Jewish Popular Culture Research Articles

Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 - 1939 (review)

Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 - 1939 (review)

The Representation of the Body in Some Old Yiddish Ethical Texts

Abstract In the last decades, the study of the body in different religions, including the Jewish tradition, gave rise to a great number of publications. Most of the articles are based on rabbinical sources in Hebrew or Aramaic. But we find fewer publications on the representation of the body in Jewish popular culture. The Old Yiddish literature provides many books which could help us to analyse the image of the body, as reflected in different types of texts, all of them show the growing importance of the body during the early modern period.

Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1929 by Anna Shternshis (review)

380 SEER, 87, 2, APRIL 200g many sympathisers tended to publicise only positiveinformation while overlooking or suppressing thenegative'(p. 4). Even giventheresults ofher painstaking workin thearchives, it is stillnot entirely clearwhyso many gifted peoplefailedto call fora plagueon theHouse ofStalinas wellas on theHouse ofHitler.Whydid theyassumethattherewas no third, fourth or fifth way?But as we read elsewhere in Shakespeare's tragedy, 'Hang up philosophy! Unlessphilosophy can makea Juliet'. Department ofSlavonic Studies Martin Dewhirst University ofGlasgow Shternshis, Anna. Soviet andKosher: Jewish Popular Culture in theSoviet Union, ig2j-ig2g. Indiana University Press, Bloomingtonand Indianapolis, 2006. xxiii+ 252 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $25.00 (paperback) On 12July1943the New York YiddishdailyForverts publishedan article entitled'The SovietJews and the AmericanJews'. The author,Lazar Fagelman, arguedthatthetwodisparate environments had formed numerous dissimilarities: 'Now we have to understand thatSovietJewsdiffer fromus; their habits, valuesand manners are different; their visionoflifeis different; theyhave a different attitude to people, to the worldand to all political, economicand moralproblems.' Indeed,during thepost-1917 quarterofa century, momentous differences had emerged between themostsocially mobileandurbanized segments ofthe two Jewish groups. Atthesametime,thelifestyle ofbothWestern and Soviet Jewishcity-dwellers significantly diverged fromthemannersoflivingin the Sovietized areasoftheformer Pale ofJewishSettlement. Despitethecentral and local authorities' massiveendeavoursto secularize, industrialize, collectivizeand Birobidzhanize theshtetl, thehabitatofEast EuropeanJewish life endured tillthebeginning ofWorldWarTwo andinsomecaseslivedon even after thewar(see,e.g.,CharlesE. Hoffman, RedShtetl: TheSurvival ofa Jewish Town under Soviet Communism, New York,2002). In hermonograph, Soviet andKosher, AnnaShternshis, Assistant Professor of YiddishLanguageand Literature at theUniversity ofToronto,emphasizes thatJewsfromYiddish-speaking shtetlach had verylittlein commonwith thosewholivedinthebigcitiesnotonlybecausetheyspokeYiddishand not Russianbut also because ofthedifferences in theinformation conveyedto thembytheSovietcultural productions' (p. 182).This useful book,based on Shternshis's 2001 OxfordDPhil thesis, givesthefirst comprehensive insight intoSovietJewishcultural lifeof the 1920sand 1930s,discussing predominantly thefollowing twoproblems:thedeclineor modification of religious traditions, and the propagandist role of state-sponsored formsofJewish culture, in Yiddishand Russian.Significant space is devotedalso to various Sovietcultural products, suchas songsand theatre performances, whichare analysedas reflections ofcontemporaneous eventsand morals. Historians usuallyshunthefrustrating taskofgetting reliableinformation from cascadesofmemories. It is wellknownthatpeople tendto forget and REVIEWS 381 mixup thedetailsofwhatthey weredestined tosee,hearordo manydecades ago. Moreover,theyofteninterpret thoseeventsfromthevantagepointof their contemporary ideological standof,say,Communists turned Zionists and Americanpatriots. In otherwords,in theirrecollections informants reveal their present-day perception oftheperception thatthey had at thetimeofthe events. For all that,Shternshis - whoseresearch projectsoughtto establish how theSovietmachinery ofJewish culture had beenperceived bythepopulation - conducted 225in-depth interviews withpeoplebornon theterritory ofthe SovietUnionno laterthan1930.She metsomeofherinformants in Russia, butthemajority ofthemwereimmigrants livingin Americaand Germany. She knewthattheirstories had to be manytimesfiltered beforefinding a place in herbook.As a result, she is confident that' [c]ross-examination of testimonies witharchival andpublished datagivesusthefullest picture todate ofthedailylivesofSoviet Jewsduring thisperiod'(p.xviii). Methodologically, Soviet andKosher can be seen as an exampleof successful utilization of oral history. The title, Soviet andKosher, reflects themainthesisoftheresearch: Jewish traditions did notdisappear, butweresignificantly transformed in theSoviet environment. Whilein urbansettings acculturation was verystrong and the younger urbanités' Jewish identity was,toborrowthewordsoftheAmerican historianArcadius Kahan [EssaysinJewishSocialandEconomic History, Chicago, IL, 1986,p. 189)'leftonlyas a mythical, almostmystical qualityincomprehensiveto theirenvironment and one thatcould become incomprehensible to themselves', olderpeople did notreplacetheirfaith in God by a faithin Communism. Old-timers had a chanceto preserve theirtraditional lifestyle, especiallyiftheychose to stayput in the shtetl.Meanwhile,the younger generation was takenin bytheKremlin'spropagandaand underwent rapid Sovietization. Still,the generationinterviewed by Shternshis could speak Yiddishand remembered songs,sayings, legendsand otherelements ofEast EuropeanJewish lore. Thanksto thiswell-written and informative study, the Soviet-and-kosher population appearslessenigmatic. In anycase,one can easierunderstand the problems ofgauging the(post-) Soviet Jewish identity byapplying toitWestern yardsticks ofJewishness. Skirball Department ofHebrew and Judaic Studies G. Estraikh NewYork University Bernstein, Frances Lee. TheDictatorship ofSex:Ltfestyle Advice for theSoviet Masses.NorthernIllinoisUniversity Press,DeKalb, IL, 2007. xvii + 246 pp. Illustrations. Notes.Bibliography. Index.$42.00. Frances Lee Bernstein'sTheDictatorship ofSexcontinues thehistorical investigation ofRussia'smedicalprofession by NancyFriedenand Laura Engelstein ,as wellas thatofRussiansexuality by IgorKon, Engelstein and Eric Naiman. By comparisonto these other scholars,Bernsteindraws more overtly upon Foucaultto explainhow the earlySovietmedicalprofession ...

Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 by Anna Shternshis (review)

Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 by Anna Shternshis (review)

American Judaism in Popular Culture (review)

Reviewed by: American Judaism in Popular Culture Nathan Abrams (bio) American Judaism in Popular Culture. Edited by Leonard J. Greenspoon and Ronald A. Simkins. Studies in Jewish Civilization Vol. 17. Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2007. xvi + 286 pp. In the recent movie Wedding Daze (dir. Michael Ian Black, 2006), an Orthodox Jewish character has invented a new Jewish soft toy. Called “the Jewnicorn,” it is, as its name implies, a unicorn bedecked in Stars of David, which, when squeezed, recites a blessing in Hebrew. Although clearly inserted into the movie simply for laughs, the Jewnicorn is not as far-fetched as the filmmakers may think: Judith S. Neulander’s essay in this volume, “Tchotchkes: A Study of Popular Culture in Tangible Form,” points out that such trinkets have been existence in American Jewish popular culture since the late nineteenth century at least and have encompassed an array of comparably kitsch items. Although not the lead essay, Neulander’s contribution gives an idea of the range of this collection, collated from the proceedings of the seventeenth [End Page 120] annual symposium of the Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization at the Harris Center for Judaic Studies at Creighton University. This volume, number 17 in the series, includes thirteen other essays that cover topics such as Hollywood, the Three Stooges, S. J. Perelman, theater, Bob Dylan, rock ‘n’ roll, sports, and comics by contributors including Jenna Weisman Joselit, Lawrence Baron, Steven Alan Carr, Lynn Rapaport, Thomas A. Kuhlman, Ben Furnish, Nora L. Rubel, Jeffrey S. Gurock, Steven Horowitz, and Leonard J. Greenspoon. In addition to Neulander’s piece, the other notable essays here are G. Andrew Tooze’s “David of Hollywood: Israelite King or American Superhero,” Dan W. Clanton Jr.’s “From Mr. Hankey to The Hebrew Hammer: Hanukkah in Pop Culture,” and Dereck Daschke’s “‘Oh Mama, Could This Really Be the End?’: The Apocalyptic Bob Dylan.” Tooze considers how, in what can now be considered a time-honored fashion, Hollywood remade the biblical character of David over as a cartoon hero, the prototype for Captain America, complete with cape and shield. Clanton, in contrast, analyses the appearance and use of the festival of Hanukkah in the television series South Park and Friends and the movie The Hebrew Hammer (dir. Jonathan Kesselman, 2003), respectively. If I have a minor criticism here, it is that his exploration of the popular cultural products could have been longer and more detailed in comparison to his section on the origins of Hanukkah. Finally, Daschke looks at the biblical motif running throughout Dylan’s music and in doing so shows how in appropriating the lines of the biblical prophets, Dylan, in a sense, became their modern incarnation. While it was certainly pleasurable, for this reader at least, to see that the object of study in this volume is how Judaism as religion—as opposed to the more typical focus on Jewishness as ethnicity—has influenced American popular culture, it certainly would have been interesting to consider the other side of the equation: whether and how far popular culture has influenced American Judaism, particularly those branches of Orthodoxy that present themselves as impervious to the outside world. Nevertheless, these minor criticisms aside, taken together, these essays provide a useful primer for the student seeking to discover the range of Jewish cultural production in the United States and add to the growing collection of similar studies, for example, You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture, edited by Vincent Brook (2006). Such students may then even be able to take the next step and consider what the appearance of the Jewnicorn, or its ill-fated counterpart the “Jewla Hoop” (a Hula Hoop in the shape of a Star of David which, owing to its shape, doesn’t work), in Wedding Daze can tell us. [End Page 121] Nathan Abrams Bangor University Nathan Abrams Nathan Abrams, director of film studies at Bangor University in the United Kingdom, is author of Commentary Magazine, 1945–1959: ‘A Journal of Significant Thought and Opinion’ (2006) and editor of Jews & Sex (2008). Copyright © 2009 American Jewish Historical Society

Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939, Anna Shternshis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939, Anna Shternshis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923‐1939 – By Anna Shternshis

Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923‐1939 – By Anna Shternshis

Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (review)

Reviewed by: Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 David Shneer Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939, by Anna Shternshis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. 252 pp. $24.95. The law of unintended consequences defines Anna Shternshis' fascinating new book, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the new Soviet government enacted policies to eliminate perceived injustices from the tsarist regime and to turn its multiethnic empire into a Soviet nation. Soviet Jews were some of the biggest beneficiaries of these new policies. Old pre-revolutionary laws that restricted Jews' mobility and access to education were eliminated; this change caused a social revolution, with Jews migrating, both physically and metaphorically, to the centers of power. At the same time, the government engaged in a cultural revolution to create a new kind of Soviet Jew. Several scholars have examined this cultural revolution, which took place primarily in Soviet Jews' designated native language, Yiddish, and have looked at the who, what, where, when and why's of Soviet Jewish culture. But Shternshis asks a different question—what the results of this social and cultural revolution were. How did Soviet Jews understand Jewish culture? What did being Jewish mean to those targeted by this cultural revolution? Historians are notoriously bad at answering questions like these. In general it is much harder to find out what consumers of culture thought, and much easier to look at what and how culture was produced. Most everyday theater goers, newspaper readers, and music listeners don't leave materials in archives explaining their motives. So Shternshis went directly to the source and conducted more than 100 in-depth interviews on three continents over four years to find out just what it meant to those who grew up in interwar Soviet Union to be a Soviet Jew. She focuses on the interwar period when there was a concerted state effort to transform, in her words, "Jews into Soviets," to eliminate old forms of Jewish culture and identity and create new forms of positive identification with the state. Shternshis complicates the standard narrative of Soviet Jewish history that says that Jews identified as Jews only through identities ascribed to them—by the state, in their passports (which had a line for nationality), and through state and social antisemitism. Shternshis finds that this generation of [End Page 176] Soviet Jews identified as Jews because of Soviet Yiddish culture, by listening to certain musicians, seeing certain movies and being together as Jews, even if, according to Shternshis, this was not what the government intended. An example from Soviet Yiddish culture—the Yiddish secular schools established by the government were, according to Shternshis, established to propagandize to Jewish children, teaching them the evils of Judaism, the class problems of major Jewish holidays, and the way the rabbinic elite oppressed Jews. In fact, most of her respondents do not positively identify with Judaism, suggesting that the schools were a success. But her students also remember feeling very Jewish about attending the schools, in which nearly all the students were Jewish, where different schools' sports teams played one another, pitting Jews against Ukrainians, and in which they learned about Yiddish literature and developed an appreciation for writers like Sholem Aleichem. Shternshis sees this as Jews "on the ground" complicating the intentions of those in Moscow. An example from Russian-language Jewish culture—an overwhelming number of her respondents talked about the 1936 Russian-language film Seekers of Happiness as the most important Jewish film they remember seeing. The film depicts a Jewish family coming to the Soviet Union to develop a communal farm in Birobidzhan, the far eastern territory designated the "Jewish autonomous region" in 1934. What struck Shternshis in her interviews was that her respondents identified with the film's negative character, a stereotype of the "old" Jew in the film named Pinya, and not with the "new" Soviet Jews, who were building the commune. Pinya is nervous, talks about money, can't work collectively, and spends the whole movie searching for gold rather than laboring. And yet, most of her respondents remember some...

Cool Jewz: Contemporary Jewish Identity in Popular Culture/-/-An Introduction

“Cool Jewz.” The term came to me as a response to watching the film The Hebrew Hammer ( Jonathan Kesselman, 2003). What is going on, I asked myself, in Jewish Popular Culture? Since 1988 and Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own, Jon Stratton’s Coming Out Jewish, David Zurawik’s The Jews of Prime Time, and Paul Buhle’s From the Lower East Side to Hollywood,1 new scholarship has been emerging which seeks to reclaim Jewish cultural history from essentialist ontologies about Jewish identity (like David Desser and Lester Friedman’s American Jewish Filmmakers).2 I remember seeing Jon Lovitz on David Letterman’s show one night. “So, Jon,” Letterman asked, “you’re a Jew?” To which Lovitz replied, “Well, Jewish.” Jews and Judaism were ceasing to be superficial and one-dimensional identities which presupposed cultural consensus—on religious praxis, on politics (specifically about the State of Israel), on history (specifically about the Holocaust). Despite the stereotype of Jewish domination of twentieth-century

Soviet and kosher: Jewish popular culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939

Acknowledgments Introduction: Sara F.'s Kosher Pork Note on Transliteration 1. Antireligious Propaganda and the Transformation of Jewish Institutions and Traditions 2. From Illiteracy to Worker Correspondents: Soviet Yiddish Amateur Writing 3. Amateur Local Yiddish Theaters 4. Soviet Yiddish Songs as a Mirror of Jewish Identity 5. Soviet in Form, National in Content: Russian Jewish Popular Culture Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Soviet and Kosher:Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. By Anna Shternshis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. xxiii, 252 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $65.00, hard bound. $24.95, paper.

Soviet and Kosher:Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. By Anna Shternshis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. xxiii, 252 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $65.00, hard bound. $24.95, paper.

Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 13 : The Holocaust and its Aftermath; Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 14 : Jews in the Polish Borderlands: The Holocaust and its Aftermath; Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 15 : Jewish Religious Life, 1500–1900; Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 16 : Jewish Popular Culture and its AfterlifePolonskyAntony Polin: Studies in

Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, <i>vol. 13</i> : The Holocaust and its Aftermath; Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, <i>vol. 14</i> : Jews in the Polish Borderlands: The Holocaust and its Aftermath; Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, <i>vol. 15</i> : Jewish Religious Life, 1500–1900; Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, <i>vol. 16</i> : Jewish Popular Culture and its AfterlifePolonskyAntony <i>Polin: Studies in

Reading the Popular in American Jewish Studies

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 694–709 Reading the Popular in American Jewish Studies LAURENCE ROTH MICHAEL IMMERSO. Coney Island: The People’s Playground. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Pp. viii Ⳮ 199. LAWRENCE J. EPSTEIN. The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America. New York: PublicAffairs, 2001. Pp. xxii Ⳮ 356. Heeb: The New Jew Review. Spring 2003. The Plotz Retrospective. The Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art at Congregation Rodeph Shalom, Philadelphia. April 25–August 17, 2003. Michael Immerso’s and Lawrence J. Epstein’s wide-ranging histories help crystallize a number of trends, and problems, in contemporary scholarship on the popular arts in American and American Jewish life. Both books attempt to convey to a broad readership a compelling story about the rise and fall of a popular phenomenon. Both are ‘‘celebrations’’ of those phenomena, and examples of how such popular scholarship— scholarship aimed primarily at lay readers—is informed and legitimated by the recent boom in the theory and criticism of mass culture, popular culture, the vernacular, and the everyday. Such upbeat interpretations appeal to America’s current fascination with its commodities and with the mundane bric-a-brac of its modern life, as well as with its entertainments and entertainment-delivery systems. Call these stories cultural solipsism in the face of global turbulence and instability, or call them a critical rereading and unpacking of American identities and cultural hegemony, in either case they now have a market value as high as any Britney Spears collectible on eBay. Much fun can be had in lampooning this publishing trend—witness the humor column in the October 6, 2003, issue of the New Yorker that The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. READING THE POPULAR—ROTH 695 offered mock book reviews of historical studies of vanilla (The Flavor That Changed the World), pet cats (The House Cat That Changed the World), and wallets (The Pocket Lint That Changed the World). But for those of us interested in how questions of race, class, ethnicity, gender, politics, and religion intersect with our readings of the everyday and our consumption of the popular arts, satires such as this are instructive. They remind us that, in light of the current obsession with everything popular, we must pay careful and close attention to the culturally specific ways in which representations of individual and collective identities are being shaped and reshaped, told and retold, in the popular arts. This is especially true when that process is examined in books like Immerso’s and Epstein’s histories. For the importance of those histories is that they illustrate to readers why popular and mass culture are the dominant social-construction engines in modern America. In both these books we are invited to contemplate how the boundaries and bridges between individuals and collectives—and between past, present, and future—are conjured and reinterpreted in the popular and mass-culture realms. Andreas Huyssen persuasively argues that it is through the media and information technologies embedded in these realms that ‘‘the sense of lived time is being renegotiated in our contemporary cultures of memory.’’1 This transformation of the human perception of time, space, and identity erupts into the popular imaginary in movies like Christopher Nolan’s Memento or Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, and spills over into a cultural need for the sorts of reassurances and solutions provided by the popular arts. For scholars of American Jewish popular culture and literature, books such as Epstein’s and Immerso’s, and ‘‘alternative’’ publications such as Heeb and Plotz: The Zine for the Vaclempt, offer an opportunity to consider how American Jewish studies is an important site of struggle over two questions: How best to unravel the scope and power of American popular and mass culture, and who constitutes the audience for that project. Jeffrey Melnick takes up these questions in a recent review essay, when he outlines what scholarship in American Jewish studies ought to look like if it aspires to be a relevant mode of contemporary inquiry...

Jewish Popular Culture in the Research Perspective of European Ethnology.

Jewish Popular Culture in the Research Perspective of European Ethnology.

The "Yinglish" Music of Mickey Katz

THE American-Jewish community has generally kept its Jewish popular culture separate from the American popular culture in which it has participated and which indeed it has helped to shape. Yiddish words and phrases have often crept into the comic strips and radio and television comedy, but Yiddish entertainment has for a long time remained isolated from developments in American popular culture. Yiddish entertainment, as distinguished from serious Yiddish theatre, has largely taken the form of Yiddish-American Revues, produced on New York's Second Avenue, the Yiddish Broadway, with short tours to larger cities west of New York. These revues have been unashamedly sentimental (and corny) operettas dealing with eastern European life, or the experiences of the East-Europe immigrant in the new land and his adjustment to it. Their humor, format, and music have been European; their atmosphere still reflects the turn of the century. The most popular songs from these revues have usually been recorded, giving Jews in the smaller towns a chance to share in this popular culture. In the last decade or so, however, out of the Jewish resorts in the Catskill Mountains near New York has come a new popular culture. Still in musical comedy, revue, or now straight vaudeville form, the new product is modern American in that it selects American hit tunes, comedy acts or situations which are translated into a basic American Yiddish consisting only of the most widely known phrases and words. As such it is comprehensible even to the younger Jews who do not understand Yiddish, and can achieve a comic effect largely because of the incongruity between American material and a more or less