American Jewish Identity Research Articles

“How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs by Tahneer Oksman

Reviewed by: “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs by Tahneer Oksman Melissa Weininger (bio) “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs. By Tahneer Oksman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. xiii + 274 pp. In the last two decades, the graphic narrative form has taken a central place in the American literary landscape. At the same time, graphic novels and memoirs by Jewish authors and with Jewish themes have also proliferated. Perhaps this is unsurprising, as the history of comics has been inextricably tied to the Jewish experience in America, from the wartime superheroes of Siegel, Shuster, and Eisner to MAD Magazine’s transgressive comedic sensibility. Since Art Spiegelman won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Maus, his graphic memoir about his father’s Holocaust experience, the graphic narrative form has also been particularly associated with Jewish history and culture. Likewise, scholarship on the Jewish graphic novel has also accelerated, and Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman’s 2010 The Jewish Graphic Novel collected a variety of contemporary scholarship on the form. However, less attention has been given to the place of women, as both authors and subjects. Tahneer Oksman’s “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?” is an important intervention in this scholarly landscape, focusing on the intersections between gender and Jewish identity in the graphic narrative format. Oksman explores intersectional identities in the autobiographical comics of several contemporary female Jewish artists. She classifies all of these authors as “postassimilated,” a term that is meant to describe the way that assimilation and its effects are no longer central to the work of these artists, although they may be influenced by or engage with the effects of assimilation (3). The theoretical framework Oksman builds in order to read the complex and dynamic representation of postassimilated Jewish-American-female identity in these comics is centered on a concept she calls “dis-affiliation,” which is not a static condition, but rather “a process” that “entails a complex negotiation” (2). [End Page 108] It is through the lens of “dis-affiliation” that Oksman examines questions of Jewish and gender identity in the graphic memoirs and diaries she analyzes. In particular, the notion of dis-affiliation is useful in understanding these intersectional identities as shifting rather than fixed, and existing synchronically. The medium of the comic, or “sequential art,” is particularly well-suited to visualizing these simultaneous, sometimes conflicting, identities, and Oksman skillfully points out the ways in which these works expose the impossibility of a homogeneous Jewish identity. The book’s chapters are structured around either individual artists or pairs of artists with thematically related works. Chapter 1 focuses on the work of Aline Kominsky Crumb, who is the only artist among those featured who belongs to an older generation that came of age in the late twentieth century. Because of Kominsky Crumb’s position as a predecessor to many of the other artists discussed in the book, this chapter also functions as a platform for introducing many of the larger themes that the younger women both make use of and rebel against. In particular Oksman focuses on the way Kominsky Crumb’s work plays with stereotypes of Jewish women and how visualizing those stereotypes exposes the constructed nature of identity itself. Her analysis here sets the stage nicely for subsequent chapters, which explore the variety of ways younger Jewish women artists use comics to exercise control over both their own self-representation and popular representations and expectations of them. The next two chapters continue to focus on the process of identity formation as expressed in the comics of three young artists, Vanessa Davis, Miss Lasko-Gross, and Lauren Weinstein. Chapter 2 is dedicated to the autobiographical and diaristic work of Davis, while Chapter 3 focuses on memoirs of adolescence by Lasko-Gross and Weinstein. In each of these, Oksman chronicles the way that the artists use Jewishness, sometimes metaphorically, to explore the relational nature of identity. That is, their comics visualize the ways that identity is contingent on community and the subject’s sense of herself as within or outside–and...

"How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?": Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs by Tahneer Oksman

"How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?": Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs by Tahneer Oksman

Introduction: Jewish American Material Culture

Introduction:Jewish American Material Culture Laura A. Leibman (bio) A family of six sits around a table ready to start a festive meal. Bubbe and Zayde are there. The cloth is white, the plates are blue, and the family has prepared perfectly formed latkes and challah to start the meal. A silver Hanukiah with candles ablaze stands close—but not too close—to the carefully wrapped gifts. With kippot on their heads, Zayde holds a siddur and Abba a Kiddush cup. A young boy dances in his chair, clasping a dreidel. Bubbe holds a gift. Ima flits between the festivities and the kitchen, spoon in hand. Music plays in the background, and the family's dog waits poised by the refrigerator. This family might seem like many other Jewish families across America during the festival of Hanukkah, if not for the fact that the family members are so incredibly short and set in their ways. In fact, all of the family members are disturbingly puny—barely two inches tall, to be exact—and they are made of a hard, molded plastic. In an attempt to avoid choking hazards to the children who will play with them, they are bonded to their accessories. Even if you wanted to free Ima from her role as chef, you couldn't, as the spoon follows her wherever she goes. You may have met this family before: they are the "Little People Hanukkah Play Set" made by Fisher Price in an attempt to diversify the company's holiday offerings and capture a Jewish market in the first decade of the twenty-first century.1 Apparently, the play set was not a commercial success: for the last few years, all of the Fisher Price holiday-themed "Little People" have been observing Christian or solidly American holidays, such as Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July. Jewish "Little People" live on only on eBay, in collectors' shops, and on amazon.com at collector's prices. Jewish "Little People" may embody a host of stereotypes, but they aren't cheap. As a type of material culture made explicitly for Jews and depicting Jews performing rites of Judaism as an embodied religion, the Jewish "Little People" set represents the various ways in which American Jewish identity is performed through things. In this special issue of American Jewish History on material culture, the authors explore the ways in which a wide range of everyday objects can enhance our understanding of American Jewish culture and religion. In this introduction to [End Page 115] this special issue, Jewish "Little People" serve as a concrete example of what might be called "material Judaism"—that is, the use of objects of everyday life in Judaism and to create Jewish identity. By exploring things made and used for and by American Jews, scholars in this issue look at how religion is embedded in culture and how a cultural sense of Jewishness has often come to replace a text-centered understanding of Jewish identity. The "Little People Hanukkah Play Set" exemplifies the variety of ways in which objects can embody what it means to be Jewish in American life. In the Fisher Price set, Jewishness is what one wears, eats, plays, and does as much as what one reads. The boy in the set learns about Hanukkah by playing dreidel, but real Jewish children also learn about Judaism by playing with the Fisher Price set and enacting Jewish holidays in their play. Even the plastic siddur is non-textual. As Pierre Bourdieu would eagerly note, Zayde's book reminds us that all books are physical objects read in material contexts. If it is "with the body that people read the 'book' from which they learn their vision of the world,"2 this family's understanding of Judaism is controlled by and channeled through the molded plastic body of Zayde—or, as one eBay seller eloquently calls him, "Fisher Price Little People JEWISH HANUKKAH GRANDPA MAN TORAH BOOK FOR HOLIDAY." Just as we might want to know who wrote a will or a novel, the context in which objects are created adds to our sense of their social function. Knowing who gave Zayde the only book...

Hybrid Judaism: Irving Greenberg, Encounter, and the Changing Nature of American Jewish Identity by Darren Kleinberg

Reviewed by: Hybrid Judaism: Irving Greenberg, Encounter, and the Changing Nature of American Jewish Identity by Darren Kleinberg Ira Robinson (bio) Hybrid Judaism: Irving Greenberg, Encounter, and the Changing Nature of American Jewish Identity. By Darren Kleinberg. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016. xxvi + 143 pp. It is certainly true that people thinking of themselves as” Jewish” in contemporary North America assert radically differing interpretations of the term. Is “Jewish” a religious expression? But, if so, how can it be defined? Is “Jewish” descriptive of an ethnicity? But, if so, can we give it any hard and fast definition? Decried by some, embraced by others, the current diversity and fluidity of definitions of the term “Jewish” has given rise to a multitude of hybridities that in previous generations would have been dismissed as inherently absurd and self-contradictory. Nonetheless, numerous such hybridities have engendered communities that proudly espouse the possibility of being, for example, a “gay frum Jew” in print, on the internet and through social media. As well, the assertion of previous American Jewish “truths,” such as the rightness of Jewish endogamy and the wrongness of intermarriage, which served as the watchword of organized American Jewry across its denominational spectrum for nearly the entire span of American Jewish history, is now under serious challenge. Hybrid Judaism: Irving Greenberg, Encounter, and the Changing Nature of American Jewish Identity takes the reader on an intellectual journey designed to both describe and contextualize the changes that have occurred in our understanding of American Jewish identity as it has been experienced and theorized in the past century. The author does so by largely focussing his narrative on the career and thought of Rabbi Irving Greenberg (b. 1933). However, the book is not really the presentation of a detailed intellectual biography of Greenberg, though there are certainly many elements of such an intellectual biography included in the narrative. It is also not primarily an expression of the author’s own spiritual journey, though the book also includes fascinating references to Kleinberg’s own spiritual itinerary. This slim volume, adapted from Kleinberg’s doctoral dissertation at Arizona State University, first goes into detail about the ways in which American Jewish identity has been and is understood. Fully one third of the book is thus devoted to a series of essentially theoretical chapters. One deals with the history of the development of scholarly conceptions of the religious history of America. Another deals with Israel Zangwill’s portrayal of America as a “melting pot,” Horace Kallen’s assertion of cultural pluralism, and Will Herberg’s mid-century “triple melting pot.” A third chapter speaks of the contribution of Nathan Glazer and Daniel [End Page 580] Patrick Moynihan’s vision of multiculturalism and its critique by David Hollinger and his theory of postethnicity. Part Two of the book mines the prodigious intellectual output of Irving Greenberg over several decades to explore the development of his “theology of Hybrid Judaism.” It is the author’s contention that Greenberg’s life and work anticipated Hollinger’s postethnicity theory and can be made to serve as a “theological basis for a more expansive understanding of religious identity” (63). Kleinberg speaks of Green-berg’s confrontation with the Holocaust and its implications for his self-understanding as an Orthodox Jew. He traces the development of Greenberg’s covenantal theology and the influence his participation in Jewish-Christian theological encounters exerted on the development of his thought. While never overtly abandoning his Orthodox origins, Greenberg’s intellectual and spiritual itinerary nonetheless transcended Orthodoxy in its narrow sense and came to embrace wider communities of Jews and non-Jews alike. Kleinberg’s concluding contention is that Greenberg’s theological journey led him to “a transformational theology of encounter that I [Kleinberg] call Hybrid Judaism” (124). Kleinberg further asserts that this concept of “Hybrid Judaism,” grounded in Greenberg’s theology, is in fact the best way to attempt to understand the contemporary American Jewish phenomenon and “presents a vision for the future of the American Jewish community in particular and humanity in general” (125). It is significant that Kleinberg’s perspective is theological—a perspective most observers of American Jews all too rarely take into account...

Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit

Much debate surrounds whether American Jews constitute a religious, racial, ethnic, or cultural group. Lila Corwin Berman's Metropolitan Jews posits urbanism as another key component of American Jewish identity. Berman is not the first historian to write about Jewish connections to city life, but her monograph of postwar Detroit offers a distinctive perspective on what she defines as “metropolitan urbanism” (p. 5). Metropolitan Jews assesses Jewish residential patterns, political advocacy, and economic pursuits in the greater Detroit region from the 1920s to the present, focusing on the 1950s and 1960s. In recounting the Jewish exodus from Detroit in the 1960s, Berman tells a familiar story of white flight, but she also notices a resilient urbanism. Detroit Jews fled Detroit neighborhoods at rates similar to those of other white ethnic groups, but their “metropolitan consciousness” kept them anchored in urban institutions and political life (p. 7). Unlike other ethnic groups, Jews never fully divested from the city that offered them unprecedented freedom, protection, and access to power. A metropolitan identity enabled Jews to expand the scope of the city and redefine their place in it. Berman shows how Jewish urbanism became a way to stem the tide of suburbanization, secularization, and middle-class consumerism. As Jews moved out of Detroit in the late 1950s and mid-1960s their ingrained urbanism transformed from local advocacy to broader city, state, and national causes. Maintaining a connection to the city became a way of asserting a Jewish identity grounded in cosmopolitan and liberal values.

New Jews? Race and American Jewish Identity in 21st Century Film

New Jews? Race and American Jewish Identity in 21st Century Film

Gender Differences in American Jewish Identity: Testing the Power Control Theory Explanation

This paper addresses discrepancies in previous research about whether there are gender differences in Jewish identity. Four factors of Jewish identity are examined: multifaceted Jewish engagement, social Jewish identity, communal religious identity, and cultural Jewish identity. Using the 2011 New York Jewish Community Survey, gender differences in Jewish identity in seven denominational groups of American Jews are examined. The power control theory (PCT) is tested as an explanation for the gender differences, and found to be lacking. Measures of power imbalance in current family situations are used, in addition to measures related to socialization; the rationale for this variation is discussed. According to PCT, the Orthodox would exhibit greater gender differences in Jewish identity, but the opposite is true: significant gender differences are found for non-Orthodox denominations more than are found for the Orthodox. Being raised Orthodox does not contribute to the gender differences. Measures of power imbalance within families do not contribute to the explanation of variance in any of the Jewish identity factors. Possible generalization of the findings is discussed, as well as directions for further research.

“How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”:Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs

“How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”:<i>Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs</i>

Oksman, Tahneer: “How Come Boys Get to Keep their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs

Oksman, Tahneer: “How Come Boys Get to Keep their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Guest Editors’ Introduction

“How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs by Tahneer Oksman

“How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs by Tahneer Oksman

Zionism’s Frontier Legacies: Colonial Masculinity and the American Council for Judaism in San Francisco

In 2011, San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum curated an exhibit called California Dreaming: Jewish Life in Bay Area from Gold Rush to Present. The ambitious exhibit illustrated specific regional history of San Francisco's Jewish community. Arranged chronologically, most of exhibit focused on successes of Jewish families in San Francisco and origin of major Jewish organizations-until exhibit reached end of World War II. Instead of celebrating end of Holocaust, exhibit instead needed to contend with American Council for Judaism (ACJ), a Jewish anti-Zionist organization whose strongest chapter was in San Francisco. The wall text of exhibit explains ACJ's popularity as a reflection of in that the Jewish elite of San Francisco, who experienced very little anti-Semitism and held many public offices, found it difficult to imagine dangers encountered by Jews in Europe or even in American cities that were less welcoming toward Jews.1 The strength of San Francisco's anti-Zionism was glossed over as a temporary aberration:With news of Holocaust, tenor of local conversation changed. By time state of Israel was established in 1948, many ACJ leaders had come to regret their earlier positions, recognizing that situation in Bay Area was like no other community and that there was an need for a Jewish especially for Jewish refugees of Europe.2The museum's analysis of Jewish anti-Zionism in 1940s San Francisco assumes several things about relationship between Zionism, Jewish identity, and assimilation, namely, that Zionism is a global, populist movement, responding to an urgent need for a Jewish state, and that anti-Zionism must therefore be a result of assimilation, comfort, financial success, and a kind of provincialism-an inability to see beyond success of Jews in San Francisco Bay area.This article pushes against assumption that American Zionism and American anti-Zionism are mutually exclusive political ideologies and, particularly, that Zionism emerged in United States as an alternative to Jewish assimilation. Rather, by examining public statements of San Francisco chapter of American Council for Judaism, it argues that both Zionism and anti-Zionism in United States took up project of and Jewish normalcy. As uniquely American political movements, both worked to situate American Jews within US racial liberal capitalism. In 1940s California, American Zionism and American Jewish anti-Zionism shared similar ideals and discursive formulations, albeit while arguing for radically different positions regarding role of state of Israel in American Jewish life.The American Council for Judaism was founded in 1942 and quickly became largest Jewish anti-Zionist organization in United States. Rather than see ACJ as a precursor to present-day anti-Zionist movements, I analyze organization's attempts to resist Zionism by defining Jewish American identity through normative discourses of proper American colonial masculinity. The political project of ACJ did not contest dominant racialcapitalist order and in fact explicitly supported supremacy of United States. The ACJ touted Jewish capitalist success as evidence of US democracy and advocated for a uniquely American Judaism. Rather than dismiss ACJ as assimilationist, however, I will situate their political position in context of American Zionism's dominance and, in doing so, question grounds for assimilation itself. The interplay between Zionism and arguments of ACJ reveals much about complexity of belonging-or assimilating-in postwar US urban landscape. Both ACJ and dominant Zionist organizations of time were preoccupied with what made a normal Jewish life. As David Biale, Daniel Boyarin, Raz Yosef, and Todd Samuel Presner note, boundaries of Jewish normalcy at this time were intimately connected to properly embodied masculinity. …

Filming Identity in the Jewish American Postwar; Or, On the Uses and Abuses of Periodization for Jewish Studies

This article takes the postwar period in the US (from the end of World War II to the mid-1960s) as represented by a handful of canonical films—both of the era and since—as an opportunity to argue for a critical Jewish Studies-based analysis of periodization. It illustrates the need in Jewish Studies to mount a sustained critique of the concept of identity that anchors its professional practices. Questions about identity are too often asked as questions about culture as the naturalized predicate of a population, and this tendency underlies and supports a dominant historicist approach in Jewish American Studies that suppresses critical alternatives. Through a series of close readings—of The Jazz Singer (1927), Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), The Pawnbroker (1964), Liberty Heights (1999), and Inglorious Basterds (2009)—this paper instead proposes that we deploy a critical history of the concept of Jewish American identity—rather than a history of an empirical subject we take for granted as American Jewry—to destabilize the logic of periodization underlying the historicist self-evidence of Jewish identity.

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2015

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2015 Compiled by Mike Witcombe What follows is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2015, including critical works (books, book chapters, journal essays, and special journal issues). All entries will reflect the format as defined in the third edition of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (2008). All sources are arranged in alphabetical order according to the author’s last name. Individual essays included in edited collections are grouped in “Book Chapters” and are cross-listed according to MLA style. Digital book editions, such as those designed for Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook readers, are not included in this listing. Given the recent growth in e-book technology, digital versions of Roth’s texts are becoming standard practice. This being the case, none of these e-book versions are included in this bibliography. Readers and researchers can easily visit online booksellers to find digital editions. BOOKS The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Basu, Ann. States of Trial—Manhood in Philip Roth’s America. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Print. Kaplan, Brett Ashley. Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Print. EDITED COLLECTIONS AND SPECIAL ISSUES Koy, Christopher E., Ed. “The Worldliness of Philip Roth.” Special issue of Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and Culture 25:49 (2015). Print. BOOK CHAPTERS Aarons, Vicki. “The Making of American Jewish Identities in Postwar American Fiction.” The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Brauner and Stähler 43-53. Print. [End Page 111] Batnitzky, Leora. “Beyond Theodicy? Joban Themes in Philip Roth’s Nemesis.” The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics. Eds. Leora Batnitzky and Ilona Pardes. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. 2015. 213-24. Print. Budick, Emily Miller. “Ghostwriting the Holocaust: The Ghost Writer, The Diary, The Kindly Ones, and Me.” The Subject of Holocaust Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2015. 19-36. Print. Furst, Lilian R. “Ritualized Bellyaching: Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.” Just Talk: Narratives of Psychotherapy. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2015. 57-70. Print. Löffler, Philipp. “‘A Singular Act of Invention’: Storytelling, Pluralism, and Philip Roth’s American Trilogy.” Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015. 97-126. Print. Mosher, Paul W. and Jeffrey Berman. “Angry Acts and Counteracts in Philip Roth’s Life and Art.” Confidentiality and its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. 82-104. Print. _______. “The Angry Act: The Psychoanalyst’s Breach of Confidentiality in Philip Roth’s Life and Art.” Confidentiality and its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. 63-81. Print. Osmanović, Sabina. “Dealing with Evanescence: The Motif of Old Age and the Crisis of Meaning in Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal.” Mapping the World of Anglo-American Studies at the Turn of the Century. Eds. Aleksandra Nikčević-Batrićević and Marija Krivokapić. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2015. 175-81. Print. Pozorski, Aimee. “American Jewish Life Writing, Illness and the Ethics of Innovation.” The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Brauner and Stähler 43-53. Print. Scanlan, Margaret. “Strange Times to Be a Jew: Alternative History After 9/11.” Narrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism. Eds. John Duvall and Robert Marzec. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. 168-93. Print. Schreier, Benjamin. “Why Jews Aren’t Normal: The Unrepresentable Future of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.” The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History. New York: New York UP, 2015. 149-84. Print. Segal, Lynne. “The Circus of (male) Ageing: Philip Roth and the Perils of Masculinity.” Psychosocial Imaginaries: Perspectives on Temporality, Subjectivities and Activism. Ed. Stephen Frosh. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 87-104. Print. Tandon, Bharat. “Philip Roth’s Kinds of Writing.” Writing for the New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical. Ed. Fiona Green. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Web. JOURNAL ARTICLES AND ESSAYS Anténe, Petr. “Racial Conflicts in the Campus Novel of the Early 2000s: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and...

Swinging Hava Nagila: “Jewish Jazz” And Jewish Identity

This essay examines “Jewish jazz”—attempts to combine “Jewish music” and jazz into a new genre—from the perspective of Jewish ethnic identity. The movement began with two albums in the early 1960s and then reemerged in a second wave in the 1990s. I analyze these musical forays as attempts to explore and expand modern American Jewish identity. Jewish jazz began tentatively, reflecting the assimilationist leanings of American Jews in the post-World War II era. As multiculturalism emerged in the late twentieth century, Jewish jazz became brasher in proclaiming its Jewishness. These performances sought to expand Jewish identity to fit a multicultural society, and sometimes black musicians stretched their identities as well by expanding into Jewish music. At its best, Jewish jazz reaffirmed Jewishness while revealing connections with African Americans, with whom Jews have shared a diasporic, urban American culture. Such assertion and expansion of identity encountered fierce resistance in a society that is still attached to rigid ethnic categories.

Jewish “Diasporic Humor” and Contemporary Jewish-American Identity

In their 1993 essay on diaspora and identity, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin reject “diaspora” as a site of persecution and fear and instead argue that “the [new] lesson of Diaspora, namely, that peoples and lands are not naturally and organically connected . . . can teach us that it is possible for a people to maintain its distinctive culture, its difference, without controlling land, a fortiori without controlling other people.” I argue that the Boyarins’ new “diaspora” has been incorporated into contemporary Jewish American humor and provides assimilated Jews a way to create humor in a multicultural world. The Boyarins’ diasporic thinking can be applied to diverse contemporary Jewish comedic texts like Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews,” Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” and Auslander’s Hope, A Tragedy . Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, and Larry David also reject traditional forms of Jewish comedy (the need for group identity and solidarity in the face of suffering, persecution, genocide, powerlessness) in favor of an emancipated diaspora that maintains identity while it is outer directed and engages the Other.

The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962–2007 by Sally Bachner, Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010) by Aimee Pozorski

<i>The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962–2007</i> by Sally Bachner, <i>Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010)</i> by Aimee Pozorski

Jewish “Diasporic Humor” and Contemporary Jewish-American Identity

Jewish “Diasporic Humor” and Contemporary Jewish-American Identity

Race, Religion, or Ethnicity?: Situating Jews in the American Scene

AbstractFor Jewish Americans and the scholars who study them, religion, race, and ethnicity make up fundamental components of American social location. In other words, they are immediately relevant to how Americans conceptualize their own identities and the identities of others, as well as to the distribution of social, political, and economic resources. In this article, I argue that scholarship on Jewish American identity is typically both attentive to and itself deeply shaped by the myths that comprise dominant American conceptions of identity, such as those that inform and construct the social categories religion, race, and ethnicity. I examine, in each of three sections, scholarship that analyzes Jewish identification in terms of religion, ethnicity, and race, respectively, highlighting how the studies engage American social categories as the framework for studying Jewish American identification. The texts that use religion as the center of their analysis tend either to focus exclusively on Jewish Americans or to situate them in relation to the expectation of assimilation to (Christian) American social norms. Ethnicity‐oriented scholarship, in contrast, often examines Jewish Americans as one among many ethnic groups, focusing initially on post‐Civil Rights era multiculturalism and, in later work that accounts for race theory, on identity performance and representation. I argue that the turn to, or neglect of, race in contemporary studies reveals the varying levels of scholarly commitment to thinking through power, privilege, and the role of ‘whiteness’ in Jewish American experiences and in their relations with other groups.

Conversational style and gesture: exploring the role of communication in shaping, maintaining and reinforcing American Jewish identity

This essay examines the little explored relationship between communication and Jewish identity, using communication as a means through which to open a discussion on the state of American Jewish identity in the twenty-first century. Focusing in particular on the topics of conversational style and gesture, this paper draws both on historical studies of Jewish behaviour and a contemporary analysis of the television sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm to determine the extent to which identifiably Jewish behaviours continue to be seen in the United States, before seeking to explore the impact of these behaviours on shaping, maintaining and reinforcing American Jewish identity.