A notable strength of this new work is that it is not content to deal only in malevolent representations of Jews in decadent literature and art, a typical approach, for example, in the work of the fiercely assiduous scholar Sander Gilman. For Nochlin, however, Portraits à la Bourse was not ostentatiously antisemitic but subtly so, and thus more pernicious in that it was conceived as a "work of art" that, either unconsciously or semi-consciously, drew from "the same polluted source" of available antisemitic visual stereotypes as the era's crude antisemitic caricatures.2 Yet this ingenious composition, at once intimate and detached, might have served as the occasion to explore whether "decadent art" can succeed aesthetically even as it fails in ethical terms. Freedman is on firmer ground when discussing Jewish currents in À la recherche du temps perdu and Proust's attitude to his Jewish heritage (although Robert Alter recently has persuasively questioned the relevance of Proust's Jewish background to his writing.) One of the strongest chapters in The Jewish Decadence concerns the philosophical influence of Arthur Schopenhauer on the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow, perhaps because Freedman here avoids a tendency towards cataloging various examples of Jewish representations in favor of an extended, sharply discerning discussion of modern Jewish ideas. Here "decadent thought" signifies a postwar pessimism about human endeavors that often risks nihilism, a threat everywhere in Singer's fiction, especially his post-Holocaust novel-as-sex farce, Enemies: A Love Story (1972), whose philandering, middle-aged intellectual hero escapes Europe for life as a non-believing, assimilated hedonist in America, and in Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), whose Holocaust-survivor protagonist, afflicted with terrible memories, is repelled by evidence of his new country's perpetual promise of endless satiation (moon launches, liberated