In the American academic context “Jewish,” “Muslim,” “Arab,” “Palestine,” and “Israel” are becoming overdetermined to the point of being inextricable, or at least inevitably discursively constellated. Given an intellectual environment in which anti-Zionism and even just criticism of the Israeli occupation are increasingly coded as antisemitic, in which “Arab” and “Jewish” are ideologically opposed, and in which “Muslim” reads as un-American, this paper uses the categories of “Jewish American” and “Palestinian American” to critically illuminate an discursive space of meaning production. Jewish American literature is mostly impossible to understand outside the exceptionalist cliché of “breakthrough”—the legitimizing post-war eruption of Jewish American writers into the heart of the American cultural scene. Paradoxically, though it has served to set Jewish literary history apart from other ethnic literatures, “breakthrough” has also served as the historiographic model for many identity-based literary renaissances to follow. How does this paradigm influence institutional understanding of the writing of Palestinian Americans, who have not enjoyed the same benefits of social and cultural legitimation? Inasmuch as Jewish American identity is now (in an array of high-prestige spaces) increasingly indexed to the legitimacy and prerogatives of the Israeli state, and in terms of a predominating identitarianism (which might promiscuously be called “Zionist”) that effectively links the discursive fate of “Jewish” to “Palestinian,” “Muslim,” and/or “Arab,” this paper analyzes the institutional legibility of Palestinian American literature since 1967. I claim that it is probably impossible in the American context to understand the concept of “Palestinian”—including in the usage “Palestinian literature”—without also thinking of the concept “Jewish” in its increasingly hegemonic link to “Israel”; a critical literary study therefore needs to expose how this identification works in reverse, contesting the ability of “Jewish American literature” to stand in self-sufficient, exceptionalist isolation. In particular, I examine sites of interaction between Jewish American literature and Palestinian literature, particularly in the academy, on the way toward examining both the field-legibility of Palestinian American literature and the institutional interdependence of Jewish American and Palestinian.