Leslie Fiedler's The Last Jew in America (1966), the first [and title novella] of three novellas in a single collection, is set in the small Western college town of Lewis and Clark City, Montana. But the story, in the tradition of the oft-touted (and occasionally scorned) college novel goes beyond narrow academic concerns. It deals with the efforts of one Jacob Moscowitz … to bring together those Jews in the community … in order to reawaken whatever sense of Jewish identity still remains in their malnourished souls. (p. 412)

Jacob had originally moved West to convert the natives to socialism. But the effort had been a dismal failure; the Party could hardly have made a worse choice, either in Jacob Moscowitz the Old World Jew with the Yiddish accent, or the mythic "Western" ambience they have placed him into. The situation only serves to make more apparent the isolation Jacob finds himself in…. Years later Jacob will transform (or convert) this earlier mission into a more viable quest: to get together a minyan, or quorum, made up of half-or fully assimilated Jewish professors at the local university.

Under these conditions, the old socialist-agnostic seems to have found his way back to his own roots—i.e., to urge (or egg) on his fallen-away fellows-Jews into making their ritual calls on the dying Louis Himmelfarb on the holiest day of the Jewish year, the Day of Atonement. Thus Jacob creates for them, as well as for himself, an opportunity to come to terms with the ethical roots they seem to have lost in their search for the more secular "humanistic values." (p. 413)

Although Jacob's secular religion is (or perhaps was) socialism, his Jewishness runs deeper than the "humanist" commitments of his semi-Jewish acquaintances on campus and the sprinkling of Jews in the town's business community. Thus this story concerns itself far more with the change that has come over Jacob since his own early radicalism than the change he attempts—with some dubious success—to make among his fellow Jews…. The West, then, not only erodes plains, mountains, and canyons with its dry, singing winds, its brief but devastating thunderstorms, its flash floods; it also erodes identity; by its bigness it makes the individual, especially a Jew, smaller. But against this erosion of identity, Jacob, "the last Jew in America"—there is the illusion he is just that—will fight, in spite of his threadbare socialism. (pp. 414-15)

Irony of it all is that Jacob, the old (or former?) socialist-agnostic now looks upon his fellow Jews of the University community, those half-Jewish, not quite assimilated professors, as apostates.

In keeping with his ability for socialist (and American) adaptation, Jacob makes up his own version of the prayer for the Day of Atonement. What comes out is a mish-mash of socially conscious harangue and a plea for forgiveness for his fallen-away brothers on the faculty. (pp. 415-16)

Thus, we can say that Jacob has transformed his original mission from convert-maker to secular messianism to something which, if not conventionally religious, points to religious directions. How successful his efforts prove in making his academic co-religionists regain their religious conscience is not really of great moment; what matters is the effect on Jacob himself.

In the second story [The Last Wasp in the World], a poet named Vincent Hazelbaker, or Vin as he is called by close associates, has come from Lewis and Clark City to the East. Just as Jacob Moscowitz has moved West to fulfill a task of redemption, so Vin has gone East to do some redeeming himself. He has not simply gone there to "make it" but to show the Eastern Jewish establishment—and perhaps himself—the "way." This creates a neat switch on the prototypal Christian missionary (or savior) to the Jews. But it will be through his poetry that Vin will attempt to redeem these materialists. What we get is an ironic turn-about, a characterological volte-face, with Jake Moscowitz turning into the last Jew in the spatially limitless West while Vin becomes the last WASP in the more hermetically limited Eastern ambience of an urban Jewish wedding. (pp. 416-17)

Like Jacob in the first of the novellas, Vin is a stranger, cut off from his community. But where Jacob Moscowitz had attempted to exchange a more distant Jewish community for a later WASPy working class ghetto—and failed in the process—Vin is cut off from his community by his status as poet. (p. 418)

Toward the end of the story, Vin, in a memory flashback, returns to Lewis and Clark, only to find that most of the students at the University—even the married girl he'd once had an affair with—are now all Jewish. They have not even left him the whiff of the myth. And Vin finds himself yelling out of a motel window at passing cars with New York license plates: "Leave us our West…. Goddamn it, leave us our dreams."… Sad to say, the dream is just that—a dream; except that Vin still believes in it. For even though, as he imagines, he is finally home again, he is not at home. WASP as he is, he is trapped in the role of "Jewish" poet who finds that even he cannot go home again. The world, the town, he himself—all have changed. The West has "moved East"—and neither the dream nor the myth which nourished it is left. (p. 419)

[In the third story, The First Spade in the West, black Ned York] runs a plush cocktail lounge in Lewis and Clark City, a form of integration, in spite of the alienation he shares with Jake Moscowitz, Jew, and Vincent Hazelbaker, WASP. While Ned may not be completely integrated into his community—it's doubtful whether he wants to be anyway—his bar is. (p. 420)

In spite of one weakness—the author's almost zealous obsession with demythologizing the classic West—Fiedler does manage to establish his donnée, to show us the bond that binds the three main characters of the triptych to each other. That bond, paradoxically, involves separation rather than unity—separation from the larger white Protestant establishment. For as Fiedler suggests, even such a WASP as Vin can himself be made to feel outside the pale. What of course draws Jake Moscowitz, Ned York, and Vincent Hazelbaker together in terms of their common "problem"—significantly WASP Vin, native of Lewis and Clark, is the only true exile from the town—is the town itself. Thus in this work Fiedler breaks through the stereotype to present us with a Jewish village philosopher in a Western town, a WASP poet acting more like a Jewish victim at a Jewish wedding; and a successful black entrepreneur of a bar in a not-so-Old West. All these conditions hold these three characters together; yet they also reveal a process of fragmentation of the stereotype itself in American life. Indeed, Ned York turns out to be an anti-stereotype of the black man: he comes closer to the image of the Old West bartender we are accustomed to see in Western films than to any recognizable image of the black man as he is portrayed in countless novels, even by black writers. So that we end up with a fractured, but complexly true picture of a bar where the larger part of its clientele is white, but where the proprietor is black though hardly an Uncle Tom.

Fiedler thus breaks through the stereotype at three levels—the Jewish village philosopher in a movie-set Western town, a WASP poet who is more "Jewish" than WASP, and a black man who is the owner of a bar in the West patronized by white merchants and farmers. Each could well lend himself to stereotyping—and certainly has in the past! Yet as Fiedler presents them (whether intentionally or not), they represent the very real break-up in recent years of the sterotype in American life. Each of the characters is beginning to take on some of the features of his two other ethnic counterparts: they not only do not do the expected thing, but are displayed in action in unexpected ways. The image has been displaced. That Ned York is somehow more "integrated" than some of the white misfits who frequent his bar does not necessarily say much for Ned's condition as a black man. Yet a positive point may be drawn from this mix-up: people are isolated or alienated; people are integrated or left out in the cold; men are the subject and object of man's inhumanity. Men are important rather than man in the abstract.

Finally, all three characters—the Jew, the WASP, the Black—have been placed in locations far from their "natural" environs. Yet they still continue to search for a way home—to a geography, a way of life, a culture, which once might have existed for them, but which forever seems to elude them. (pp. 420-21)