LISA SILVERMAN. Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars.

Abstract

Jonathan Wolfe Miller, the famous British opera director, intellectual, and wit, was once part of the “Beyond the Fringe” comedy troupe. In one sketch, Miller is asked “Are you a Jew?” Miller responds, in panic, “Oh no!” Then, pausing, he says: “I am Jew-ish.” This idea of a marginal, quasi-Jewish identity is not quite what Lisa Silverman has in mind with her own distinction between “Jews” and “the Jewish,” or “Jewish difference,” but it is related. Miller was applying the rhetoric of British approximation to Jewish identity. Silverman applies the rhetoric and intellectual apparatus mainly of gender studies to show that the social construction of Jewish identity based on antisemitic concepts and definitions was central not only to the formation of interwar Austrian identity but to much of the cultural creativity of “Jews” (people of Jewish origins) in Austria as well. Unlike Miller's case, in Silverman's dualism the concept of “Jewish” is actually much more significant—and dangerous—than just being a “Jew.”