Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity Andrea Most (bio) Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity. By Jonathan Freedman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. xi + 388 pp. For the past fifteen years or so, discussions about Jewishness and American Jewish culture have revolved around questions of race and ethnicity, with a particular focus in the last decade on the whiteness of Jews. Arguing that these oft-cited tropes of American Jewish experience in the twentieth century—immigration, assimilation, and especially the move from racial other to whiteness—fail to capture the complexity and creativity of Jewishness in the twenty-first century, Jonathan Freedman's Klezmer America lays the foundation for the next stage in this conversation. At the same time, he shows how these Jewish narratives have been adopted, revised, rejected, and embraced by a variety of other groups—queer, black, Asian, Christian, and Latino American—all of whom make use of images of Jews as a model minority in order to understand or justify their own position vis–à–vis American mainstream culture. Freedman uses "klezmer" to describe this interplay of narratives, cultural forms, and ethnic tropes, seeing in the klezmer revival, and what he calls the "postklezmer moment," "a tradition of dynamic innovation wrought in the encounter between Jewish and gentile cultures that has the property of reanimating both, creating in this interplay new configurations of ethnic belonging, new aesthetic forms in which to express them, and ultimately new vessels for delineating and interrogating the experience of a multiracial, multiethnic modernity at large" (22). The book equates klezmer with hybridity and revisionism, and then searches out instances of said hybridity in a variety of different venues—from the lives and work of frequently discussed American Jewish characters like Tony Kushner, Arthur Miller, and Norman Mailer, to less expected sites such as the evangelical Christian Left Behind series, the "discovery" of Marranos in the American Southwest, and the autobiographical fiction of a number of young Asian American novelists. This is a heavy load for the word "klezmer" to bear, and the organizing theoretical principle of the book often seems to get lost in the detailed close readings of a multitude of texts from a wide variety of media and cultural groups. It works best, not surprisingly, when Freedman discusses music, and his sections on radical Jewish culture and Artie Shaw are focused moments in which an argument begins to take shape. But other chapters, while often fascinating as individual essays, are less clearly linked to the main theme. As the book progresses, "klezmer" becomes simply another word to describe what has been variously called the [End Page 231] "postracial," "postethnic," "diasporic" or "transnational" moment of the early twenty-first century in America, albeit from a distinctly Jewish perspective. In bringing together a series of texts and cultural moments that offer new narratives (and functions) for American Jewishness, Klezmer America begins to lay the groundwork and redraw the boundaries for important work in contemporary Jewish culture. But the significance of this collection of texts and analyses remains undertheorized and the idea of "klezmer" does not quite achieve the goal of articulating a new direction for Jewish cultural studies. Part of the problem seems to be that, despite its contemporary and future-oriented focus, Klezmer America is still too closely wedded to the very analytical models—from ethnic, race, gender, and sexuality studies—that the book wants to move beyond. What is needed here is not a new word, but a new paradigm. This still too-close relationship of Klezmer America to the twentieth century's obsession with identity helps to explain why chapters on Angels in America, Arthur Miller's marriage to Marilyn Monroe, and racial passing feel tired. While Freedman does offer some interesting new observations on the texts, the analyses end up seeming like quibbles over details rather than inspired new narratives of Jewish masculinity, sexuality, or racial identity. (Speaking of quibbles, the book has not been carefully proofread. There are multiple errors of spelling, punctuation, and syntax scattered throughout each chapter.) On the other hand, chapters on Latino and Asian American ambivalence vis-à-vis the paradigmatic Jewish immigration narrative do open up new directions for conversations about Jewishness...