Jewish Cultural Studies Research Articles

Jewish Cultural Studies by Simon J. Bronner

Reviewed by: Jewish Cultural Studies by Simon J. Bronner Jacqueline Laznow Simon J. Bronner. Jewish Cultural Studies. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021. xix + 458 pp. In Jewish Cultural Studies, Simon Bronner summarizes his long and prolific academic trajectory. The book consists of updated versions of his published work with additional new material dealing mainly with the digital world and COVID-19. Bronner focuses on three folklore and ethnographic themes, conceptualization, ritualization, and narration, while interrogating objects, patterns, frames, and practices identified as Jewish in North America. His aim is to discern what makes them Jewish, why, and by whom. By doing so, he draws the boundaries of what he conceptualizes as Jewish cultural studies, a separate but complementary entity to traditional Jewish studies. In addition, Bronner argues that general American cultural studies do not recognize Jews as an ethnic group and points to the struggles of Jewish cultural studies in North America to find its place in academia since the twentieth century. Bronner considers the book an example of what he calls “the Chutzpah of Jewish Cultural Studies” (1). Through case studies and personal narratives, he points to the complexity of defining what Jewish culture is nowadays, raising the need to dare to examine Jewish daily praxis and rituals while considering the local context and the outsider’s gaze. He points to the fact that Jews, outside of Israel, have always been a minority group concerned with the maintenance and representation of their heritage, which makes them a unique cultural group with its own frame of mind. Reference to contemporary Israel as a multicultural Jewish center where folklore and ethnography researchers face different challenges from those faced by American researchers adds some depth to the otherwise American-centered arguments. Nevertheless, the description in chapter 4 of the history of Jewish folklore research, with an emphasis on S. An-sky’s collection of Jewish folktales in early twentieth-century Europe, Dov Noy’s work in Israel, and Haya Bar-Yitzhak’s description of their legacy, lacks reference to any of today’s prominent Israeli folklorists who engage in Jewish cultural studies in Israeli academia. Moreover, from his American and postdiasporic perspective, Bronner states: “In America the tension between tradition and modernity is especially evident” (xiii). This determination is problematic, since in our digital world, well described by the author in chapter 10, Jewish communities mirror each other and appropriate modern traditions and rituals that suit their own cultural context, thus the tension between tradition and modernity affects all Jewish communities. One example of this tension is the debates over mixed-gender prayer at the Western Wall in Jerusalem between ultra-Orthodox and progressive Jewish streams. Another example is the issue of conversions performed by the Conservative and Reform movements in today’s Argentina despite a historic religious ban from 1927. The book consists of three parts. Part 1 discusses the formation of beliefs and ideas in the academy and in everyday life while pointing to the tangle between opposites: continuity and change, tradition and modernity, and past and future. Bronner argues that in the modern world, keeping and passing on tradition takes place to a great degree at home, while the media help promote traditions and rituals, sometimes altering them. He correctly argues, as many folklorists around [End Page 224] the world have shown, that ethnographic research on home praxis is enlightening. Thus, Bronner conducts an in-depth analysis of the dualities of “House” and “Home” while pointing to the cultural construction of the term “domestic” and the role of the stereotypical Jewish mother in Kitchen Judaism. Finally, he introduces the term: “Livingroom Judaism,” an exposition of Jewish symbols at home (79). Part 2 focuses on the ways rituals have been adapted, created, and imagined in modern Judaism. Bronner points to the traditional role of women in Jewish rituals but does not discuss gender issues in depth nor the leading part North American Jewish women took in breaking religious gender roles, mirrored in all Jewish communities around the world. Interpreting the bar mitzvah as a celebration that connects father and son, he portrays the ritual as a masculine expression of tradition in spite of the actual feminized synagogue. Bronner further...

Gendered Bodily Flux and Queer Catharsis in the Work of Bruno Schulz

This article analyzes themes of shapeshifting and gendered supplication by Polish Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) in relation to his biographical and cultural positioning in the decades preceding World War II. It does so through historically contextualized close readings of Schulz’s drawings and writings from 1919 through the 1930s, which render his embodied alienation and complex relationships to gender, Jewish cultural identity, and the pursuit of spiritual transcendence. Drawing on existing works in Jewish cultural studies and gender theory, Schulz’s shape-shifting and supplicated male characters are shown to speak, rather than to an alleged Jewish sexual perversity, to a history of Jewish affective alienation and sexual displacement in modern Europe. These themes in Schulz’s work are also considered as forms of aesthetic opposition to modernizing social ideologies and to the sexual antisemitism bolstered by them.

The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader

The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader

The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader

The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader

Leslie Morris. The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture outside the Margins. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 248 pp.

Reviewed by: The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture outside the Margins by Leslie Morris Todd Samuel Presner Leslie Morris. The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture outside the Margins. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 248 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001090 Bridging the fields of cultural studies, transnational literary and visual studies, translation studies, and urbanism, The Translated Jew is a theoretically rich and strikingly original contribution to Jewish studies. Situated outside the contours of conventional national literary and ethnic studies, Morris argues that "the Jewish" is always already translated in multiple cultural and historical contexts, which give rise to new mappings for the study of Jewish culture and identity. Placing translation at the center of her analysis, Morris undertakes a reassessment of German Jewish textuality by focusing on what she calls the "trans-Jewish." More than merely the act of "moving" from one language to another, the trans-Jewish is [End Page 218] about the continual accrual and dispersion of meaning that exceeds the referents "German" and "Jewish." In this sense, "trans" refers to translation, transnationality, and transformation—all processes that productively deterritorialize the object of study (the text, the work of art, the cultural artifact) as well as the very notion of Jewishness. As such, Morris problematizes the linkage between place and language—a connection that has been productively undone, she notes, by other scholars such as Werner Sollors and Marc Shell—to imagine modes of analysis that are unbound from assumptions that govern the study of national literatures. The theoretical framework of Morris's book is formed by a complex dialogue with a number of thinkers, including Hélène Cixous, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Yosef Yerushalmi, Roland Barthes, and many others. Her aim is to open up new conceptual and imaginative spaces of inquiry between Jewish studies and German studies by exploring zones of contact, intertextuality, transnationality, and translation. "Jewishness," like "Germanness," is hardly a given or authentic object of inquiry, Morris argues, but is instead something that is formed through various acts of translation, transmission, and movement. Rather than simply arguing this idea, she performs it through the original interweaving and staging that make up the structure of the book's chapters. Much more than an astute bricolage, the book coheres around a remarkably rich and highly nuanced set of cultural analyses of German and Jewish textuality, in its broadest possible sense, during the postwar period. To wit, she not only analyzes works of literature and poetry (such as that of W. G. Sebald, Paul Celan, and Rose Ausländer) but also delves into the interplay between urban spaces (Berlin's Sculpture Park) and public art practices, digital art, memory politics, and multidirectional translation (such as the works of Alfred Kazin and Daniel Blaufuks). As a whole, the book reconceives of the status of the "Jewish" literary, visual, and urban text (itself an unstable signifier and object of analysis) in ways that are provocative for literary studies writ large. Placing the Jewish text outside of the predefined and predetermined strictures of national literature, Morris focuses on the "klezmerical" dimensions of the object, unbounded and translated into the broadest possible range of cultural contexts. As she demonstrates so cogently in her chapter on Berlin's Sculpture Park, for instance, the indeterminate translation and movement of cultural objects and signifiers give rise to generative paradigms of entanglement between "Jewish" and "German" and, thus, new ways of thinking about cultural memory, public art, digital media, and urban spaces. This is also the approach she pursues in her "tangential" analyses of literary and visual texts that variously confront the representation of the Holocaust, such as the works of W. G. Sebald, Raymond Federman, Kazin, and Blaufuks. As such, she opens up and dismantles the hyphen between "German-Jewish" in ways that interrogate the basic categories of author and identity in the post-Holocaust world. As Morris argues, that which is "German" is already "Jewish," and that which is "Jewish" is already "German." By showing that the overdetermined space between the very words and concepts "German" and "Jewish" represents a kind of third space of encounter, Morris looks to the ways that fields and objects of study are intimately interwoven, and...

The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture outside the Margins by Leslie Morris

Reviewed by: The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture outside the Margins by Leslie Morris Todd Samuel Presner Leslie Morris. The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture outside the Margins. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 248 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001090 Bridging the fields of cultural studies, transnational literary and visual studies, translation studies, and urbanism, The Translated Jew is a theoretically rich and strikingly original contribution to Jewish studies. Situated outside the contours of conventional national literary and ethnic studies, Morris argues that "the Jewish" is always already translated in multiple cultural and historical contexts, which give rise to new mappings for the study of Jewish culture and identity. Placing translation at the center of her analysis, Morris undertakes a reassessment of German Jewish textuality by focusing on what she calls the "trans-Jewish." More than merely the act of "moving" from one language to another, the trans-Jewish is [End Page 218] about the continual accrual and dispersion of meaning that exceeds the referents "German" and "Jewish." In this sense, "trans" refers to translation, transnationality, and transformation—all processes that productively deterritorialize the object of study (the text, the work of art, the cultural artifact) as well as the very notion of Jewishness. As such, Morris problematizes the linkage between place and language—a connection that has been productively undone, she notes, by other scholars such as Werner Sollors and Marc Shell—to imagine modes of analysis that are unbound from assumptions that govern the study of national literatures. The theoretical framework of Morris's book is formed by a complex dialogue with a number of thinkers, including Hélène Cixous, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Yosef Yerushalmi, Roland Barthes, and many others. Her aim is to open up new conceptual and imaginative spaces of inquiry between Jewish studies and German studies by exploring zones of contact, intertextuality, transnationality, and translation. "Jewishness," like "Germanness," is hardly a given or authentic object of inquiry, Morris argues, but is instead something that is formed through various acts of translation, transmission, and movement. Rather than simply arguing this idea, she performs it through the original interweaving and staging that make up the structure of the book's chapters. Much more than an astute bricolage, the book coheres around a remarkably rich and highly nuanced set of cultural analyses of German and Jewish textuality, in its broadest possible sense, during the postwar period. To wit, she not only analyzes works of literature and poetry (such as that of W. G. Sebald, Paul Celan, and Rose Ausländer) but also delves into the interplay between urban spaces (Berlin's Sculpture Park) and public art practices, digital art, memory politics, and multidirectional translation (such as the works of Alfred Kazin and Daniel Blaufuks). As a whole, the book reconceives of the status of the "Jewish" literary, visual, and urban text (itself an unstable signifier and object of analysis) in ways that are provocative for literary studies writ large. Placing the Jewish text outside of the predefined and predetermined strictures of national literature, Morris focuses on the "klezmerical" dimensions of the object, unbounded and translated into the broadest possible range of cultural contexts. As she demonstrates so cogently in her chapter on Berlin's Sculpture Park, for instance, the indeterminate translation and movement of cultural objects and signifiers give rise to generative paradigms of entanglement between "Jewish" and "German" and, thus, new ways of thinking about cultural memory, public art, digital media, and urban spaces. This is also the approach she pursues in her "tangential" analyses of literary and visual texts that variously confront the representation of the Holocaust, such as the works of W. G. Sebald, Raymond Federman, Kazin, and Blaufuks. As such, she opens up and dismantles the hyphen between "German-Jewish" in ways that interrogate the basic categories of author and identity in the post-Holocaust world. As Morris argues, that which is "German" is already "Jewish," and that which is "Jewish" is already "German." By showing that the overdetermined space between the very words and concepts "German" and "Jewish" represents a kind of third space of encounter, Morris looks to the ways that fields and objects of study are intimately interwoven, and...

Jewy/screwy leading lady: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and the critique of rom-com femininity

ABSTRACTAs a common platform for stigmatized outsiders, subversive comedy holds special interest for Jewish cultural studies, feminist media studies, and critical race studies alike. However, these fields have just begun to analyze millennial Jewish women’s transgressive TV comedy, a subgenre taking America by storm in series like Girls, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Broad City. Further, feminist and critical race work on these series sometimes overlooks Jewish difference, reflecting a wider tendency in both fields to conflate Jews with white gentiles. To advance scholarship on race, gender, Jewishness, and millennial TV comedy, I analyze the CW’s musical romantic comedy series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019). I argue that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend originates a new paradigm of the “Jewy/screwy Leading Lady” and uses this figure to disrupt rom-com gender scripts from within, especially the rom-com myth that women can find wholeness through straight romance. My analysis invites Jewish studies to better grasp millennial Jewish American women’s experience and artistic production. I likewise expand feminist theories on race in comedy to better analyze Jewishness in romantic comedies and millennial “precarious-girl comedies.” More broadly, I invite these fields to converse with Jewish studies in order to address Jewishness as a salient ongoing difference in the twenty-first-century United States.

Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination ed. by Marjorie Lehman, Jane L. Kanarek, and Simon Bronner

Reviewed by: Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination ed. by Marjorie Lehman, Jane L. Kanarek, and Simon Bronner Keren R. McGinity Marjorie Lehman, Jane L. Kanarek, and Simon Bronner, eds. Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination. Jewish Cultural Studies, vol. 5. The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. Pp. 416. Paper, $37.50. ISBN 9781906764661. Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination, the fifth volume of Jewish Cultural Studies by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, fills a scholarly void well beyond this reviewer’s imagination. An interdisciplinary collection of chapters, Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination is an impressive anthology that spans time, place, voice, perspective, relationships, genres, fiction and nonfiction, texts, and images to produce a work that offers both breadth and depth. In short: it brings multiple worlds in conversation with each other. According to editors Marjorie Lehman, Jane L. Kanarek, and Simon Bronner, the collective endeavor sought to “enhance the visibility of mothers and call attention to them as an analytic category essential for narrating Jewishness.” (vii) As such, and at this juncture in contemporary life, this book represents a unique and acutely relevant work. Although the volume as a whole is best suited for graduate students and advanced readers, the dedicated educator could adopt select chapters in an undergraduate course and the students would benefit enormously from being introduced to the innovative analyses therein. The authors succeed at upending much of what scholars thought we knew about mothers, mothering, and motherhood while simultaneously looking toward a future that includes change from within. Jewish mothers have a long history of being the focus of many stereotypes and the butt of many jokes. Without a doubt, they are lampooned to an extent and in ways that no other individual perhaps of any ethnic or religious background has endured during the history of humankind. The self-sacrificing immigrant Yiddishe Mama may have earned some of her reputation, but as Joyce Antler already proved in You Never Call, You Never Write, there is much more to her than meets the eye. Paula Hyman, z”l, complicated the simplistic narratives earlier in Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Now we are fortunate to have seventeen authors and their capable editors to thank for putting a new array of tints on the artist’s palette that takes seriously Jewish maternal portraiture. Collectively they teach an important lesson: rather than one cultural icon of Jewishness there are, in fact, many. Shaped by second-wave feminist scholarship, the book’s premise that culture transcends natural givens and its application to Jewish mothers is ground breaking. This framework enables the volume to cast a wide net and reel in much more dynamic and multidimensional representations of a figure that had been relegated to family life. Now, however, the Jewish mother can be understood as operating at the very heart of Judaism, Jewish culture, and transmission of Jewish identity rather than as merely an accessory to them. The organized parts, “Idealized Mothers,” “Constructions and Contestations of Mothers,” “Activist Mothers,” “Re-embodying Mothers,” and “Recasting Mothers” move the reader along from how ideas about Jewish [End Page 225] mothers and motherhood are drawn and redrawn to cast Jewish women in particular ways as wives and/or mothers. The result is both a reification of certain ideals, marriage, and procreation, and at the same time a reinterpretation that reclaims such elemental things for Jewish continuity as the Hebrew language and Torah. The scope of this particular volume is truly impressive. Beginning with the idealization of Jewish motherhood in children’s books as a form of early-childhood education about gender roles in books that won the Sydney Taylor Award, to nineteenth-century Hungarian Neolog women’s prayer books in which women’s responsibility for young children is actually for the entire Jewish people, and on to how the binary associations of mother-bread and father-meat served as a metaphor for the Afghani Jewish family in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Analysis of some talmudic sources yield new insights about the high esteem for mothers relative to women more generally by sages in Ottoman Jewish society. A clustering of rabbinic narratives yields complexity...

Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual by Nathan Abrams

Reviewed by: Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual by Nathan Abrams Nigel Morris (bio) Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual New Brunswick By Nathan Abrams. NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. 340 pp. Determining a movie's meaning from its director's biography is a suspect strategy associated with journalism rather than academia. That Steven Spielberg suffered bullying as a teenager, for example, or watched numerous movies on TV because he lacked friends, helps explain his motivation and clarifies themes discernible in his pictures, but hardly accounts for their narrative or cinematic workings, critical or commercial reception, or ability to attract funding initially. An underdog success story endorses the American Dream and enhances a marketable star profile accordingly, yet evades cultural, political, or aesthetic concerns that help determine value. Nathan Abrams instead uses biography and production context to find in Stanley Kubrick's work "Jewish moments" that for most audiences pass as "universal" (16). His account of the director's life, career, and possible meanings of his films systematically "plumbs the depths of Kubrick's Jewishness" (18), which most obituaries ignored. Employing archival research, analyses of Kubrick's films chronologically explore "four key concerns—men, menschlikayt, evil, and Jews/Jewishness" (18). The second and fourth of these may be surprising: Kubrick was not religious, and ostensibly downplayed his heritage. The tripartite subtitle—such arithmetical discourse mirroring logic that Abrams unearths in Kubrick's projects, elucidated according to Kabbalistic principles the book suggests Kubrick was aware of—is key to the enigma. That Kubrick was a native New Yorker is objective fact, yet the director moved to Britain. His intellectualism will be self-evident to any prospective reader. The Jewishness is problematic to the extent that screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and Frederic Raphael, four decades apart, deemed him a Jew-hater. [End Page 196] Abrams shows how Kubrick methodically expunged Jewishness from characters inherited from literary sources, or eliminated them entirely, right up to Eyes Wide Shut (1999). He furthermore enjoyed a long, happy marriage to a German—not merely a former Hitler Youth, but niece of the director of the hate propaganda film Jud Süss, Veit Harlan, whom Kubrick, fascinated by him, met, and whose story he considered filming. Many such revelations are not new. Abrams, however, demonstrates persuasively how Kubrick's contradictions spring from the metropolitan culture—his Columbia University education and subsequent residence in Greenwich Village—that shaped the young artist, and that they informed his entire output. Their working-through confers unity and continuity on otherwise disparate films, mostly adaptations, across various genres. Abrams is a film professor specializing in Jewish topics and representations. For Jewish cultural studies this book might seem to offer an insider's view: note the general absence of italics for Hebrew and Yiddish terms. Particularly distinctive is exegesis consciously influenced by mid-rash, a traditional Judaic inferring of scriptural significance beyond overt meanings. The term appears in the text and index but—an uncharacteristic lapse from Abrams's usual care—remains undefined. Despite this unconventional film studies strategy, Abrams explains everything patiently and engagingly for secular and non-Jewish readers, too. Reclaiming Kubrick's sensibility for Jewish cultural identity, Abrams nevertheless enriches and expands the significance of this most cerebral and influential director's work. Abrams identifies "core elements" (21) in Kubrick's practice: mis-direction and manipulation, derived from his passionate chess playing and early photojournalism, which both routinely involved staging events. Chess and photography, Abrams claims, "were extraordinarily Jewish professions or pastimes" (4)—"even if the public was unaware" (82)—as were jazz, which Kubrick aspired to perform professionally, and boxing, the topic of his first film. These interests, Abrams contends, explicitly evidence Jewish content and sensibility in Kubrick's first three, New York-situated, features before analogy, allegory, and metaphor intervened as intentional misdirection. [End Page 197] Insistence that meaning is other than transparent produces readings that are tentative and speculative, or otherwise bluntly assertive as when "performative and comedic abilities" are "commonly known as Jewish traits" (33). Abrams treads a fine line between ingenious, provocative, illuminating exegesis to which no brief review can do justice, and seeming reinforcement, if not imposition, of stereotypes while simultaneously revealing antisemitic prejudices Kubrick...

Mapping Jewish American Literary Studies in the New Century

Mapping Jewish American Literary Studies in the New Century

Mapping Ararat: An Augmented Reality Walking Tour for an Imaginary Jewish Homeland

This article reviews Mapping Ararat: An Imaginary Jewish Homelands Project that utilizes augmented reality (AR) to create a walking tour that envisions what would have happened if Mordecai Noah’s 1825 plan to transform Grand Island, New York into a city of refuge had succeeded. Using mobile devices, tourists interact with Ararat artifacts and monuments created using 3D modeling software and inserted into the Grand Island landscape. The article reviews Mapping Ararat as a new form of mediated and virtual Jewish tourism and its implications for such fields as sensory ethnography, counterfactual history, and Jewish cultural studies. It also contextualizes the project in terms of augmented reality art and its extension of site-specific installation using locative media. The final section highlights four electronic monuments on the AR walking tour (flag, cornerstone, gravestones, and synagogue) with documentary video clips.

Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers by Stewart F. Lane, and: Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical by Stuart J. Hecht (review)

Reviewed by: Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers by Stewart F. Lane, and: Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical by Stuart J. Hecht David Gorshein Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers. By Stewart F. Lane. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011; pp. 232. Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical. By Stuart J. Hecht. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; pp. 240. Two recent titles contribute to the exponential growth of scholarship in Jewish cultural studies and musical theatre history. Both academic areas, previously peripheral to other disciplines, converge in the books Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers by producer Stewart Lane and Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical (part of the Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History series) by historian Stuart Hecht. While the scope of Lane’s book goes beyond the genre of musical theatre, its focus is primarily on the Jewishness of Broadway’s composers, choreographers, performers, and hit-makers. The two books often overlap in terms of content, but the methods employed by the authors are fundamentally different. Lane provides a spiraling history comprised of anecdotes and brief summaries, while Hecht’s cultural/historical analysis is grounded in dramaturgy and draws from theories in performance studies, sociology, and literary analysis. Lane’s enthusiasm in Jews on Broadway is palpable: the author’s voice is out of breath, and his sentences are packed tightly with names, numbers, and dates. Theatre history is an account of collaboration, full of various people and interactions, but the book does not provide a focused through-line in its synthesis of research other than a broadly constructed “Jewish” trail. Instead of describing the development of an ethnic voice in Broadway theatres and what that voice might mean, Lane provides multiple narratives, references to his own award-winning career as a producer, and unreliable anecdotes (his own and others’). One of the strengths of Jews on Broadway, however, is the book’s centralization of the disparate accounts of the Jewish performers, playwrights, composers, lyricists, and producers who left a legacy to Broadway. In the last three decades, US filmmakers have created hundreds of documentaries about and fictionalizations of industry subjects discussed in the books by Lane and Hecht. PBS created an entire series titled “American Masters,” which features in great detail personal stories, archival materials, and rare footage of artists and performers, mostly drawn [End Page 150] from Broadway. Evidently, Lane has viewed almost all of these programs, recounting in the book many details previously aired elsewhere without proper citation. Gathering these stories under a Jewish umbrella, his book presents them in an accessible way. Nonetheless, it presumes a preexisting interest in popular US theatre (especially musical theatre) to get beyond the dense enumeration of entire genres and figures that are not given sufficient critical consideration. Jews on Broadway is divided into eight chapters, an epilogue, notes, and bibliography. The book begins with a discussion of the superstars of Yiddish theatre, then moves from vaudeville to Broadway to a discussion of the golden age of the musical. After the fifth chapter, “From Communism to the Catskills,” Lane explores “Jewish Themes, Legends and Life in the 1960s and 1970s.” In the book’s final two chapters, he offers an assessment of Disney musicals, emerging voices in the American theatre, and his own career achievements. Some sections of the book are commendable, including Lane’s gentle look at how Broadway theatres were affected by the attacks on 9/11. But more striking in his historical survey are typos, awkward incomplete sentences, and inconsistencies in spelling, italics, and quotation marks. Further, he makes bombastic claims, such as his assertion that Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is “one of the greatest American dramas ever written—if not the greatest” (97). In other sweeping statements, he nostalgically describes entire decades of plays whose “quality prevailed over quantity” (177). In an egregious mistake, Lane claims that the play The Diary of Anne Frank is “based upon the actual published diary of a young woman who hid seven Jewish children from the Nazis during...

Jews at Home: The Domestication of Identity. Volume 2 of Jewish Cultural Studies (review)

Jews at Home: The Domestication of Identity. Volume 2 of Jewish Cultural Studies (review)

Soviet Jewishness and Cultural Studies

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: In 2009 Natan Sharansky, formerly an iconic refusenik and now an Israeli politician, was named chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the wing of the Israeli government historically charged with fostering Jewish immigration to Israel, traditionally known as aliya. Sharansky, however, immediately reformulated the central mission of the Jewish Agency away from aliya and toward the strengthening of secular Jewish identity around the world. The Forward reported: At the center of Sharansky's plan is the notion of peoplehood. He and a tight group of ideological allies—mostly other Russian Jews—believe that the Jewish Agency must now become a global promoter of Jewish identity, particularly among the young. Peoplehood, according to its proponents, is defined as a sense of connectivity between Jews who share a common history and fate. With Sharansky's ascent to this particular position and the concurrent shift in the Jewish Agency's mission from fomenter of migration to builder of secular Jewish identity, Jews have moved to the center of conversations about Jewish identity and culture. These new developments give reason to think seriously about Jewish culture and its impact on global Jewish culture. Indeed, a growing number of books and articles on the subject indicate that there is a new body of scholarship, defined by a cultural studies approach to the and post-Soviet Jewish experience. These new studies come from varied disciplines, such as history, anthropology, film studies, and literary criticism, to name a few, but they all put culture and cultural production at the center of scholarship on and post-Soviet Jewish community and identity. We call this emerging field Soviet Jewish Cultural This newly developing field sweeps across temporal and spatial boundaries. It encompasses Jewish experiences in both the and post-Soviet eras, as well as within the borders of the Former Union and outside of it, in Israel, North America, or elsewhere, wherever and post-Soviet Jews have migrated. What the subjects of all of this research have in common is the experience of having lived under the Union with its radical experiments in Jewish identity and culture. Scholars working in this emerging field generally do not look at and post-Soviet Jews through the more traditional lenses of vanishing diasporas, anti-Semitism, and the disappearance of Yiddish and Hebrew cultures. Rather than approaching the Jewish experience of Jews with presumptions of what it means to be Jewish, and whether in fact Jews measure up, this scholarship asks what it means to be Jewish in a and post-Soviet context. In what ways is Jewishness performed and represented? By taking a birds-eye, interdisciplinary view, we want to redefine the field of Jewish Studies, and to use particular examples of the new research to suggest what a cultural studies approach reveals about and post-Soviet Jewish culture. We will demonstrate first that scholars of Jewish Cultural Studies have focused on new forms of Jewish practice that have sometimes supplanted traditional religious practices. Secondly, we show that this body of scholarship in Jewish Cultural Studies complicates the idea that twentieth century Jewish history is a history of assimilation, a movement downward from authentic Jewish practice rooted in Jewish languages to the end of a distinctive Jewish life. Most importantly, this new scholarship takes a global rather than national perspective, since post-Soviet Jewry is one of the most transnational in contemporary Jewish life. Thus, in a post-Soviet, post-Zionist, post-assimilationist moment in global Jewish culture, this group of Jews with their unique cultural history may be placed at the center, not periphery, of the global Jewish experience. Therefore, the body of scholarship forming Jewish Cultural Studies has much to offer to scholars in Jewish and Russian Studies, as well as Diaspora Studies.

Hasidic Drag: Jewishness and Transvestism in the Modern Dances of Pauline Koner and Hadassah

Hasidic Drag: Jewishness and Transvestism in the Modern Dances of Pauline Koner and Hadassah Rebecca Rossen On February 27, 1932, Pauline Koner, an emerging talent in U.S. concert dance, presented a series of solos at New York City's Town Hall. For this occasion, Koner, who was Jewish, premiered Chassidic Song and Dance, in which the choreographer portrayed a young Hasidic Jew.1 To a certain extent, the folksy and mystical Chassidic Song and Dance was not so different from the other dances that constituted Koner's repertory in the early 1930s. Indeed, aided by an array of vibrant costumes, the U.S.-born soloist would effortlessly transform herself over the course of an evening into a bouquet of foreign types—Hindu goddess, Moorish gypsy, Javanese temple dancer, Andalusian maid, Spanish flamenco dancer, and Russian peasant girl. However, Chassidic Song and Dance offered one critical distinc tion. In all of her other ethnic solos, Koner portrayed female characters; in Chassidic Song and Dance, she presented herself as a boy—in Jewish drag. Koner was not the only female dancer performing in Jewish drag on New York stages in the 1920s and 1930s. In Bar Mitzvah(1929), Belle Didjah depicted an Orthodox boy on the verge of manhood; YeshivaBachur(1932) was one of several dances in which Dvora Lapson portrayed a Talmudic student; Benjamin Zemach, a male choreographer, adorned an ensemble of Jewish women and men in Hasidic outfits for a 1931 concert; and Lillian Shapero offered a more abstract rendition in her Hasidic Sketches (1936). Jewish drag was also prevalent on U.S. and European Jewish stages and Feminist Studies37, no. 2 (Summer 2011), © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 334 Rebecca Rosseti 535 screens in the early-twentieth century. The Viennese choreographer Gertrud Kraus cross-dressed in The Jewish Boy and Song of the Ghetto in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and Judith Berg danced in drag throughout Poland in Menachem Mendel and Pilpul Tants in the years leading up to World War II.2 The most famous female-to-male drag performer was Molly Picon, an influential figure in Yiddish theater and film who frequently cross-dressed in such Second Avenue stage hits as Yankele (1922-1925) and the films Ost undWest(East and West; 1923) and Yidl mitn Fidl(Yidl with His Fiddle; 1937), presaging Barbra Streisand's Yeshiva "boy" in Yentl (1983). Feminist schol ars working in Jewish cultural studies have discussed Picon's Jewish trans vestism, but there are no studies that consider this substantial trend in U.S. concert dance more broadly.3 Although Koner did not perform on Yiddish stages in Manhattan, many of her peers did, demonstrating that performers, choreography, and representational modes flowed sinuously across town and genre. In these drag performances, stagings of Jewishness became entangled with choreographies of gender and nation, resulting in ethnically ambiguous and androgynous figures who simultaneously bolstered and evaded the frameworks that defined them. The role of gender in the staging of Jewishness in U.S. modern dance cannot be underestimated. Indeed, Jewish American choreographers have not only struggled with the ethnic and racial histories that have been in scribed on their bodies but also with their gendered histories.1 When choreographers such as Koner staged Jewishness, they inevitably staged gender as well. This article considers the provocative intermingling of gender, Jewishness, and embodiment in U.S. modern dance during the interwar and immediate postwar years in the dance works of Koner and the Pales tinian-born Hadassah, who, like Koner, perpetuated, and even capitalized on, an exotic persona. However, in Hadassah's 1947 signature work, Shuvi Nafshi (Return Oh My Soul),5 she replaced cross-dressing with cross gesturing. Instead of presenting Jewish drag, this choreographer's dances effectively appropriated and recontextualized ritual gestures restricted to Jewish men. Both Koner and Hadassah undeniably reproduced certain stereotypes about the East and Eastern European Jews. Nonetheless, their ethnic (and gestural) transvestism challenged essentialist notions of 336 Rebecca Rossen gender and ethnicity and, in Hadassah's case, dramatically undermined the androcentrism of traditional Judaism. To a certain degree, this article aims to coalesce feminist studies, Jewish cultural studies, and dance studies in order to more fully...

Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain by Michael Ragussis

548 BOOK REVIEWS Michael Ragussis. Theatrical Nation:Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Pp. 247. $55.00. When Michael Ragussis’s pioneering Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity was published fifteen years ago, there were not many other treatments ofJewish representations in nineteenthcentury British literature. The major monograph on the topic, Edgar Rosenberg’s From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Literature, thirty-five years earlier, assumed a critical world dominated by New Criti­ cism and was written long before the theory wars, cultural studies, postcol­ onialism, and gender studies. A generation later Sander Gilman’s culturalstudies approach to Jewish representations in Jewish Self-Hatred: AntiSemitism and the Hidden Language ofJews (1986) andJew’s Body (1991) pro­ vided theoretically current examples of writing about Jewishness. Ragus­ sis’s 1995 monograph was joined in the same year by Frank Felsenstein’s Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660—1830, Bryan Cheyette’s Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875—1945, coming a year later, and the Boyarin brothers’ anthology of the “New Jewish Cultural Studies” a year after that. These four scholarly works, in addition to Gilman’s books and Todd M. Endelman’s historical writing on Anglo-Jewry, established the template on which later criticism would proceed. Since then there has been a steadily increasing number of monographs, articles, book chapters, dissertations, and collected essays on Anglo-Jewish writing, Jewish rep­ resentations in various national contexts (from English and American to French and German), and Jewish cultural studies (from queer theory to “tough Jews”). IfJews and Jewishness in literary studies had been some­ what neglected before the 1990s, the same cannot be said now. Ragussis’s new monograph is on how Jewish theatrical representations— and Irish and Scottish as well—relate to national identity. His earlier study stressed Protestant efforts to convertJews and maintain the Christian nature of the British state, whereas the present study deals little with religion and much more with ethnic identity. According to the 1995 book, the well subsidized but ineffectual attempts to convert Jews to Protestantism were inspired by millenarian narratives and myths about moral-religious prog­ ress. These cultural currents manifested themselves in literary treatments of the Jew in Scott, Edgeworth, Dickens, Aguilar, Arnold, Eliot, Disraeli, Trollope, and others. Ragussis describes various revisions of the core con­ version narratives that derive from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, as Shylock and Jessica compete with newer versions of male and female Jewish­ ness. Ragussis traces a recurrent pattern: some aspects of the dominant SiR, 50 (Fall 2011) BOOK REVIEWS 549 Shakespearean paradigm get revised philosemitically—Scott’s Rebecca does not convert as Jessica did, Eliot’s Christian hero Deronda converts to Judaism—but other parts remain untouched—Scott’s Isaac is just a lesser Shylock, Eliot’s Cohen family is materialistic and without Bildung, as are most of Trollope’s Jewish characters. Whereas Figures of Conversion dealt mostly with canonical fiction, the new monograph deals mostly with unfa­ miliar plays. Just asJewish literary studies began to flourish in the 1990s, so too studies of Georgian and Romantic-era theater emerged at the same time. Scholars directed their attention to the concept of theatricality and to once popular but now neglected plays (i.e., the Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama [2003] edited by Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer provides an orienta­ tion to this area of study). Except for Scott and Byron, the canonical Ro­ mantic poets were not read extensively in their own time, but theater was popular culture, which makes dramatic literature a better vehicle for un­ covering sociological meanings. When Theatrical Nation asks repeatedly what cultural work the plays perform, it does not seem outlandish—to use one of the keywords in the study—because the audiences made their pref­ erences clear, even sometimes loudly protesting and rioting. Ragussis’s ar­ gument is that the Georgian theater responded symptomatically to the po­ litical project of forging a British nation from different ethnic groups. The 1707 Act of Union with Scotland, the “Jew Bill” of 1753, and Act of Union with...

Really Jewish? Joan Rivers Live at the Apollo

ABSTRACTThis article analyses Joan Rivers' hosting of the BBC's flagship stand-up comedy programme, Live at the Apollo, in 2007. It draws methodologically on both performance studies and Jewish cultural studies, the latter of which aims to interrogate the cultural politics of difference. In doing so, it attempts to read the ways that Rivers' performance might be coded as Jewish by positioning it in relation to theories and practices of ‘Jewish humour’, other autobiographical texts by Rivers and the author's own cultural experience. The analysis focusses, in particular, on what Susan Melrose (2007) would call Rivers’ ‘signature practices’ and how these were informed by specific experiences and cultural contexts in the 1960s. These include Rivers’ season playing the Borscht Belt and her exposure to the live performance work of Lenny Bruce, which are embodied as cultural memory in Rivers’ set at the Apollo.

Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity James Loeffler Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity. By Jonathan Freedman. New York: Columbia. 2008. Jews have long occupied a curious place in the collective imagination of American Studies. While scholars consistently invoke Jewish images and influences as defining elements of modern American culture, they all too frequently insist on viewing Jewish identity solely in terms of its relationship to the black-white racial dichotomy, ignoring its own unique fusion of ethnic, religious, and national dimensions. In Klezmer America, Jonathan Freedman's welcome new study, he confronts this problem directly and offers a solution in the form of an ambitious, impassioned call for a revival of the study of Jewish ethnicity in American culture. [End Page 152] Freedman makes his case through a virtuoso set of peregrinations through the works of writers such as Tony Kushner, Philip Roth, and Arthur Miller, along with briefer, highly suggestive excursions into the Jewish-Latino, Jewish-Asian American, and even Jewish-Evangelical Christian nexuses in contemporary fiction. He selects music as his linking motif for these case studies, highlighting the hybrid, destabilizing force of klezmer music in contemporary Jewish and American culture. From its early modern East European folk origins, klezmer dramatically morphed in late twentieth-century America into a creative vehicle for a loose movement of musicians who frequently collapse the lines between high and low, black and white, Jewish and non-Jewish, synagogue and jazz club. Freedman sees this contemporary klezmer—multicultural and avant-garde, yet rooted in Jewish tradition—as a neat expression of Jewish-American creativity as a whole. It is one that substitutes postmodern "affinity" for more rigid notions of cultural ownership or national heritage, let alone the rigidity of race. Freedman's book is an enjoyable mixture of literary criticism and genuine cultural sleuthing into the Jewish-American past. Building on the work of the newer Jewish Cultural Studies, he convincingly demonstrates how, one way or another, Jewishness forms a crucial counterpoint to various kinds of American ethnic identity. Ironically, though, the reader in search of a deeper account of the music referred to in the book's title will come away frustrated by its casual, selective approach in this regard. Despite its present-day "relentless hybridity," for most of the twentieth century, American klezmer was neither a modernist cultural movement nor a multicultural mélange, but an immigrant ethnic folk music. Indeed, one of the enduring mysteries of Jewish-American cultural history is why this music failed to undergo the great mid-century cultural mainstreaming that took place for literature. Freedman does not ask, for instance, why Sholem Aleichem's Yiddish stories found new life as Broadway's Fiddler on the Roof, the ultimate symbol of post-Holocaust Jewish-American identity, yet most American Jews abandoned klezmer until the 1990s. So too is the story of this musical decline and reemergence a more complex tale than Freedman's politicized reading of it as the sound of "rootless cosmopolitanism," "queer diasporism," and "cultural syncretism." Rather than a progressive Jewish rejection of ethnic essentialism, klezmer's contemporary boom might just as easily be understood as a post-Civil Rights era re-ethnicization (and re-Europeanization) of Jewish identity at the very point when American urban ethnicity had seemingly reached its nadir. This criticism aside, Freedman's book offers scintillating readings of an impressive array of texts and a valuable, provocative challenge to scholars who reduce modern Jewish artists to cultural appropriators, wannabe blacks, or would-be WASPs. Most importantly, his convincing redeployment of the frame of Jewish ethnicity in studying American culture should inspire others to follow in his footsteps. James Loeffler University of Virginia Copyright © 2011 Mid-America American Studies Association

Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (review)

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...

Intimations of difference: Dvora Baron in the modern Hebrew renaissance

Dvora Baron (1887-1956) has been called founding mother of Hebrew women's literature. Born in a small town on the outskirts of Minsk to the community rabbi, Baron immigrated from the Jewish Pale of Settlement to Palestine in 1910. Although she was not the only woman writing in Hebrew in the first few decades of the twentieth century, Baron was the only woman to achieve recognition in the canon of Modern Hebrew fiction during that period. As such, her work reflects both the revolutionary and conservative qualities of the Modern Hebrew Renaissance. Rooted in the Jewish tradition and using the Hebrew language as its battle cry, the Modern Hebrew Renaissance can be said to have distinguished itself from its patriarchal past by fostering a woman's literary emergence. At the same time, the fact that Dvora Baron was the only woman writing in the first decades of the twentieth century who was included into the Renaissance's literary canon indicates the movement's resistance to its own potentially revolutionary nature. Sheila E. Jelen reveals how Baron viewed her own singularity and what this teaches us about the contours of the Modern Hebrew Renaissance - its imperatives and assumptions, its successes and failures. This is the first full-length, English language treatment of Baron's Hebrew corpus. It will be of interest to scholars of literary studies, gender studies, Jewish cultural studies, Jewish literary studies, and Hebrew literary studies.