This dissertation examines how twentieth-century Jewish American writers conceive of the world and of their place, as Jews, in its complex of audiences. My research maps the ways in which Jewish American writers traversed political and linguistic boundaries to join transnational networks: the anthologies and canons of world literature, international modernisms, and global literary economies. During the twentieth century, the American literary market began to reflect the new realities of globalization, through the success of translated best sellers, the rise in popularity of immigrant literatures, and the growing prominence of modernist movements. This dissertation traces how four Jewish American writers – Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, and Isaac Bashevis Singer in Yiddish and Saul Bellow in English – negotiated the intertwined and evolving legacies of these new forms of world literature from the 1930s to the 1970s. The first two chapters of the dissertation examine the status of Yiddish literature on the world stage during the interwar period, focusing on Sholem Asch and Jacob Glatstein as two opposing models of world-writing. Asch was a bestselling novelist in Yiddish and English and a believer in the reconciliation of Christian and Jewish traditions through world literature and translation. Glatstein proposed an opposite project: rejecting translation altogether, he hoped for an alternative, modernist form of world literature that valued the very untranslatability of Yiddish literature. The third and fourth chapters focus on two postwar models, the Nobel Prize winners Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow. In the shadow of the Holocaust, Bashevis Singer saw the translation of his writing from Yiddish into English as a way to preserve and universalize a lost Eastern European civilization, especially as it was reflected in the pseudo-autobiographical accounts he produced of his own past. Bellow, an heir to the traditions of Yiddish literature but at home in English as an American novelist, also saw Jewishness as an integral yet undetermined part of his personal, and paradoxically universal, imaginative project. Both postwar authors harbored universal ambitions to be accepted in world literature, but their works were also haunted by the unassimilable traumas of the Holocaust and the inevitable compromises of transcultural exchange. The models gathered in this project enable an outline of the strategies and possibilities of world literature during the twentieth century while also illustrating the limitations of the very idea of world literature. However, despite the global circulation of their work and despite their having written extensively on the questions of translation and audience, the writers considered in this project have rarely been studied in conjunction with the concept of world literature. While there has been recent interest among scholars in a transnational American Literature and a renewed focus on world literature in Comparative Literature, there is still a lack of scholarship on how writers from ethnic enclaves confront the global dimensions of the literary marketplace. By analyzing how Jewish American writing can act as a supplement to transnational literary systems, I seek to challenge normative conceptions of world literature. Jewish American writing comprises a collection of texts that strive for success on the global market and seek recognition as universal literary objects; but these texts simultaneously remain untranslatable, unhinge networks, and can be read against their own global ambitions. This project also attempts to expand contemporary scholarship on Jewish writing beyond a focus on the marginal status of Jewish literatures. Rather than locate Jewish writing on the peripheries of world literature, this dissertation tracks the undecidability of modern Jewish writing, the complex ways in which modern Jewish writing, in multiple languages, translated and untranslated, negotiates its inevitable global contexts.