[maddogconservative]

Why hasn’t there been a Christian version of Mel Brooks :)

[x_plus_one]

To put it crudely, if Christianity is a fantasy religion, then Judaism is a science fiction religion

If wishes were horses then beggars would ride....

[Zuben Elgenubi]

"I cannot think of a single major fantasy writer who is Jewish, and there are only a handful of minor ones of any note."

Isaac Asimov? Gene Roddenberry?

[discostu]

Because it’s not a proselytizing religion. Jews right fantasy, what they don’t right is parables designed to bring people to the faith.

[Mr. Jeeves]

Christianity has a much more vivid memory and even appreciation of the pagan worlds which preceded it than does Judaism.

This is, of course, the answer to the author's question, coupled with the reality that most successful commercial fantasy is deeply rooted in Anglo-Saxon, English-language legends and myths. Sadly, today's fantasy genre still consists primarily of pale Tolkien clones , hearkening back to lost tales of knights and wizards and dragons and orcs and elves that are primarily - if not uniquely - English in tradition. Try to tell similar stories based on African or Mayan myths and you may earn praise from trendy, Leftist reviewers, but you'll sell about 150 copies.

Thus, if you aren't an Anglophile, you will find fantasy literature tough going. Obama probably detests it. :)

[Sudetenland]

This guy's a putz. Another self-annointed "expert" on literature and what authors really meant when they were writing about monsters;

"Tolkien especially grapples in his novels more seriously than many supposedly more sophisticated modern literary works with the evils of the twentieth century."

What a total crock of XXXX. Tolkein repeatedly attacked these attempts to impute meaning into his work . . . especially this old canard.

[throwback]

Maybe Jews don’t need to make up romantic tales because their story beats anything anyone can make up. Incredible heroes, endless tradgedy, fantastic supernatural events, it’s all in the one Book.

[parcel_of_rogues]

Although Wikipedia does not mention it I can get other google hits that indicate that Fritz Leiber was Jewish.

You can’t get any more fantasy than Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

[LexBaird]

[SunkenCiv]

As to being Jewish, Tolkien regretted that "I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people." Needless to say, C. S. Lewis wasn't Jewish either, though he did marry a Jewish convert to Anglican Christianity... Tolkien had famously converted his friend and fellow Oxford don [Lewis] from skepticism to Christianity through a series of conversations that led Lewis to the realization that "the story of Christ is simply a true myth."

[nickcarraway]

What about some Isaac Basehvis Singer?

[Tainan]

Damn...thems a lotta words just to answer a question the writer makes up his ownself.
Not too many red-neck, beer drinkin HillBilly 'writers of fantasy; either.
I smells a con-spir-a-cy.

[rmlew]

Jews have plenty of fantasy fiction, largely based on the Bible, Talmudic Stories, and Kabbalah. We forget just how much literature is extrapolation of biblical stories. (Heck, I would argue that 1/2 of Rabbinic exegesis is fantasy playing around with numeroulogy and non-canonical source material. There are also dozens of non-Canonical biblical books known as the Apocrypha. ) Although we have been in exile for centuries, we have a tribal lore. We have Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Deborah, Saul, and David.

European Christians use biblical allegory mixed with local history or pre-christian themes to create a sense of rootedness. This is largely necessary since Christianity is not a tribal religion for them, but a universal religion that they adopted.

As a member of the Khazar-Fiction email list, I have read quite 3 historical fantasy novels based on this. As non-Jews whose nobility accepted Judaism while still having a society and political cultural based on the the Tengri religious Khagans inherited from the Gok Turkut, Khazaria is a perfect setting for historical fantasy.One could argue that the Yehuda haLevi's Kuzari served this purpose, but stripped away from all of its fantasy elements with a straight exposition on Jewish survival and pride in the diaspora. There have been a few good (more bad) novels on this. Major publishers just don't pick it up.