The Overlooked Jewish Identity of Roy Cohn in Kushner's “Angels in America”: American Schmucko

Abstract

Hannah Arendt, describing the marginalization of as outside society first articulated this liminal space which exposes them to suspicion, hostility, and discrimination (70; Ginsberg 7). The land of liberty, indeed, proved no different in its treatment of Jews. By the mid twentieth century, American achieved, at best, a tenuous stance in both political and cultural American life. Successive waves of anti-Semitism, particularly in the 1930s and 1950s, periodically resurged as if to test Jewish loyalty to the American way of life.1 These waves primarily served to attack liberal regimes: anti-Semitism was used, in part, to delegitimate liberal democracy by exposing it as a creature of, or cover of, the Jews (Ginsberg 6). Of the 1930s wave, political members of the right crudely renamed the New Deal the Jew Deal, in an anti-Semitic attempt to discredit Roosevelt's policies. Writing of the years before Pearl Harbor and American participation in World War II, Morton Horwitz notes anti-Semitism's increase in volume and virulence as well; between Charles