Cool Jewz: Contemporary Jewish Identity in Popular Culture/-/-An Introduction

Abstract

“Cool Jewz.” The term came to me as a response to watching the film The Hebrew Hammer ( Jonathan Kesselman, 2003). What is going on, I asked myself, in Jewish Popular Culture? Since 1988 and Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own, Jon Stratton’s Coming Out Jewish, David Zurawik’s The Jews of Prime Time, and Paul Buhle’s From the Lower East Side to Hollywood,1 new scholarship has been emerging which seeks to reclaim Jewish cultural history from essentialist ontologies about Jewish identity (like David Desser and Lester Friedman’s American Jewish Filmmakers).2 I remember seeing Jon Lovitz on David Letterman’s show one night. “So, Jon,” Letterman asked, “you’re a Jew?” To which Lovitz replied, “Well, Jewish.” Jews and Judaism were ceasing to be superficial and one-dimensional identities which presupposed cultural consensus—on religious praxis, on politics (specifically about the State of Israel), on history (specifically about the Holocaust). Despite the stereotype of Jewish domination of twentieth-century