perhaps that grows out of my relationship to time when I was a child. I associated time with the start of the sabbath on Friday evening and the end of it on Saturday night, the way the sabbath is timed down to the minute, changing over the course of the year as the time of sundown changes. Apparently, when I was six or seven and it was the night we switched to Daylight Saving Time, I said to my parents, "Do non-Jews also switch their clocks?" But is a concern with time a singularly Jewish phenomenon? Is every writer who is interested in time therefore a Jewish writer?

There was a lot of talk on the panel about whether Jews are outsiders or insiders, how Jewish literature has changed over time, and, as would be expected, we didn't come to a consensus. I myself am suspicious of measuring Jewish writing and Jewish writers by the Jewish content of their novels. My first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, was very directly a novel about Jewish identity. Matrimony, though it has some material about Jewish identity, is less directly about that subject. But is it a less Jewish novel? I'm not convinced it is. There's an intermarriage in Swimming Across the Hudson, and there's an intermarriage in Matrimony. In the first book it's the cause of considerable anguish and discussion, and in the second book it's not even remarked upon. That's not because I forgot to do so, nor is it because I've become a different kind of Jew--"less" Jewish than I was when I wrote the first book. No, I was writing about different kinds of Jews and different kinds of gentiles in the two books. Every character, every novel is different, and the writer must take what comes to him and run with it; above all, he must be true to his characters. That, to my mind, is the fiction writer's principal task.