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Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for thefirst time became the popular literary representatives of what it meantto be a soldier and what it meant to be an American. Revisitingbest-selling works ranging from Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead to Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and uncovering a range of unknown archival material, Leah Garrett shows how Jewish writers used the theme of World War II to reshape theAmerican public's ideas about war, the Holocaust, and the role of Jewsin postwar life. In contrast to most previous war fiction these new"Jewish" war novels were often ironic, funny, and irreverent and soughtto teach the reading public broader lessons about liberalism,masculinity, and pluralism.