This chapter draws a parallel between postwar American Jewish identity and bourgeois economics as responses to a historical economic transformation. In inflationary regimes and moments of crisis, self-ethnicizing art and bourgeois economics both attempt to withdraw from exchange and hoard forms that seem to retain their value. I argue this by analysing a short story by Cynthia Ozick, in which a monster is conjured to save a fallen New York City, but the monster grows too large and threatens to destroy the city it was meant to save. Read faithfully, Ozick’s monster is a figuration of the Jewish American identity in an age of its inflation and devaluation. Read against her grain, the story is a representation of the performative impact that economic narratives have on the real economy, despite misdiagnosing the root causes of inflation. In offering an ethnic standpoint critique of aesthetic theory as an ideology of false universalism, ultimately grounded in Frankfurt school critical theory, Ozick inadvertently reveals the limits and contradictions of her pursuit of a “Jewish form”.