American Entertainment Research Articles

The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist and Stoolpigeon Culture (review)

Reviewed by: The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist and Stoolpigeon Culture Paul Buhle The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist and Stoolpigeon Culture, by Joseph Litvak. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. 282 pp. $22.95. A quarter century ago, a graduate student doing some research for a professor in my department at Brown University calculated the book and journal references to "Identity" in the campus library. There were a lot, but more interestingly, the proportion of Jewish references was phenomenal. It is not likely to have fallen since, as any Wikipedia check will surely reveal. There are good reasons, of course, but have Jews more difficulty with identity than, say, Inuits, Armenians, Roma, and other peoples with or without states of their own? Or is it the proportions of Jewish author-scholars that may be decisive? If this question seems ultimately imponderable, the lure of pondering its aspects is not likely to go away. To the expanding literature, Joseph Litvak has added a remarkable and sometimes dazzling footnote. Any number of scholars (myself included) writing on Ashkenazic Jews in the European and North American diaspora have come to Yiddish and Yiddishkayt as the root source. In their various locations, Yiddish speakers borrowed not only their language in its many varieties and adaptations, but also elements of the accompanying popular cultures. In the long run, by 1900 or so, this proved decisive to Jewish participation in the emerging commercial popular cultures. No degree of [End Page 200] supposed global political or financial influence, no earthly or spiritual power is likely to surpass the Jewish influence on the mundane worlds of film, television, music and so on that reach people in every language and culture. And yet so little of the content is identifiably Jewish! We have, here, a paradox of major proportions. Joseph Litvak wants us to focus our attention on one particular aspect largely forgotten in the last two generations. He examines, in his own ways, the Blacklist, specifically the Blacklist in the entertainment world, its impact upon popular culture, and implications for Jews everywhere. Talk about metaphors, the cover of the Un-Americans sports one of the most self-revealing of blacklistees, and at the same time one of the most iconic and tragic Jewish American entertainers: Zero Mostel. Now best remembered as the theatrical star of Fiddler on the Roof (replaced, somewhat mysteriously, by the Israel actor Topol, for the film version), Mostel was of course a leftwing actor and, before that, a stand-up comic. His role best preserved (that is, in film, although he was even better as a live act) for future generations must be as stand-in for Philip Loeb in The Front, playing the actors' union pioneer, long-time character actor in Gertrude Berg's assorted vehicles, and blacklistee driven to suicide. Humiliating himself before investigators, Mostel as Loeb could not, however, become a friendly witness: that would be like conversion to Christianity. Others will remember a little art film, The Angel Levine, playing opposite Ida Kaminska, a dying wife whose angel of death is schwartze hipster Harry Belafonte, but whose real drama may be Mostel saying goodbye to life as well as fictive wife. He died not long after the shooting. Mostel would have been yet better, nay perfect for Litvak if he had been gay. In the very particular narrative of this volume, the "rootless cosmopolitan" identified with Jewishness for centuries is even more rootless when outside existing sexual norms as well as outside all apparent or acceptable national, racial, and religious. Litvak's cosmopolitan is, by no surprise, also an atheist, although the unwillingness of Christians to acknowledge Judaism as a religion might in some circumstances have meant almost as much in defining rootlessness. Being "comic" is the other element of essential identity, and here, of course, Mostel as metaphor works perfectly. The "mimesis of mimesis" (in the phrase of Horkheimer and Adorno, two figures often cited in this book) is the opposite of anything-for-a-laugh humor. It embodies a revenge against everything and everybody who oppresses others (or the Other in themselves). A reader might suspect a danger in this analysis of getting out of hand, theoretically and...

Kissing as Telling: Some Thoughts on the Cultural History of Media Performance

uch of my research has involved the analysis of types of per- formance as they have developed through history and moved between media forms and genres. My experience with that type of work has convinced me of the potential benefits of an interdisciplinary dialogue between Studies and Media Studies. This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of all the pos- sible synergies between these disciplines, but let me briefly mention two. First, the analysis of performance can help scholars to study the dynamics of trans- or intermediality—the relationships among media forms. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett writes that, since performance lacks a distinctive medium, Studies starts from the premise that its objects of study are not to be divided up and par- celed out, medium by medium. 1 Second, the study of performance is inherently concerned with process and change, with the relationship between tradition and innovation, between the doing and the already done. 2 Studies can thus provide methodological tools for scholars embarking on what Rick Altman calls a approach to media history. Altman reminds us that nineteenth-century American entertainment was organized around acts and the people who performed them, as opposed to media products, and he suggests that film scholars must put aside a firmly entrenched film-oriented approach to cinema in favor of a performer-oriented position. 3 A performer-oriented or performance-oriented approach has much to offer media historians, but it is not without its challenges. How does 1 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Performance Studies, Rockefeller Foundation, Culture and

Red, White, and Blue: Finding the Black Behind George M. Cohan's Patriotic Success

George M. Cohan was one of the first dancers to juxtapose tap dancing with “all-American” tunes. After his Broadway success, Little Johnny Jones, a number of American-themed musicals, books, and films based on his life and repertoire followed. Such profound influence on American entertainment demonstrates how other social histories can slip under the cloak of one man's patriotism. Currently I am researching the relationship between tap dance and nation-ness on both the visual and aural levels. This paper illumines how tap dance choreographs individual and social histories, from the black man through the white man to the nation. Throughout its history, tap dance has frequently been subject to the problem of promoting white worth and values while at the same time denigrating black accomplishments. Cohan embodies this process of covering up black accomplishments by cloaking them in white American patriotism. On the Broadway stage, Cohan represents Irish America with buck-and-wing dancing and patriotic “rags,” but does so without blackface make-up. Cohan's removal of blackface deliberately attempts to remove any trace of blackness from material he deems valuable to the nation. By removing all hints of blackness from certain steps, and juxtaposing them with patriotic ditties, Cohan constructs a dance style that America can call its own. This paper locates where and how Cohan takes credit for steps and sounds with a complicated genealogy and connection to black America by performing them on a white proscenium stage.

Modernist America: art, music, movies, and the globalization of American culture

America's global cultural impact is largely seen as one-sided, with critics claiming that it has undermined other countries' languages and traditions. But contrary to popular belief, the cultural relationship between the United States and the world has been reciprocal, says Richard Pells. The United States not only plays a large role in shaping international entertainment and tastes, it is also a consumer of foreign intellectual and artistic influences. Pells reveals how the American artists, novelists, composers, jazz musicians, and filmmakers who were part of the movement were greatly influenced by outside ideas and techniques. People across the globe found familiarities in American entertainment, resulting in a universal culture that has dominated the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and fulfilled the aim of the movement - to make the modern world seem more intelligible. Modernist America brilliantly explains why George Gershwin's music, Cole Porter's lyrics, Jackson Pollock's paintings, Bob Fosse's choreography, Marlon Brando's acting, and Orson Welles' storytelling were so influential, and why these and other artists and entertainers simultaneously represent both an American and a modern global culture.

The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

THE COLLAPSE OF THE CONVENTIONAL: GERMAN FILM AND ITS POLITICS AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Edited by Jaimey Fisher Brad Prager Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010, 431 pp. Reviewed by Brigitte B. Wagner At turn of millennium, German historian Eric Rentschler published a seminal piece that traced institutional changes responsible for shift from politically engaged New German Cinema (along lines of Fassbinder, Kluge, Wenders, Herzog) to a post- 1989 of consensus. An early proponent both of study of cinema in North American German departments study of 1970s leftist West German in departments, Rentschler was understandably perturbed by postwall German industry's new emphasis on box office success, generic formulas, film-television co-production structures, commercially biased subsidy boards, Americanised distribution, individual, not nationally rooted, self-understandings dramatic conflicts.1 Although acknowledging an ardent nostalgia for formally experimental oeuvre of postwar auteurs (contemporaries of participants in revolutionary concerns of 1968 generation) calling for a more measured critical exploration of latest incarnation of German film, Rentschler's essay in effect betrays a disdain for this unabashedly 1990s cinema.2 Far from Utopian political impulses of its forebears, this cinema seemed suddenly too free of national identity, too unencumbered by German past, too dangerously inclusive of a heterogeneous population, too imitative of Hollywood; it did not address international markets. Even as 1990s European cinema more generally maintained national local idiosyncrasies in face of transnational Europeanisation globally hegemonic American entertainment industry thus secured brands English, German, or French in a legal sense, (West) Germany's purported loss of cinematic legitimacy in immediate postwall postwall era has been a hard pill for scholars of German cinema to swallow. In intervening years, Rentschler's observations have challenged a new generation of German experts to re-examine politics within beyond consensus to scan horizons for other modes of cinematic politicization. It is this task that Jaimey Fisher Brad Prager's edited volume, The Collapse of Conventional: German Farn Its Politics at Turn of Twenty-First Century, assumes. The timing of this anthology could not be better. Just as its title refers to of conventional German film declared by young filmmakers who signed Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962, Fisher Prager hail what they term the collapse of consensual filmmaking. The conceit of both collapses is of course that a period of cinematic normalization, whether postwar or postwall postwall, precedes a renewal of aesthetic energies that artistic output of present therefore deserves heightened critical attention. In other words, there is once again work to be done. While Oberhauseners' arrogant dismissal of 'Papas Kino' (well-made genre for masses) short-changed critical interventions of numerous 1950s directors (one thinks, for example, of of Wolfgang Staudte Bernhard Wicki), it is not Fisher Prager's project to discredit productions of 1990s. Rather, they introduce a millennial periodisation that demarcates a new era in All-German filmmaking- one in which unified Germany is no longer a concept-in-the-making but a place structured by new borders, migrants, transnational alliances as well as East West German past selective memories of National Socialism, World War II, Holocaust. The editors avoid separation of contemporary German cinema into what they call bad ideological films good cultural critical films, and turn their attention, instead, to variety of produced in past fifteen years or so. …

Review: Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment

Review: Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment

Ain't nothing like the real thing: how the Apollo Theater shaped American entertainment

Ain't nothing like the real thing: how the Apollo Theater shaped American entertainment

Prince Modupe: An African in Early Hollywood

An African expatriate who went by the name Prince Modupe entered the Hollywood scene in the mid-i930s. He had been raised in a village in the hinterland of French West Africa (contemporary Guinea) and arrived in Los Angeles around 1935 following an appearance at the Chicago World's Fair of 1933-34. During this time in the American entertainment industry, Africans were generally thought of as primitives. Media images of Africa and Africans were often conjectural or exaggerated to fit preconceived notions. Into the midst of this environment, Modupe brought a measure of traditional (or indigenous) Africa to Los Angeles while deftly negotiating and contracting with the power brokers in the Hollywood entertainment industry. In the media of the time (and to some degree today), the many nations and diverse cultures of Africa were subsumed under the single term African. However, in 1935, reports regarding Modupe that appeared in the Los Angeles Times identified a discrete African nation: Nigeria. Modupe was described as an Oxford-educated Nigerian royal and producer of the stage extravaganza Zungaroo. In Los Angeles, Modupe worked as a composer, choreographer, theatrical producer, music consultant for film, and a lecturer and educator, managing to bridge a formidable sociocultural gap between the races. In this essay, I discuss the life of the enigmatic Modupe and his activities in Los Angeles, focusing on his 1935 stage production of Zungaroo. Black Los Angeles in the 1930s In the year 1935, the big-band era had begun. Black jazz musicians were finding ever-expanding ways to create and perform this uniquely African-American genre. What had been the jazz of the urban South was now appropriated, commodified, and integrated into national white popular urban culture and media. By the mid-i930S, the relatively localized and even insular awakening of black cultural consciousness, the Harlem Renaissance that emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century, had stimulated similar cultural awakenings in other cities. For example, Bette Cox (1993,3) argues that the rise of Central Avenue in Los Angeles during the thirties is a repercussion to activities that took place in New York City in the twenties. By 1935, blacks were making headway as major contributors to American culture at large. In Los Angeles during the 1930s, Central Avenue was the hub of opportunity for black musicians. Yet, in other parts of the city, discrimination was very entrenched. Barred from membership in Local 47, the white musicians' union, blacks started their own union, Local 767, which continued into the early 1950s. Similar to earlier years, whites held black culture with both fascination and contempt. During the minstrelsy and jazz heydays, urban whites were the primary patrons of performance. It was also true that, in Depression-era Los Angeles, the white population thought of blacks as either servants or entertainers (Sides 2003, 26). Modupe's Zungaroo When Zungaroo was presented in 1935 at the Philharmonic Auditorium, a major public performance venue in Los Angeles, the production became an important marker in the history of African public performance in that city. Zungaroo was probably Los Angeles's first large public performance production to include a measure of African authenticity. Further, it was produced by an African: Prince Modupe. The cast, which included dancers, singers, and instrumentalists, was characterized in several ways (e.g., a ballet, a pantomime, and a play) by those who reviewed the production. Although the number of African-born performers in the all-black cast is unknown, Zungaroo was described as an exhibition of Nigerian performance culture. The reviewers' descriptions are vague and cursory, providing few details. However, through the perspectives of these Los Angeles Times journalists, we can assess the attitudes of the day about African performance. Journalistic descriptions of Zungaroo In October 1935, an article in the Los Angeles Times announced the opening of Zungaroo. …

Song of Russia

“Song of Russia” is a series of oil paintings based on imagery borrowed from three Hollywood films about Russia that were produced between 1943 and 1944. These films, North Star and Song of Russia, both produced at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, and Mission to Moscow, produced by Warner Brothers, were created at the behest of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and were intended to garner support for the Soviet Union during World War Two by influencing the American public's perception of the USSR. The films were essentially pro-Soviet propaganda, presenting Stalin's Russia in a very favorable light. They adroitly appropriated the aesthetics and rhetoric of Stalin's Socialist Realism of the 1930s and 1940s, and were essentially American embodiments of Socialist Realist motion pictures in terms of both form and content, but produced in Hollywood and sanctioned by F.D.R. himself.The unlikely creation of these films was possible due to timing: they were produced during the hiatus between the anti-Soviet hysteria that followed the October Revolution, and the beginning of the “Cold War” era – a brief moment when the goals of the American and Soviet propaganda machines coincided.What makes the films particularly poignant is that after World War Two, during the period of McCarthyism known as the Second Red Scare, they came under the corrosive scrutiny of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Swept up by the purported communist infiltration of Hollywood, and the subsequent witch hunts and hearings that were to grip the American entertainment industry for a decade, with reverberations beyond, the creators of these films could never prove that they had received direct orders from the Roosevelt administration to produce these films, since those orders remained classified. As a consequence, many of those involved in producing these films were blacklisted.The painting series, “Song of Russia,” reflects this forgotten chapter of the history of American cinema, and contributes to narratives about the mechanisms and processes of official constructions for the notions of “enemy” and “ally” alike.

Pick a Card . . . Any Card

The American Journal of Economics and SociologyVolume 69, Issue 3 p. 903-906 Pick a Card . . . Any Card Vicki L. Moss, Vicki L. Moss Rhode Island Vicki Moss is a psychologist, living and working in Rhode Island.Search for more papers by this author Vicki L. Moss, Vicki L. Moss Rhode Island Vicki Moss is a psychologist, living and working in Rhode Island.Search for more papers by this author First published: 24 June 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1536-7150.2009.00705.x Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume69, Issue3July 2010Pages 903-906 RelatedInformation

Leaving Kazimierz : Comedy and realism in the Yiddish film musical Yidl mitn Fidl

In making the 1936 Yiddish film musical Yidl mitn Fidl , the international cast and crew aimed to represent the Jewish customs of the Polish shtetl by filming in the Polish town of Kazimierz, to capture its residents engaged in Jewish ritual and the activities of everyday life. These scenes serve as a backdrop for a comic romance about a klezmer ensemble that uses its musical talent as a ticket for passage from the Old World to the New. The film’s music, by American composer Abraham Ellstein, incorporates songs in the tradition of Yiddish theatre, combining the influence of Eastern European Jewish folk music and modern American entertainment culture. The soundtrack plays a crucial role throughout the movie, at times creating a persuasive impression of quasi-ethnographic documentation, while celebrating the possibilities offered to Diaspora Jews by modernity and emigration. The letters and writings of the film’s American star Molly Picon express confidence in the importance of filming on location in Kazimierz, but her experiences there reinforced her preference for cosmopolitan life over the hardship of the shtetl . Her ambivalence reflects the complicated relationship with Jewish Eastern Europe of immigrant and first-generation Diaspora Jews during the decades leading up to World War II.

End Times Entertainment: TheLeft Behind Series, Evangelicals, and Death Pornography

Many Evangelical Christians are avid fans of the Left Behind series despite the shocking amounts of violence and death the novels contain. This enthusiastic support is puzzling, given that Evangelicals frequently criticize the mainstream entertainment media for the displays of violence in movies, television programs, and video games. In this article, I attempt to explain why the fictional violence of the Left Behind series entertains Evangelical audiences, while the fictional violence of the mainstream media repulses them. I examine Evangelical tastes in entertainment in light of the general increase in displays of violence in the American entertainment industry over the last two centuries. I argue that Evangelicals are as entertained by displays of violence as mainstream audiences are, as long as the violence is in line with key Evangelical values.

Don't 'Axe' Don't Tell: A Critical Commentary on Axe's 'Chocolate Man'

What’s behind the success of Unilever’s line of Axe toiletries for men? It’s not a secret ingredient for concocting sprays with “woodsy overtones” and “oriental spice” – Axe is notorious for its commercials depicting the instant, uncontrollable attraction of young, good-looking, thin and scantily clad women who happen upon any pasty, scrawny teenage boy doused in the sexual scents of Axe body spray. Axe’s marketing strategy for increasing the popularity of the line amongst their target demographic – young, white, heterosexual men – capitalizes on the perpetuation of masculine, sexist, and racist stereotypes and heterosexist sentiments. Indeed, Axe’s recent commercial, the “Chocolate Man,” reeks of a nasty tradition in North American entertainment.

American Television as a Global Public Sphere

This article examines the hegemony of the American media industry, and the effect that American teltevision has on global publics and global citizens. On the one hand, American television newa (and other global news service) produces the subject position of the hlobal audience that encourages a new type of attentiveness, a new form of collective monitoring, and a new politics of publicity. This new subject position encourages social reflexivity, but it does so in an uneven way, which also provides a number of distancing mechanisms that allow viewers to escape from ethical responsibility. On the other hand, genres of American entertainment programming produce technologies of transnational cultural citizenship, allowing the popular to come into contact with the civil spherein public debates about cultural policy, in aesthetic publics (which combine cultural criticism and social commentary), and at the level of the social imaginary. In this way, American television provides a kind of hybrid public space, which combines local and global publics in a way that denaturalizes both, creating a situation of ideological competition between multiple discursive forms and competing forms of cultural origin.

Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers (review)

{ 154 } BOOK REV IEWS ment industry), examine briefly military theatre since World War I, and a most effective summary that provides in a scant six pages a wonderful profile of the successes and failures of the Liberty Theatres, emerging “from a thicket of twisted motives and stumbling down a crooked path” to its initial openings, momentum in the spring of 1918, and final demise. Four appendixes, copious notes, and effective illustrations complete this superb effort (an excellence expected from the editor of the extraordinarily useful three-volume American Theatre Companies, 1986–89). —DON B. WILMETH Emeritus Professor, Brown University Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers. By Arthur Frank Wertheim. New York: Palgrave MacMillan , 2006. 332 pp. $75.00 cloth. Although the history of American vaudeville has been reasonably well examined , no work has focused so directly on the economic and managerial aspects of the industry as Arthur Frank Wertheim’s Vaudeville Wars: How the KeithAlbee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers. Using a combination of first-person accounts, primary source materials, and exhaustive financial data, Wertheim tracks the rise, merger, and fall of the two dominant forces in big-time vaudeville. The resulting narrative is a compelling and insightful look into the inner workings of an American entertainment monopoly . Wertheim begins in the mid-1880s, tracking the course of the young Benjamin Franklin Keith and his first theatre in Boston. The small venue began as a dime museum, featuring a mixture of variety acts and sideshow attractions such as“Boz, the Canine paradox, described as a‘dog with a human brain’”(15). In July 1885, in an effort to maximize his profits, Keith shifted his performance schedule to a continuous, repetitive rotation of acts, becoming one of the first to embrace the format that would become the defining characteristic of vaudeville . Wertheim’s narrative then details the addition of Edward Franklin Albee to Keith’s managerial staff, thus cementing the pairing that would become the foundation of the eastern vaudeville circuit. As the Keith-Albee story unfolds on the East Coast, Wertheim introduces \ { 155 } BOOK REV IEWS the history of the rise of the Orpheum circuit on the West Coast. German immigrant Gustav Walter’s Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco opened in 1897, featuring acts imported from the East as well as from Europe. Walter’s combination of popular and high culture appealed to a wide range of customers, achieving a profitable respectability that would later become the model for his Orpheum circuit. From these beginnings, Wertheim tracks the expansion of each circuit throughout the 1890s, including exhaustive details about key players, economic data, marketing strategies, and management structure. Under the shrewd financial direction of Morris Meyerfield, the Orpheum circuit added venues in Los Angeles, Kansas City, Omaha, and Denver, eventually opening a booking office in Chicago in 1889. Keith and Albee first added New York to their empire, successfully challenging the great Tony Pastor with their Union Square Theatre in 1893. They also followed the Orpheum’s notion of broad cultural appeal, with ticket prices at one of their Boston locations ranging from 15 cents to $1.50. By 1899 the circuit constituted four large theatres, one each in Boston, New York, Providence, and Philadelphia, with the Boston theatre alone averaging twentyfive thousand customers per week. Having detailed the origins of the Keith-Albee and Orpheum circuits, Wertheim then outlines the various attempts of vaudeville performers to organize resistance to the increasingly strong-armed tactics of management. Beginning with the formation in 1900 of the White Rats of America, the rapidly expanding circuits on both sides of America faced organized challenges to their employment practices. The middle portion of Wertheim’s book focuses on the continued consolidation of both circuits, the inner workings of their business operations, and the overall failure of the White Rats and other organizations to make any significant gains in rights for vaudeville performers. Keith and Albee joined with several other eastern managers in 1907 to form the United Booking Offices of America (UBO), and by 1913 the UBO had established a formal relationship with the Orpheum management to centralize control...

Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (review)

Reviewed by: Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen Andrea Most (bio) Henry Bial. Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Pp. 195. $20.95 (Pb). Henry Bial’s Acting Jewish addresses the thorny and complicated question of how Jewishness manifests itself in American popular entertainment. Using a performance studies approach that privileges performance history and audience responses to films, plays, and television of the last sixty years, Acting Jewish argues that mainstream American entertainment “is a crucial site for understanding the relationship between Jews and American culture” (5) and that the particular strategy of what Bial calls “double coding” allows for a conversation about identity that is based “neither on questionable essentialisms nor on a politics of victimhood” (6). Double coding describes how the same cultural product can be read differently from two different reading positions: Jewish and gentile. The act of “reading Jewish” is a primary way of “acting Jewish” and even, Bial asserts, one of the most important means by which Jewish identity is established in American culture today. In other words, to “get” the Jewish codes of Seinfeld or Fiddler on the Roof serves to “affir[m] one’s membership in an imagined community of American Jews” (20). Those who do not “read Jewishly” can enjoy the same shows without experiencing this act of identification. Bial takes care to point out that the definitions of Jewish and gentile, as used here, are not essential or racial; rather, to respond “Jewishly” to a work of popular culture, one must simply be literate in the requisite cultural codes. Because of its methodology, Acting Jewish illuminates aspects of canonical works of American Jewish culture that might be overlooked by relying exclusively on textual analysis. For example, Bial makes fresh observations by focusing on questions of casting and acting styles. He argues that Death of a Salesman has been read as Jewish when Willy Loman was played by a Jewish actor because Lee J. Cobb’s or Dustin Hoffman’s Method acting –which draws on personal experience to build a character – uses the actor’s Jewish background and therefore creates a Jewish sensibility in the performance. Similarly, Bial fills important gaps in our understanding of Fiddler on the Roof by exploring the notably different performances of Tevye by Zero Mostel (on the Broadway stage) and Topol (in the mass-market film). Explaining the history that each actor brought to the role, Bial contrasts [End Page 638] Mostel’s shtetl sentimentality to Topol’s more robust, almost macho performance. The use of audience response to make the central argument of Acting Jewish proves to be less convincing, however. Reception studies are notoriously problematic because the evidence for audience response is so difficult to acquire. The “audience” for Bial seems to be almost exclusively reviewers for major publications and scholars of Jewish culture. While their responses do teach us something about the ways in which culture writers respond to Jewish-inflected works, it is not safe to infer conclusions about identity formation among American Jews more generally from these select and self-selecting responses. Furthermore, although Bial aims to identify both “Jewish” and “gentile” responses, a large majority of the responses he cites are “Jewish” ones. In his discussion of the 1950s sitcom The Goldbergs, for example, he notes how certain Jewish aspects of the show resonate with Jewish scholars, but then asks, “Do they resonate in the same way for an audience unfamiliar with these coded indicators of Jewishness?” (48). He implicitly answers this question in the negative but provides no explicit evidence. Similarly, Bial makes sweeping statements about the response of audiences to Annie Hall: The significance that viewers attach to Alvy’s “specific Jewish personality” is conditioned in large part by the cultural knowledge and expectations they bring to the film. Members of the Jewish audience . . . respond to the familiarity of the character. For them, Allen’s appeal lies in his ability to observe the humor in everyday situations. But audiences not familiar with Jewish performance codes see the intercultural encounter from the point of view of Annie. (98) This statement is unsupported by evidence, and...

The Language of Ownership

Dearborn continuedfrom previous page entire collection. Nancy suffered not only the destruction ofher house, but also her knowledge ofwhat the villagers had done. It was a profound betrayal, and she was never to feel at home again. After the war, she felt, according to Gordon, as if she had '"risen from the dead...like Lazarus,'" experiencing '"an inexplicable sense of faltering. '" Aldous Huxley wrote of Nancy Cunard's '"Giaconda style'" and said her '"caresses were like a drug, at once intoxicant and opiate'"; Michael Arlen wrote of her as '"a swift, moving, reckless, white-faced young woman, the very incarnation of youth, fearless and intent, charged with purpose'"; and William Carlos Williams described her as '"constant of the heavens in her complete and passionate inconstancy.'" Speaking of her façade, her friend Mary Hutchinson said it was a "'romantic and melancholy shadow which one [could] never approach. The façade was exquisite, made ofgold leaf, lacquer, verdigris and ivory.'" This fine biography—extremely well researched and felicitously written, especially in the musings Lois Gordon sets typographically apart at the end of each chapter—not only does credit to Nancy Cunard's complexity, it celebrates it, along the way setting this marvelous creature in the context of twentieth-century cultural history. Mary V Dearborn 's latest book is Mistress of Modernism : The Life of Peggy Guggenheim (2004). She lives in New York City. The Language of Ownership Mark Wallace Everyone I Know Lives on Roads Trevor Dodge Chiasmus Press http://www.chiasmuspress.com 121 pages; paper, $14.95 American experimental fiction currently finds itselfin a complicated moment. Mainstream publishing houses, competing for slices of the American entertainment pie, have become more averse than ever to publishing risky innovative fiction by lesserknown authors. On the other hand, with the now practically venerable FC2 as role model, presses like Spuyten Duyvil, Starcherone, Chiasmus, and others remain deeply committed to publishing such work. If a wide readership seems for the moment out of the question for this work, a fiercely devoted community of writers, publishers, and readers does not. Among much else, Trevor Dodge's new short fiction collection Everyone I Know Lives on Roads illustrates pointedly the social conditions in which much of this fiction struggles to survive. Everyone I Know presents a set of intriguing literary techniques which might not seem that new to readers of experimental fiction, while readers unaware of that tradition will likely find them startling or even incomprehensible. There's hilarious, bawdy social satire devoted to exposing corrupt systems of power. There are discontinuous story lines, in which characters disappear mid-story or morph into other, similar versions of themselves. Singular narrative threads have been replaced by fragmentation, disruption , and dissociation; recognizing what is related between various threads also involves acknowledging what's unrelated. The most structurally extreme co-authored pieces seem more prose poem than narrative. Finally, and perhaps crucially, the book insists that human experience cannot be adequately understood through the exploration of individual personalities usually called character development. Instead, human experience can at best be glimpsed only in bits and is defined as much by vast social forces as by individual differences. Many of the best pieces (it's not quite right to call them stories) in the book feature a clear-eyed examination ofwork in contemporary America. Dodge details how overworked, underpaidAmericans living in isolated communities struggle to find and keepjobs that they can't stand but still need. Such characters often search desperately for human companionship in a way that's surprisingly reminiscent of the work ofRaymond Carver. Yet Dodge doesn't explore individual character in the way Carver does. Instead, he's more concerned with how character interacts with larger issues like history, landscape, and American social planning. Some of the book's most striking moments come from descriptions of daily work conditions, or from uncovering the historical facts that have led to these conditions, as in the opening piece, "The True Point of Beginning," set in Twin Falls, Idaho: My typing skills have netted me a nominal , hourly-wage job typing insurance forms for a land title and escrow office. . . . Nothing but typing and re-typing legal descriptions for forty and...

Hegemony or diversity in film and television? The United States, Europe and Japan

In October 2005 UNESCO produced its Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. This was largely a response to the worries of countries, especially in Europe and not least of which France, which feared the damaging effects to their cultures if trade in entertainment products remained too one-sided. Generally the argument of this paper is that while initial tensions between the United States and Europe were motivated by the usual commercial concerns, Europeans were increasingly worried about the cultural impact of this commerce. The Japanese, however, have not been nearly so concerned as the Europeans about becoming ‘Americanized’. This lack of tension between the United States and Japan in the area of film and television is due to several factors. First, there is a complementarity between American entertainment and the Japanese electronics industry. Second, the Japanese are major players in some aspects of the entertainment industry, most especially in the area of animation, and they are especially influential in Asia. Finally, issues of cultural conflict between the United States and Japan are simply less salient to Tokyo than those which characterize Japan's relations with its Asian neighbors.

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This article analyzes the Pili International Multimedia Company's “digital video knights-errant puppetry” serials, a popular culture genre unique to Taiwan, to answer two questions. First, how do digital technologies, originally developed to meet the needs of the American military and entertainment industries, become embedded in a different cultural context? Second, how does this embedding allow media technologies to become something through which distinctly local models of globalization itself may be imagined? Analyzing both the style of the serials and the discourse of producers and fans, I argue that new media technologies, despite their foreign origins, may not only be adapted or resisted, but may also come to be imagined as emerging from local aesthetics and local needs. Through the specific ways they utilize both digital and traditional technologies, the Pili producers and fans construct a utopian vision of what globalization might look like if Taiwan were at the center.

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As cartoons and animated features became an increasingly important part of the entertainment business, the production of cartoons industrialized to meet growing demands for the new global media. Artists adopted traditional union models to protect their jobs and working conditions, and a unique set of unions was born. Drawing the Line is the first labor history of an industry whose principal figures - Walt Disney, Chuck Jones, and Max Fleischer - helped define American entertainment. Author Tom Sito, Disney animator and former president of the Hollywood Animation Guild, draws on oral histories, archival information, and firsthand knowledge of the animation process to create an insider's history of a colorful group of labor unions. Sito describes the history and fiery personalities behind the formation of the Screen Cartoonists Union, the strikes and walkouts, the effects of Hollywood blacklisting, and the battles at the bargaining tables. He closes with a look at the changing nature of animation and the way in which current giants Disney and Dreamworks are again reshaping the relationship between studios and animators. Well illustrated with never-before-seen images from the backstage of classic Hollywood, Drawing the Line will change basic assumptions about animation history and its place in the story of American labor.