You Should See Yourself

Transcription

You Should See
Yourself
⡣
Jewish Ide ntity
in Po stmode rn
Ame rican Culture
Edite d by Vince nt B rook
Rutg e r s Unive r sity Pre s s
New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
You should see yourself : Jewish identity in postmodern American culture / Vincent
Brook, editor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978–0–8135–3844–0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978–0–8135–3845–7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Jews in popular culture—United States. 2. Popular culture—Religious aspects—
Judaism. 3. Postmodernism—United States. 4. Postmodernism—Religious
aspects—Judaism. I. Brook,Vincent, 1946–. II. Title.
NX652.J48Y68 2006
700'.452992400904—dc22
2005028060
A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available
from the British Library.
This collection copyright © 2006 by Rutgers,The State University
Individual chapters copyright © 2006 in the names of their authors
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press,
100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this
prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.
Manufactured in the United States of America
For Karen, my helpmeet, soul mate, true love, and best friend
Conte nts
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction: Seeing Isn’t Believing
1
Vi nc e nt Brook
Lite rature
Re-imagining the Jew’s Body: From Self-Loathing
to “Grepts”
17
19
Andrea Mo st
Recalling “Home” from Beneath the Shadow of
the Holocaust: American Jewish Women Writers
of the New Wave
37
Janet Handle r Bur ste in
Theate r
“Your World Is Very Different from Mine”: Troubling
Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Theater
55
57
Jan Lewis
Tony Kushner’s Metaphorical Jew
76
Jame s Fishe r
M us ic
Exploring the Postmodern Landscape of Jewish Music
95
97
Judah M. Cohe n
Continuity, Creativity, and Conflict: The Ongoing Search
for “Jewish” Music
119
Mar sha Bryan Ede lman
vii
viii
Contents
Dance
The Jewish Man and His Dancing Shtick: Stock
Characterization and Jewish Masculinity
in Postmodern Dance
135
137
Re becca Ro sse n
Painting and Ph otog raphy
Between Exile and Irony: Modernism, Postmodernism,
and Jewish Modes of Thought
155
157
Ruth We i sb e rg
Observant Jews and the Photographic Arena of Looks
176
MacDonald Moore and De borah Dash Moore
Film
Joke-Work: The Construction of Jewish Postmodern
Identity in Contemporary Theory and American Film
205
207
Ruth D. Johnston
They All Are Jews
230
Dani e l I tz kov i tz
Stand-up Come dy
Genealogies of Jewish Stand-up: Looking Back,
Moving Beyond
253
255
Donald We be r
Te levis ion
Something Old Is New Again? Postmodern Jewishness
in Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development,
and The O.C.
273
277
M i c he le B ye r s and Ro sal i n K ri e g e r
“Y’all Killed Him, We Didn’t!” Jewish Self-Hatred
and The Larry Sanders Show
298
Vi nc e nt Brook
Contributors
Index
319
323
Acknowle dgme nt s
I must start by thanking all the contributors to this volume, who have produced exceptional work under typically trying conditions, and who have
weathered my editorial nudginess with admirable aplomb. Second in line of
gratitude are the editors at Rutgers, especially editor-in-chief Leslie Mitchner,
whose guidance was exemplary and whose own nudginess was kept to a
mandatory minimum. The outside readers also come in for encomiums for
their extremely useful comments that greatly enhanced the volume, as do Eric
Schramm for his superb copyediting and Matt Gatlin for his selfless technical
assistance. Last not least, the Jewish cultural practitioners discussed in this volume deserve perhaps the greatest plaudits, since without their work to analyze, gain succor from, and enjoy, we all would be whistling a mute tune from
a blank score to an empty house.
ix
Introduction
Se eing Isn’t Be lieving
Vincent Brook
Two Jews, three opinions notwithstanding, this much is indisputable: the quantitative level of American Jewish cultural production has
surged remarkably in the past fifteen to twenty years. New waves of film and
literature have been heralded in various Jewish journals, a major klezmer revival is underway, bagels have become as commonplace as pizza, kabbalah
as cool as crystals, and as the 1976 “Too Jewish?” exhibit and my own book
Something Ain’t Kosher Here:The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (2003) indicate, similar trends have marked the fine arts and television as well.1 As the titles of the
exhibit and my book also suggest, however, the qualitative level of this cultural
accretion, especially as it relates to Jewish identity, is less assured—and less
reassuring.
In response both to the palpable rise in American Jewish culture and its
evaluative disparities, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture (NFJC) in
2002 assembled a Commission on the Future of Jewish Culture to examine
the phenomenon. Leading Jewish artists and intellectuals participated, including scholars Daniel Bell, Jonathan Sarna, Michael Walzer, and Ruth Wisse;
novelist Allegra Goodman; film critic J. Hoberman; painter R. B. Kitaj; playwrights Tony Kushner and Wendy Wasserstein; dancer/choreographer Liz Lerman; writer/Ms. magazine co-founder Letty Cottin Pogrebin; composer Steve
Reich; graphic novelist Art Spiegelman; and writer and Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Ellie Wiesel.2 In response to the commission’s overarching question—
Are we experiencing a Jewish cultural renaissance or decline in America?—
there was surprising consensus among the prestigious group. “Both,” the
participants unanimously concluded;“there is evidence of decline and renaissance at the same time.”3 The commission’s grounds for pessimism, weighted
more toward the social than the cultural, are by now familiar: “intermarriage,
late marriage, low birth rates, Jewish illiteracy, emotional distancing from Israel,
1
2
Vi n c e n t B r o o k
generational distance from the immigrant experience, low affiliation rates, low
synagogue attendance, low contribution rates to Federations.”4 Religious and
cultural renewal, on the other hand, raised hopes, though here too there was
cause for concern, particularly on the mass-cultural front, where persistent dilution cum denial of Jewish identity was regarded by many as abetting rather
than countering the Jewish continuity crisis.5
Something Ain’t Kosher Here addressed the latter concerns in regard to “Jewish” television, with the quotes around the ethnic designation acknowledging
the tenuous, largely inferred, and increasingly “virtual” nature of Jewish televisual representation.This anthology casts a wider net: besides television, cultural
areas explored include literature, theater, music, dance, painting, photography,
film, and stand-up comedy. The aim in bringing together an array of cultural
forms is, on the one hand, to track specific representations of Jewishness within
each form; on the other, to reveal significant points of intersection and divergence among the forms. As for the varied discursive approaches taken by the
contributors, if a postmodernist frame had not assured a range of responses,
then Jewishness sealed the deal. Although David Ben Gurion’s legendary quip,
“Put two Jews in a room, and you’ll get three opinions,”6 may be of comparatively recent vintage, a Jewish tradition of multivocality may be traced back to
the Torah, whose ambiguities invited a host of heterogeneous views in the Talmud and Midrash.
The term “postmodern” in the anthology’s title is thus not thrown in
willy-nilly; it indicates a clear intention to frame the discussion around Jewish
cultural engagement with, and/or influence by, postmodernism. In other words,
to what extent is recent Jewish cultural representation reflective and/or constitutive of the postmodern “condition”? A corollary issue is how notions of
high versus low culture or art versus entertainment play into or against Jewish
cultural contribution generally and the postmodernist discourse specifically.
Are Jews, for example, as they were for modernity, to be alternately championed and maligned as the quintessential Postmodern (Wo)man?7 If the United
States was, as Jean Baudrillard proposes, postmodernist from its founding as a
representationally based construction, can’t Jews also, as David Biale, Michael
Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel argue in Insider/Outsider:American Jews and
Multiculturalism (1998), be deemed protypically postmodern in their diasporic
existence(s), fractured/fragmented identity(ies), and decentered/indeterminate
sacred text(s)?8
Danny Bailis, the Jewish neo-Nazi anti-hero (based on a real person) of Jewish filmmaker Henry Bean’s The Believer (2002), makes the case for the Jewishpostmodernity connection hyperbolically but not without rhetorical force:
The real Jew is a nomad, a wanderer. He has no roots, no attachments. So
he “universalizes” everything. . . . Take the great Jewish minds: Marx,
Introduction
3
Freud, Einstein.What have they given us: communism, infantile sexuality
and the atom bomb. In a mere three centuries since these guys emerged
from the ghettos of Europe, they’ve taken us from a world built on order
and reason and hurled us into a chaos of class warfare, irrational urges and
relativity, a world where the very existence of matter and meaning is in
doubt.Why? Because it’s the deepest impulse of the Jewish soul to unravel
the very fabric of life until nothing is left but thread, nothing but nothingness. Nothingness without end. . . .9
Such grossly oversimplified and offensive assertions will not go unchallenged here, of course.Yet the core propositions of Bailis’s rant cannot so easily be dismissed. Indeed, they can readily be expanded into the American
cultural sphere, where the influence of Jews since the turn of the nineteenth
century has been undeniable, enormous, and unique.While Jewish migration
to the cities of post-emancipation Western and Eastern Europe “transformed
both the Jews and their urban cultures,” as Biale observes in Cultures of the
Jews:A New History (2002), even more so in the United States, due to its foundational democratic ambitions and less contentious history in regard to Jews,
“the world in which Jews found themselves [from the late nineteenth century
on] was also a world they made: Jews shaped American culture as much as it
shaped them.”10
Caryn Aviv and David Shneer offer a contemporary spin on the American Jew/postmodern connection. In New Jews:The End of the Jewish Diaspora
(2005), they argue that many, if not a majority, of U.S. Jews (and many secular
Israeli Jews as well), in no longer looking at Israel as an answer to exile,“have
finally embraced the hybrid, multiple, unmoored identities that our ancestors
were so desperate to give away.”11
Another distinctive Jewish trope, that of the Luftmensch (air man), offers an
especially potent conjunction between American Jewry and postmodernism.
An agent, investor, or broker who from a lack of opportunity and capital was
forced to “live on air,” this shtetl-based variation on the schlemiel would, in
his twentieth-century American incarnation, add show business to the list of
“immaterial” professions. Once a marginal and disparaged economic type, the
Luftmensch, as Ruth Wisse observed in the early 1970s, has come to characterize the “majority of Americans.”12 Extrapolating from Wisse’s observation and
from subsequent developments, I propose that in a society shifting increasingly
from goods to services, from manufacturing to marketing, from virtual reality
to virtual people, “the Luftmensch can be regarded as signifying, for Jew and
non-Jew alike, not merely living on air but vanishing into it as well.”13
The most vigorous case for, and against, the Jewish-postmodern connection
is made by Ruth D. Johnston in her essay here, “Joke-Work:The Construction
of Jewish Postmodern Identity in Contemporary Theory and American Film.”
4
Johnston argues that certain postmodern theorists—e.g., Eric Sander, Julia Kristeva, Slavoj Žižek, Jean-François Lyotard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and JeanLuc Nancy—in their aversion to essentialism in the wake of the trauma of
Nazism, have transformed the Jew into the decentered, destabilized postmodern subject par excellence. Johnston notes, however, that some critics problematize such privileging of the Jews’ postmodern status on the grounds that
it fails to dismantle the binary structuring of modernist discourse and worse,
“ends up fetishizing the Jew.”Therefore, Johnston concludes, the “Jewish question” remains alive and unresolved in postmodern theory. Unresolved, and
perhaps unresolvable, given the notorious slipperiness of the signifiers “Jewish” and “postmodern”—though not too slippery to prevent us from trying to
get a grip on them.
Jewish Culture/Jewish Ide ntity
Just as one must be wary of grandiose linkages of Jewishness and postmodernism, to assert that Jews have crucially impacted American culture is not to
claim that American culture is, ipso facto, Jewish. Indeed, grappling with the
question of what, if anything, makes a cultural artifact Jewish has become a fundamental, if not obligatory, task in the postmodern age.Two notable recent studies of American Jewish culture—Stephen Whitfield’s In Search of American Jewish
Culture (1999) and Jack Kugelmass’s anthology Key Texts in American Jewish Culture (2003)—take as their starting point the question of Jewish cultural identity.14 As for their answers, Ben Gurion’s adage uncannily applies. A single, if
broadly understood, premise underlies the Jewishness of Kugelmass’s “key
texts”—“canonical” works ranging from The Rise of David Levinsky and Fiddler
on the Roof to Marjorie Morningstar and The Goldbergs—namely, Lenny Bruce’s
stand-up-comic distinction between Jewish and goyish. American Jewish cultural expression, in this binary schema, is at its core a meditation “on the line
separating Self and Other.”15 Such a dichotomy, while it might prove useful to
an understanding of the “classical” period, is insufficient as the conceptual basis
for an analysis of more recent American Jewish cultural expression.As several essayists in this volume argue (cf. Ruth Weisberg and Andrea Most), postmodern
American Jewish artists (or post-postmodern, in some formulations) begin with
a view of history, identity, and difference as “pluralistic, sprawling, and chaotic . . .
ultimately unrepresentable in any neat, organized fashion.”16 As Most explains in
her essay here, “Re-Imagining the Jew’s Body: From Self-Loathing to ‘Grepts,’ ”
about graphic novelist Ben Katchor:“The opposition between Jew and non-Jew
is not only far too simple for Katchor, it inaccurately represents the way in which
history functions. . . . Any such representation would imply that Jewishness can
be separated from the world being represented.”16
Whitfield’s take on American Jewish cultural identity, in a manner more
consonant with postmodernism, is a double take, embracing two divergent
Introduction
5
and seemingly contradictory definitions. One applies to the “classical” period,
roughly from the turn of the nineteenth century to the 1980s; the second
relates to what he terms American Jewish culture’s “prospects.” As for the
former, Whitfield shaves the latter two-thirds from ethnomusicologist Curt
Sachs’s dictum that Jewish music is that “which is made by Jews, for Jews, as
Jews,” proposing flatly that American Jewish culture “is whatever individuals
of Jewish birth (who did not sincerely convert to another faith) have contributed to art and thought.”17 The quest for a specifically Jewish content or
sensibility Whitfield eschews as ambiguous and limiting.The polymorphousness of American Jewish cultural production “defies any effort to define it in
a unified way.” For example, given the “contentlessness” of Abstract Expressionism, are we to declare the work of Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman,
Mark Rothko, and Louise Nevelson “off-limits to the student of American
Jewish culture?”18 Indeed not, as Ruth Weisberg demonstrates in her essay for
this volume,“Between Exile and Irony: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Jewish Modes of Thought,” pointing out that critic Harold Rosenberg went so
far, on one occasion, as to espouse “an ethnic definition of Jewish identity by
referring to the Jews as [Abstract Expressionist Barnett] Newman’s ‘tribe.’ ”
Yet the “anything by a Jew is Jewish” approach clearly has its problems, as
Jan Lewis avers in her essay here, “ ‘Your World Is Very Different from Mine’:
Troubling Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Theater.” Lewis critiques
the Jewishness ascribed by some, including by playwright Arthur Miller himself, retroactively, to Death of a Salesman, despite the fact that none of this play’s
characters are overtly identified as Jewish. Claims for “a fundamental, innate
Jewishness which transcends private or public experience and acknowledgment” are not merely tenuous but disturbing, Lewis believes, because they
imply “an essentializing of both the ethnicity and the work of art, so that one
can fit neatly into the other.” Certainly, when the NFJC in 2004 selected for
its Top 100 American Jewish Films of all time William Wyler’s The Best Years of
Our Lives and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd., Ace in the Hole, and The Apartment—
while leaving off Wilder’s The Odd Couple, Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, Edward
Dmytryk’s The Juggler, and Ernest Lehman’s Portnoy’s Complaint—birth-based
claims to American Jewish culture have lost their moorings.
Thankfully, Whitfield is far more judicious in his application of “proprietary Jewishness,” using it for wide-ranging, non-tribalist analyses of individual
artists’ work and to an especially acute examination of Black-Jewish cultural interaction. A greater problem, from a postmodernist and a personal perspective,
occurs with his second definition, relating to Jewish cultural “prospects.”These
he deems unfavorable, not because there are fewer American Jews contributing
to art or thought, but because these contributors are becoming less Jewish—
meaning, in this instance, less normatively religious. “The Jew in the pew is
pivotal,”Whitfield contends, invoking Mordecai Kaplan to seal his case: “Take
6
religion out [and Jewish civilization] becomes an empty shell.”19 Not only does
such a monocausal view, when applied to American Jewish culture, run the
risk of being repudiated as surely as Irving Howe’s late-1970s immigrant-based
criterion for a viable American Jewish literature, but in embracing a religiousbased criterion for Jewishness,Whitfield has embraced a curious double standard.20 No longer is the fact of Jewish birth a sufficient determinant of Jewish
identity, as it was for American Jewish cultural practitioners of old—a good
percentage of whom were secular, or at least non-observant, Jews. Circumscription has replaced circumcision: “A Jew is someone who subscribes to Judaism
Period.”21
Although contributors to this volume were free to adopt a religion-informed
stance—no litmus test of any sort was applied—as a template for an exploration of postmodern American Jewish culture, such an approach is a nonstarter. Postmodernism, if it means anything, means foregoing reductive
categories, master narratives, and absolute truths, most certainly religious ones;
Jewish particularism and postmodernist anti-essentialism are, by definition, incommensurable. Further undermining the utility of a religion-based framework is the fact that I myself am a secular but spiritual and highly conscious
Jew who belongs to the group—larger than the religious group, according to
a 1988 survey—that gains its sense of Jewish identity primarily from the belief in and pursuit of social justice.22 Without such an engagement, for many
of the like-minded, Judaism is an empty shell.
Biale’s Cultures of the Jews, although it deals with the entire history of Jewish culture and only cursorily with its American Jewish expression, offers an
approach to more recent Jewish culture that is perhaps closest to that of You
Should See Yourself. It seems but a short conceptual leap from Biale’s notion,
“What may be the most defining characteristic of modern Jewish culture is
the question of how to define it,”23 to my own proposition here:What may be
the most defining characteristic of postmodern American Jewish culture and
identity is the increasing inability, yet persistent necessity, to define it. The
“knowledge of not knowing,” as Freud posited early in the last century and as
the postmodern age appears to affirm, lies at the core of what it means to be
a Jew.24
Po stmode rni sm
Briefs on what makes Jewishness postmodern and postmodernism Jewish
have been filed: polymorphous identity, diasporic history, rejection of monolithic truths, the Luftmensch syndrome. But a “third opinion,” with considerable
bearing on the first two, has yet to be broached: What makes postmodernism
postmodern? The term’s notorious slipperiness derives partly from its application to several, not always commensurable concepts: a historical period, a
cultural style (or styles), a human condition, a philosophy. Historically, it refers
Introduction
7
to a period in conflict with modernism’s perceived attempts to fix meanings
and locate truths; culturally, it is characterized by an ironic self-awareness and a
penchant for pastiche; psycho-socially, it suggests an ahistorical and hyperconsumerist consciousness; philosophically, it asserts the indeterminacy of meaning
and the decenteredness of existence.
Befitting a discourse based in ambiguity, there are—frustratingly for some,
exhilaratingly for others—multiple interpretations and ideological positions
within each of the definitional categories. As for periodization, despite Anne
Friedberg’s detection (with Walter Benjamin’s assistance) of postmodernist
stirrings in the “mobilized virtual gaze” of mid-nineteenth-century flâneurs
(window shoppers),25 and conceptual grounding in Einstein’s relativity theory,
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—
not to mention Nietzsche’s perspectivism, Freud’s unconscious, and Wittgenstein’s “meaning as use”26—most critics view the postmodern era as emerging
from the seismic socioeconomic and cultural shifts of the post–World War II
era, particularly in the United States. Global capitalism, pop culture, mass
media, and, above all, television—whether seen as relentlessly oppressive or
potentially emancipatory—are, in this analysis, crucial prerequisites for and reproducers of the postmodern condition.Additional key cultural influences include the Beat, Pop Art, and Underground Film movements of the 1950s and
1960s, and, although it has yet to be given its due, gay camp.Traits that Susan
Sontag attributed to what she termed “modern camp,” in her seminal 1964
essay on the subject, fit the postmodernist style like a sequined glove: radical
eclecticism and pastiche, self-consciousness and irony, theatricality and artifice, the equivalence of objects and conflation of categories (high/low, past/
present, tragic/comic).27 Further impetus was provided by the counterculture,
identity politics, and poststructuralist movements of the 1960s and 1970s,
which, through their resistance to and deconstruction of the “logic of late capitalism,” both propelled and problematized postmodernist theory and practice.
The term postmodern, as we understand it today, was first used with any
purposefulness by Charles Jencks in his The Language of Post-Modern Architecture
(1977).28 Critical mass around the concept congealed in the 1980s through the
writings of Andreas Huyssens, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Jürgen
Habermas, and Fredric Jameson. Pro- and anti-postmodernist camps quickly
developed, with Lyotard, joined later by Linda Hutcheon and Jim Collins, favorably inclined, and the rest, except for Huyssens, generally opposed. Huyssens,
joined by Hal Foster, have taken ambivalent positions.29
Pro-postmodernists see the concept and its realization as a corrective
for ossified and oppressive ideological agendas.The fluidity, permeability, and
expansiveness of postmodern thought and action, this side argues, opens up
possibilities for progressive change, as evidenced in more flexible attitudes toward
race, gender, sexual orientation, and identity in general. Anti-postmodernists,
8
expanding on the “culture industry” theorists of the Frankfurt school,30 see the
postmodern project as a formula for cultural degradation and social control:
hyper-consumerism and ahistoricism (Jameson), moral relativism and political
apathy (Habermas), fragmentation of the subject and reduction of reality to representation (Baudrillard).31 Yet what for Jameson is postmodernism’s penchant for
“empty parody”—an ironic relationship to texts drained of any critique—is for
Hutcheon “ambivalent parody”—a relationship that recognizes the texts’ power
to capture the imagination while not denying its ideological or aesthetic limitations.32 What for the anti-postmodernists is cultural appropriation, incorporation,
and displacement is for Collins “hyperconsciousness: a hyperawareness on the
part of the text itself of its cultural status, function, and history, as well as of the
conditions of its circulation and reception.”33 Acknowledging the good, the bad,
and the ugly, Huyssens sees postmodernism as simultaneously delimiting and
opening up new horizons, as marking both “the end of the avant garde as a
genuinely adversary culture but also as [having] critical potential,” as both “our
problem and our hope.”34 Foster’s ambivalence envisions a specific alternative.
Distinguishing between neoconservative, antimodernist, and critical postmodernisms, Foster argues instead for a “resistance postmodernism”: a “postmodern
culture of resistance, as a counterpractice not only to the official culture of modernism but also to the ‘false narrativity’ of a reactionary postmodernism.”35
Befitting a Jewish intervention into the subject, the contributors to this
volume not only include passionate adherents of the pro-, anti-, and ambivalent postmodernist schools, but they add a fourth stance: outright rejection.
Some writers’ resistance to applying a postmodern model to their particular
essay, as I had suggested they do, stemmed from a sense that this was an artificial imposition, not an organic fit. Deborah Dash Moore and MacDonald
Moore, for example, simply did not find a postmodernist frame relevant to
their essay, “Observant Jews and the Photographic Arena of Looks.” Donald
Weber similarly rejected a postmodernist approach to his essay, “Genealogies
of Jewish Stand-up: Looking Back, Moving Beyond,” because the postmodern
aspect of his piece, at least in relation to its prime focus, comic Marc Maron,
“simply doesn’t engage me . . . ; why can’t we more simply understand Maron
in conscious and complicated reaction/rebellion to Seinfeld’s exhausted mode
of observational humor?”36
A consistent strand in the “postmodernist rejectionist” argument is that
postmodernism has become an exhausted mode of conceptual analysis that
additionally, as Weber also suggested, may be symptomatic of a more general
“theory fatigue.” Such fatigue is understandable; indeed, it is inherent in the
anti-postmodernist critique as well, as we will see. However, the range and
intensity of the debate around the “p” word is ample proof that any reports
of the death of postmodernism are, to extrapolate from Mark Twain, greatly
exaggerated. This is not to underestimate the cogency of the postmodernist
Introduction
9
rejectionists’ stance. But in the context of this anthology, and of the multivocal mode of inquiry that informs it, such a stance becomes just one more piece
of the Jewish postmodernist puzzle.
Of the contributors who—whether pro, anti, or somewhere in between—
accepted postmodernism as a useful lens through which to examine their particular cultural category, Jan Lewis is the most ardent of the pro-postmodernists.
Expanded through Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, postmodernism,
for Lewis, spurred a Jewish playwright such as Wendy Wasserstein to explore
and expand notions of Jewish identity. James Fisher, writing on dramatist Tony
Kushner, Janet Burstein on Jewish literature, and Michele Byers and Rosalin
Krieger, and myself, on Jewish television also tend to focus on work that exemplifies postmodernism’s progressive potential. Rebecca Rossen, though her
essay “The Jewish Man and His Dancing Shtick: Stock Characterization and
Jewish Masculinity in Postmodern Dance” shares the pro-postmodernist view,
acknowledges ambivalence among American Jewish choreographers who see
postmodern identity either as presenting a “multiplicitous entity” that “seems
hopelessly fragmented” or one that is “a healthy reflection of contemporary
life.”37
Ruth Weisberg leads the anti-postmodernist charge. Moral relativism,
distancing irony, and anti-bourgeois impulses have led those involved in the postmodernist project “to value transgression for its own sake,” she cautions.
Postmodern Jewish art, specifically, either accepts “the cultural cliché of Jewishness,” thus demeaning or negating Jewish individuality, or, as in the “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art” exhibit (2002), such art “may simply
reiterate evil in all its banality and nihilism.” As a practicing artist, however,
Weisberg intersects with the ambivalent postmodernists, although, unlike
Huyssens and Foster, she finds hope not within postmodernism but beyond
it—in a post-postmodernism that can return Jewish art to an acquisition of
knowledge and culture, to a reclaiming of the human and the sacred.
The postmodernist stance of Marsha Bryan Edelman in “Continuity, Creativity, and Conflict:The Ongoing Search for ‘Jewish’ Music,” Judah Cohen in
“Exploring the Postmodern Landscape of Jewish Music,” Daniel Itzkovitz in
“They All Are Jews,” and Andrea Most in “Re-Imagining the Jew’s Body” are
the most explicitly “somewhere in between.” Interestingly, these are also the
writers who posit the strongest bond between postmodernism and Jewishness.
Jewish music “has always been ‘postmodern,’ ” Edelman claims, and all of its disparate and hybrid forms “were/are legitimate.” But this creative “openness” also
has contributed to a cultural identity crisis that threatens “a recognizable legacy
of Jewish musical culture.” Cohen, while he acknowledges that the term “Jewish music” is hotly contested, finds much of it, seen historically, as preternaturally
postmodern in its hyper-eclecticism. In its contemporary formation, however,
he regards it as post-postmodern in its appropriation of pastiche to reclaim
10
tradition and reconstitute religious identity. Itzkovitz deems secular Jewish identity, since the dawn of modernity, quintessentially postmodern “precisely because it has been defiantly elusive . . . to the point that the Jewish presence has
the potential to complicate the project of identity-making entirely.”As for postmodern American Jewish cinema’s success in realizing this potential, Itzkovitz is
far more guarded. Most both engages postmodernism and Judaizes her approach
to it. Her choice of literary genre, the graphic novel, is not only quintessentially
postmodern in its conflation of cultural forms (art/literature) and hierarchies
(comic book/literature), but the hybrid form was, like the comic book, arguably
“invented” by Jews. Still, postmodernism also poses special problems for Jewish
cultural producers, Most contends, because of “the problem of representing the
self and history as multiple, unstable, anti-essentialist, and contingent.” One possible solution to this “crisis in Jewish identity,” which she proffers through an
analysis of Ben Katchor’s work, is another form of post-postmodernism: one
that eschews “fixed meanings and stable truths” but insists “that the only essential truth is that humanity is created in the image of God, an always impenetrable and infinite idea.”
Further support for a spiritually rooted post-postmodernism comes from
an unlikely source.The philosopher Jacques Derrida, father of postmodernism’s
immediate theoretical precursor, deconstruction, was an Algerian French Jew.
In his exacting analysis of texts, some commentators have noted a secular kinship with the reading skills of talmudic scholars. His book Writing and Difference
(1967) actually closes with a quotation attributed to a rabbi named Derrisa.
More significantly, Derrida, in his later thought, began to engage that of the
more overtly Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whose work attempted
to reconcile Heideggerian existentialist philosophy with ethical reflection and
biblical commentary.38 Derrida’s “passion for writing,” according to Adam
Shatz,“defined a ‘certain Judaism,’ diasporic, itinerant, self-questioning, rooted
in a fierce attachment to the Book rather than to the Land.”39 Ultimately, Derrida began to nuance deconstruction’s assault on absolute truth by entertaining the possibility of an “undeconstructibility” in concepts such as justice,
democracy, friendship, and—surprisingly, for this “non-believer”—God.“The
name of God was important for him,” religious scholar John Caputo explains,
“even if by the standards of the local pastor or rabbi, he was an atheist . . .
because it was one of the ways that he could name the unconditional, the
undeconstructible.”40
Conc lusion: The Isra e l Que stion (or)
the Po stmode rnism of Minor Diffe re nc e s
In March 2004, a “Colloquium on Jewish Arts” was held at the University
of Wisconsin, Madison. Intended as a dialogue on “the role of Jewish artists
and thinkers on the creation of modern and postmodern art practices,” the
Introduction
11
colloquium brought together a diverse group of cutting-edge American Jewish artists.41 These included choreographers Ellen Bromberg and Nina Haft,
choreographer/filmmaker Allen Kaeja, dancer/performance artist Dan Froot,
performance/installation artist Laurie Beth Clark, multi-media artist Yacov
Sharir, photographer/new media artist Mark Tasman, artist/activist Richard
Kamler, theater artist/writer Nina Wise, and performance artist Doug Rosenberg, who organized the event. Norman Kleeblatt, curator of the Jewish Museum of New York, delivered the keynote address.The colloquium concluded
with presentations of the artists’ work illustrated with video clips, followed by
a panel discussion. In viewing a video record of the final day of the colloquium, I was struck by a curious disconnect between the presentations and the
discussion. Whereas the work, covering a panoply of topics from personal
identity quests to “virtual golems” to the Holocaust, contained no reference to
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this was all the artist-panelists wanted to talk
about afterward, and with a level of passion that highlighted how much the
conflict meant to them, and how deeply it disturbed them—too deeply, perhaps, to allow it to enter their work.
A similar, if more conscious, structuring absence characterizes this anthology. In an addendum to my instructions to the book’s contributors at the start
of the project (a few latecomers were spared the subjection), I requested that
everyone at least consider the effect on their particular cultural category of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since the conflict has long dominated the world
political scene and I personally am greatly troubled by it—disclosure: I stand
decidedly to the left on the issue—I felt that its impact on contemporary
American Jewish cultural production was at least worthy of exploration. One
contributor responded that the issue was too complex and controversial and
that its topicality might date the project by the time of its publication. I responded that no one was required to deal with the subject but merely to consider
its impact. (I might have added that the upside of topicality was its reflection
of a particular historical moment.) No one else responded one way or the
other—nor, in the end, did anyone mention the subject in their essays, except
me (Cohen’s and Edelman’s references to Israel are technical and apolitical).
This is not to imply, as the Madison colloquium showed, any lack of concern
with Israel-Palestine on the part of the other contributors. My own brief reference to the conflict at the end of my essay on television was prompted by
the essay’s main topic, Jewish self-hatred, and by my personal investment in the
issue. The others’ reticence can be explained in any number of ways, ranging
from misgivings like that of the lone respondent to a sense (as with some writers’ rejection of postmodernism) that the issue was insufficiently pertinent to
their essays.
Another explanation for the near-complete elision of the Israel Question
from this book’s discussion of contemporary American Jewish culture may lie
12
in what Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen called (in 2001) the “divergent Jewish cultures” of Israel and America.42 Moore and Troen’s assessment
did not deny that a sense of mutual responsibility for Jewish survival and Jewish solidarity still animated the Israeli and American Jewish populations.
“Nevertheless,” they contended,“awareness grows of the attenuation of bonds
that connect both communities.” Some of the main reasons: “Yiddish is no
longer a common language, and with its loss as a lingua franca, a moral vocabulary disappears from currency among Jews. . . . The pervasiveness of American popular culture enthusiastically embraced by Israelis often substitutes for
knowledge and makes many indifferent to American Jews as a distinctive social group. . . . Different social realities, historical experiences, and political
needs have generated distinctive cultures.”43
The last two sentences are worth examining more closely, because their
apparent inconsistency speaks to a salient feature, and frustration, of postmodern “reality.” On the one hand, Israeli culture is said to be increasingly Americanized; on the other hand, it is said to be increasingly distanced from
American Jewish culture. By becoming more like one another, one grows further apart—wondrous strange, but not inexplicable.Two keys to unlocking the
paradox come to mind: Freud’s notion of “the narcissism of minor differences,” which posits an inverse psychological relation between similarity and
affinity,44 and postmodernism.
Postmodernism’s ambivalence to difference has two main sources. First, its
destabilization of totalizing systems (ideologies of religion, nation, ethnicity,
sexuality), despite progressive potential, threatens to devolve into relativism.
The radical reinvention of self by the likes of ( Jewish?) Bob Dylan and (“Jewish”) Madonna, for example, may epitomize the radical fluidity of identity, but
it also reveals the moral and semiotic vacuity of a performativity in perpetual
flux. Second, the relentless and accelerating commodification of difference by
consumer culture ultimately devalues culture and difference by reducing both
to the dollar sign.This marketing of difference has an elastic limit, however, a
point of diminishing returns at which manufactured diversity is increasingly
drained of affect. The deflationary crisis of affect and deeper meaning produces, in turn, in Lawrence Grossberg’s terms, an “indifference to difference,”
as well as its corollary and pseudo-antidote,“authentic inauthenticity.”As Grossberg explains, “Authentic inauthenticity, as a popular sensibility, is a specific
logic that cannot locate differences outside the fact of its own temporary affective investment. . . . It is a logic that allows one to seek satisfactions knowing that one can never be satisfied, and that any particular pleasure is likely, in
the end, to be disappointing. For even if all images are equally artificial and all
satisfactions equally unsatisfying, one still needs some images, one still needs
some satisfactions.”45
Introduction
13
Extrapolated to American Jewish identity, one still needs, in the parlance
of this volume, to “see oneself.” As for the strategies employed by postmodern
cultural practitioners to fulfill this need, and their comparative success or failure, the following essays will explore.
Note s
1. Norman L. Kleeblatt, ed., Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996); Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t
Kosher Here:The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 2003). For more on the Jewish new wave in literature, see Morris Dickstein,
“Ghost Stories:The New Wave of Jewish Writing,” Tikkun 12, no. 6 (1997): 33. See
also note 1 in Janet Burstein’s essay here. On the new wave in film, see Harry Medved,
“Men in Black,” Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, March 27, 1998: 40. For more
on Jewish cultural revival generally, see Joanna Smith Rakoff, “The New Super
Jew,” Timeout New York (Issue 427: December 4–11, 2003).
2. For a full list of participants, see Richard A. Siegel, ed., Commission Report on the Future of Jewish Culture in America (New York: National Foundation for Jewish Culture,
1992), 5.
3. Ibid., 4.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. See Jo Ann Mort, “Is Unity Good for the Jews?” http://www.fmep.org/analysis/
mort_LATimes_isunitygoodforthejews.html; anon., “Two Jews, Three Opinions,”
http://www.jewishaz.com/jewishnews/990226/edit.shtml; Sandee Brawarsky and
Deborah Mark, eds., Two Jews,Three Opinions: A Collection of Twentieth-Century American Jewish Quotations (New York: Perigree, 1998).
7. For more on discursive alignments of Jews with modernity, particularly in the writings of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Werner Sombert, see Amy Newman,“The Idea
of Judaism in Feminism and Afrocentrism,” in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and
Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
8. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983); Biale, Galchinsky, and
Heschel, Insider/Outsider.
9. Henry Bean, “The Believer (The Screenplay),” in The Believer: Confronting Jewish
Self-Hatred (New York:Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), 69.
10. David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York: Schocken, 2002),
727. In his reference to American Jewish culture, Biale is drawing on Steven J.Whitfield’s essay in the same volume, “Declarations of Independence: American Jewish
Culture in the Twentieth Century,” 1098–1146.
11. Caryn Aviv and David Shneer, New Jews:The End of the Jewish Diaspora (New York:
New York University Press, 2005). The quote is from a review of the book by Jo
Ellen Green Kaiser,“The End of Judaism?” Tikkun 20, no. 6 (November/December
2005): 71.
12. Ruth Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1971), 79.
13. Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher, 178.
14. Steven J. Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis
University Press, 1999); Jack Kugelmass, ed., Key Texts in American Jewish Culture
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003).
15. Kugelmass, Key Texts, 7.
14
16. Andrea Most, “Re-Imagining the Jew’s Body: From Self-Loathing to ‘Grepts,’ ” in
this volume.
17. Whitfield, In Search, 81; Sachs’s quote is from his opening lecture to the First International Congress of Jewish Music in 1957, quoted by Bathja Bayer in her entry
“Music” in Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1972), 12: 555.
18. Whitfield, In Search, xiv, 19.
19. Ibid., 241.
20. Howe’s elegy to American Jewish literature appears in the introduction to his edited
volume Jewish American Stories (New York: Schocken, 1977). The most recent and
resounding repudiation of his claim is made by Donald Weber in his essay “Permutations of New-World Experiences Rejuvenate Jewish-American Literature,” Chronicle
of Higher Education, September 17, 2004: B8–B10.
21. Whitfield, In Search, 241. Whitfield is far from alone in his insistence on religious
grounding as a mainstay for Jewish culture. Several participants in the NFJC’s Commission on the Future of Jewish Culture expressed a similar view. For further, more
extensive support of this stance, see, for example, Samuel G. Freedman, Jew vs. Jew:
The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), and
Kaiser,“The End of Judaism?”
22. Whitfield, In Search, 239.
23. Biale, Cultures of the Jews, 726.
24. See Eli Zaretsky,“The Place of Psychoanalysis in the History of the Jews,” paper delivered at the Jewish Museum of Berlin, May 30, 2005.The paper was drawn partly
from Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis
(New York: Knopf, 2004).
25. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and Postmodernism (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994).
26. On postmodernism and capitalism, see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991); on postmodernism and television, see Baudrillard, Simulations; on the postmodern condition, see
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
27. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp” (1964), in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966), 274–292. For more on the camppostmodern connection see Vincent Brook, “Puce Modern Moment: Camp, Postmodernism, and the Films of Kenneth Anger,” Journal of Film and Video 58, no. 4
(Winter 2006).
28. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 4th ed. (New York: Rizzoli,
1984). According to Jencks, the term postmodern was first used, “with any frequency, in literary criticism . . . [but] to mean ‘Ultra-modern,’ referring to the
extremist novels of William Burroughs and a philosophy of nihilism and anticonvention” (p. 6). Stuart Sim, in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, 2nd ed.
(New York: Routledge, 2005), viii, dates the first use of the term from the 1870s, as
a description for “any art that went beyond Impressionism.” Historian Arnold Toynbee, in his A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 338, speaks
of the period from 1875 onward as the “post-Modern Age of Western history.” For
discussions on the emergence of particular postmodernist styles, see Jencks, Language; Sim, Routledge Companion; Naomi M. Jackson, Converging Movements: Modern
Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University
Press, 2000); and Walter Truett Anderson, The Truth about the Truth: De-confusing and
Re-constructing the Postmodern World (New York: Jeremy P. Thatcher/Putnam, 1995).
29. Baudrillard is a somewhat curious case in that his views have also been taken, by
those who either choose or fail to recognize their frequently ironic formulation,
as not merely supporting but championing postmodernism (see Sim, Routledge
Introduction
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
15
Companion). For a general discussion of seminal postmodernist writings and the division into camps, see Robert Lapsely and Michael Westlake, Film Theory: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Jim Collins,
“Postmodernism and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, 2nd ed., ed.
Robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 327–353;
and Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press,
1983).
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as
Mass Deception,” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (London:Verso, 1979), 120–167.
For more on mass cultural theory, see Joanne Hollows, Peter Hutchings, and Mark
Jancovich, eds., The Film Studies Reader (London and New York: Arnold, 2000),
1–44.
Jameson, Postmodernism; Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity, an Incomplete Project,” in
Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic; Baudrillard, Simulations.
Linda Hutcheon, “The Politics of Postmodernism, Parody, and History,” Cultural
Critique 5 (Winter 1986–87): 179–207.
Collins,“Postmodernism,” 335.
Andreas Huyssens,“Mapping the Postmodern,” New German Critique 33 (Fall 1984):
52; Lapsely and Westlake, Film Theory, 206.
Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic, xii.
Email from Donald Weber to Vincent Brook, November 4, 2004.
Rossen is quoting Naomi Jackson, “Searching for Moving Metaphors: Jewishness
in American Modern Dance and Postmodern Dance,” Jewish Folklore and Ethnology
Review: 20, nos. 1–2 (2000): 144.
Scott McLemee, “Derrida, a Pioneer of Literary Theory, Dies,” Chronicle of Higher
Education, October 22, 2004: 18–22. See also Adam Shatz,“The Interpreters of Maladies,” Nation, December 13, 2004: 55–58.
Shatz,“Interpreters,” 56.
Quoted in McLemee,“Derrida,” 22.
Doug Rosenberg, “Conney Colloquium on Jewish Arts,” Press Release, Center for
Jewish Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, March 25, 2004.
Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen, eds., Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and
America (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 2001).
Moore and Troen, Divergent, 2–3.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), trans. Joan Riviere (London:
Hogarth Press, 1963).
Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 226. I am indebted for this gloss on Grossberg
to Shane Gunster,“ ‘About Nothing’: Difference, Affect, and Seinfeld,” Television and
New Media 6, no. 2 (May 2005): 200–223.
⡣
Literature
Cultural categories in the postmodern age are anything
but undeconstructible, in Derrida’s, or any other, sense. Multi-media practice
and interdisciplinary analysis have long since achieved legitimacy in the arts
and academe. However, while cross-culturalism will be evident in many of
the essays here, and in some cases—performance art, graphic novels, stand-up
comedy, film—even foregrounded, classification remains a useful conceptual
tool for historicizing cultural permeability within categories and for comparing it across them.Thus, a traditional taxonomy (with significant qualifications)
will be used for grouping the essays.As for the ordering of the groups, this will
follow a quasi-chronological model, beginning with the earliest cultural activity associated with Jews, literature (the word), and proceeding to the most recent, television (the virtual image).
Irving Howe’s earlier cited, infamous 1976 prediction that an American
Jewish literature extirpated of its Eastern European roots and inundated by
Americanization was doomed to extinction has itself only survived in the breach.
Third- and fourth-generation American Jewish writers have made mincemeat—
or is it charoseth—of the “Howe Doctrine,” producing since the mid-1980s
enough critically acclaimed Jewish-oriented work for Morris Dickstein to proclaim, by 1997, a Jewish “new wave.”1 Dara Horn, herself a recent National
Jewish Book Award winner for her first novel In the Image (2003), might disparage the “new wave” designation as premature, believing that much of the
recent work is not Jewish enough, although “a Renaissance awaits.”2 But Dickstein’s description of “new wave” writers as having made “their Jewish fantasies, feelings, and experiences absolutely central to their work” belies Horn’s
hard line.3 Moreover, one can even begin to talk of multiple generations within
the new wave, with the “old guard” of 1980s/1990s writers such as Pearl Abraham, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Leah Cohn, Nathan Englander, Rebecca Goldstein,
Allegra Goodman, Robin Henley, Michelle Herman, Nessa Rapoport,Thane
Rosenbaum, Helen Shulman, and Steve Stern having been joined in the 2000s
by the likes of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ehud Havazelet, Horn,
17
18
L i t e rat u r e
and Tova Mirvis. Donald Weber, in a 2004 article for the Journal of Higher Education, goes Horn (and Howe) one better by spotlighting a new immigrant generation composed of American Jewish writers from the former Soviet Union,
most prominently David Bezmozgis, Gary Shteyngart, and Lara Vapnyar.4
If we include the ultra-postmodern/ultra-Jewish medium of the graphic
novel, as Andrea Most does in her essay, the Jewish new wave becomes a
tsunami. Here the Jewishness of the message meets that of the medium, given
the Jewish lineage not only of the graphic novel (Art Spiegelman’s Maus) but
of its pop-cultural precursor, the superhero comic book (Jerry Siegel and Joe
Shuster’s Superman, Bill Finger and Bob Kane’s Batman, Jack Kirby and Stan
Lee’s Spiderman, et al.). Most further contextualizes the graphic novel/comic
book in relation to Jewish author Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), showing how Chabon’s
reading of the history of American comics is “a story about the negotiation of
Jewish identities in an American culture devoted to self-fashioning.” She then
compares the graphic novels of Spiegelman and the comic books of Aline
Kominsky, who use postmodernism to dismantle the idea of an authentic self
or group identity, with the graphic novels of Ben Katchor, who uses Judaism
to deconstruct/transcend the anti-essentialism of postmodernism.
Janet Burstein’s focus is on writers whose subject is more the past than the
post—or is it? Specifically, she is concerned with female Jewish “new wave”
memoirists and novelists whose actual or fictionalized recollections of “home”
in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe are heavily inflected by gender and new
ways of imagining “the self.” As viewed through a post-Holocaust lens, this
memory work reflects a renewed interest in the persistent effects of the Holocaust in Jewish life on ethnic and gendered identity. In exploring how these
writers’ postmodern awareness of the complexity of “selving” is coupled with
a search for origins, however, Burstein illuminates how the Holocaust itself—
“as a divisive, fragmenting, destabilizing force in contemporary experience”—
emerges as another uncannily “Jewish” connection with the postmodern age.
Note s
1. Morris Dickstein, “Ghost Stories: The New Wave of Jewish Writing,” Tikkun 12,
no. 6 (1997): 33.
2. Dara Horn,“Jewish Writing:A Renaissance Awaits,” Jewish Journal, July 16, 2004: 11.
3. Dickstein,“Ghost Stories,” 6.
4. Donald Weber, “Permutations of New-World Experiences Rejuvenate JewishAmerican Literature,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 17, 2004: B8–B9.
Re-imagining the Jew’s Body
From S E L F -L O AT H I N G to “Gre pts”
Andrea Most
American Jews have been instrumental in the creation of
popular comic books, cartoons, and graphic novels throughout the twentieth
century, but Jewishness and explicitly Jewish bodies have become visible in
their work only recently. Living and working during the worst period of antisemitism in American history, mid-century comic book authors such as Jerry
Siegel and Joe Schuster (Superman), Bill Finger and Bob Kane (Batman), and
Jack Kirby and Stan Lee (Captain America, The Fantastic Four, and Spiderman),
like their colleagues in the entertainment industry, kept their Jewishness quiet,
often actively hiding it by changing their names.1
They also kept Jewish bodies and overt Jewish content out of their
comics. The muscle-bound men in tights who flew across the pages of DC
Comics sporting ridiculously angular jaws and cleft chins were the epitome of
the White, non-ethnic, all-American hero.2 It takes only a small leap of imagination, however, to read these characters as expressions of Jewish male assimilationist desire. All the superheroes from Clark Kent/Superman to Peter
Parker/Spiderman have double identities. They spend their lives negotiating
their different personae, an experience not unlike that of their Jewish creators,
who needed to negotiate the Jewish/American divide with similar finesse in
order to succeed in an antisemitic culture.3
Michael Chabon, in his recent Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), demonstrates the usefulness of reading
the history of American comics as a story about the negotiation of Jewish
identities in an American culture devoted to self-fashioning. Set in wartime
New York City, where the comics industry began, the novel focuses on the interrelated adventures of two young Jewish comic-book writers, Joe Kavalier,
who has recently escaped from Nazi-controlled Prague, and Sammy Clay, who
is desperately trying to escape from working-class Brooklyn and his own
19
20
Andrea Mo st
physical disabilities. Chabon investigates the complex psychological, economic, political, and sexual dynamics of the early comic-book world. Playing
with themes of escape and alter egos throughout the novel, Chabon shows
how the comic book heroes created by these young Jewish men reflect a passionate desire for escape from the constraints of ethnic and sexual identity,
economic limitations, and physical shortcomings. The novel tells Jewish history as an integral part of American history, revealing the ways in which Jewish bodies were hidden, transformed, or rendered invisible in mid-century
America, especially in relation to popular culture. After studying with a
Houdini-like escape artist, for example, Joe escapes Prague by hiding in a coffin with the inert body of the golem (the legendary man of clay created to
save the Jews from attack), which at the end of the novel comes to represent
the collective body of the murdered Jews of Europe. Joe’s first comic-book
drawing of a golem is deemed too Jewish, so he transforms it into the White,
all-American superhero the Escapist.4 Joe himself disappears for years. He is
rediscovered, hiding above the city at the top of the Empire State Building.
Significantly, his experience of invisibility, like that of Ellison’s Invisible Man,
allows him to return to his Jewish roots, and, the novel suggests, ultimately to
reappear as a Jew, drawing comics about Jews and with Jewish bodies in them.
In the final section of the novel, which is set in the 1950s, Joe begins to
develop an overtly Jewish comic book about the golem, the rejected model
for his first comic-book character.Through Joe’s work, Chabon’s novel envisions a marvelous future for the comics after the 1950s: avant-garde, artistically
daring, and unashamedly ethnic.And that is, in part, the way things played out.
Jewish characters began to appear in the work of the second and third generations of Jewish comics artists, those who were raised reading superhero
comics, but who, for the most part, began their comics careers as part of the
underground comics movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Underground comics
artists were engaged with the countercultural politics and postmodern art
movements of the period, appealing to a much more select audience than did
the mass-market comics which these artists had read as children.5
A central issue for postmodern culture in general, and Jewish postmodernity in particular, has been the problem of how to represent the self and history as multiple, unstable, anti-essentialist, and contingent. For Jews, the claims
of postmodernity have given rise to a crisis of Jewish identity that is being articulated within the pages of contemporary comic books and graphic novels.
Aline Kominsky in Self-Loathing (1995, 1997) and Art Spiegelman in Maus I &
II (1986, 1991) both self-consciously address their own struggles to find an appropriate visual language with which to represent the Jewish self and Jewish
history. In doing so, both use the distinction between Jew and non-Jew as a
central organizing opposition. Jewishness becomes a discrete thing to be represented within their works, and a central question of the works is who is
21
(or isn’t) a Jew and what is (or isn’t) Jewish. Ben Katchor, in The Jew of New
York (1998), engages this postmodern dilemma by assuming that history, identity, and difference are ultimately unrepresentable in any neat, organized fashion. The opposition between Jew and non-Jew is not only far too simple for
Katchor, it inaccurately represents the way in which history functions.
Katchor resists the possibility of the representation of Jewishness. Any
such representation would imply that Jewishness can be separated from the
world being represented; that is, that there exists, on the one hand, a (nonJewish) world, and, on the other, that there are Jews. Modern Jewish history,
by that account, is a process of reconciling the two. Instead, Katchor’s work
explores identity and history from within a Jewish discourse, using the terms
provided by the theology, iconography, language, and history of Judaism.
Kominsky, Spiegelman, and Katchor all make use of the inescapably visual nature of the comic-book form to pursue their meditations on representation
and identity. Comic-book form demands that each artist decide how to represent a Jewish body and how to determine what exactly a Jewish narrative
looks like.The choices each artist makes about how to represent Jewish bodies tells a story about the shifting status of Jewishness in contemporary American popular culture.
Half of one of the best-known couples in the comics underground, Aline
Kominsky Crumb created an ongoing series entitled Self-Loathing, which revolves around the domestic life of Aline and R. (Robert) Crumb, with a particular emphasis on Aline’s Jewishness, especially as manifested in her body, her
hair, her nose, and her mannerisms. Kominsky’s approach to Jewish identity in
her contemporary comic books is rooted in the sensibility of her earlier 1970s
work “Love That Bunch,” which offers a highly personal, anecdotal history of
the day-to-day trials and tribulations of being (and being seen as) a neurotic
Jewish woman and an artist.6 Typical of her self-representations, Self-Loathing
(No. 1, 1995) is obsessed with every detail of Aline’s domestic life, especially
the choices she makes about her body and her clothing. The comic book
opens with Aline waking up, getting out of bed, and looking at herself in the
mirror. She draws herself as a living horror, lumpy and hideous, and complains, “Now I’m me. . . . But older and fatter.”This is followed by a series of
panels of Aline trying to figure out what to wear, and worrying about how
each outfit makes her look. She is dressing for a breakfast party at which she
and her husband will be entertaining a German couple. As the couple enters,
we get a close-up of the German woman Bettina, who is thin, with perfectly
coiffed blond hair. In succeeding frames,Aline’s face gets larger and larger, her
hair wilder, her nose bigger and lumpier.Aline is Jewishly self-conscious about
the way in which she perceives the distinction between her own body and
that of Bettina’s:“These days I look like Milton Berle in drag. I c’n understand
how they might feel just a tad genetically superior.”
22
Andrea Mo st
This image not available.
1. Aline compares herself to her German guest (Self-Loathing Comics #1, Fantagraphics Books, 1995). © 2005 Aline Kominsky-Crumb.
Aline then begins to remember her family’s loathing of Germans and her
secret fascination with their otherness. In another panel, Kominsky literalizes
the binary opposition between Jew and non-Jew, drawing Aline’s face next to
that of a German man, and provides a map of their differences: curly versus
straight hair, pushy versus intelligent but not pushy, greasy pus big pores versus pale fine skin, fat cheeks versus good cheekbones, and so on (Figure 1).
The sensibility is reminiscent of the scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall in
which the highly assimilated Alvy Singer (Allen) dines with the WASP-y Hall
family and imagines that they must see him as a Hasidic Jew, complete with
payess (earlocks) and a large black hat. Self-Loathing pushes this concept a step
further, however, insisting on the multiple perceptions or subjectivities at
work in any instance of self-representation.At the same time that Kominsky is
representing herself as Milton Berle in drag, she also shows the German couple enthusiastically praising Aline’s taste, her home, and her conversational
abilities. Kominsky is pointing out the obvious discrepancy between her own
self-perception and the way in which the others perceive her.
The distinction between Jew and non-Jew is represented most fundamentally in formal terms by the fact that Self-Loathing (No. 1) is a two-part
comic, half written by Aline Kominsky and half by R. Crumb.When you turn
the comic book over and upside down, you get Crumb’s take on the same domestic situation. He draws Aline quite differently (and more conventionally
23
attractive) than she draws herself: slimmer, and without the exaggerated nose
and hair.The “real”Aline (or Robert, for that matter) is inaccessible.Where do
these stereotyped perceptions of the Jewish woman reside, this comic book
asks—in the minds of Jews, in the self, in the other, or in all three? Self-Loathing
(No. 1) adds another layer of complication to the question in the centerfold
and in the two end pieces, all of which feature conversations between Aline and
Bob (as he is called in the book) in which each artist has drawn her/himself.
Aline’s perception of herself speaks with Bob’s perception of himself.This device seems to have pleased the artists, for Kominsky and Crumb draw all the
panels in the No. 2 (1997) issue together, each drawing her/himself.7
The distinction between Jew and non-Jew becomes a stand-in in Self-Loathing
for the whole problem of perception and identity in postmodern culture. The
conversation that opens the comic book is about whether Bob is antisemitic.
For several pages, Bob philosophizes about ancient Jew-hatred and the roots of
his own (supposed) paranoia while Aline ignores him, thinking instead about
sex, food, flowers, and the natural beauty of the landscape. Bob’s supposed antisemitism in these pages is represented exclusively as a product of his own addled
mind. Refusing to acknowledge any version of reality as dominant, Crumb and
Kominsky continue their dispute through a struggle over the representation of
Aline’s (Jewish) body. In another sequence, a text balloon pointing to a picture
of Aline reads,“Unusually realistic drawing. I looked in the mirror!”This assertion is undercut by a tiny note at the bottom of the frame:“ ‘No, it’s not.’ —R.C.”
(Figure 2). A page later, Aline explains the radical shifts in her self-presentation
from panel to panel in a text balloon with arrows pointing to two different
drawings: “Sorry I look completely different in every panel . . . but that’s how
much I change to myself.” A few frames later, Kominsky substitutes an actual
photograph of herself for a drawing. Even this photo-realistic representation
does not lay to rest the questions raised by Self-Loathing, however. The camera
just offers one more angle in a panoply of Jewish perception and representation.
Self-Loathing subscribes to a postmodern understanding of the Jewish self as an
unstable proliferation of representations and interpretations: Aline’s self is a figure for the text’s own problematic referential status.
The best-known Jewish artist of this generation is Art Spiegelman, who,
as the author of Maus I and II, introduced explicitly Jewish characters and stories to the mainstream comics reader and established the graphic novel as a legitimate art form.8 Spiegelman is particularly celebrated for his postmodern
approach to history-telling about the Holocaust. His work uses a highly selfconscious autobiographical character as narrator and a constant awareness in
the text of the unstable relationship between memory and truth. Whereas
Kominsky focuses obsessively on every detail of Aline’s individual Jewish body,
Spiegelman erases Jewish bodies (indeed almost all human bodies) in Maus, replacing them with the bodies of animals. The distinction between Jew and
24
Andrea Mo st
2. Aline and Bob debate the realism of their self-representations (Self-Loathing Comics
#2, Fantagraphics Books, 1997). © 2005 Aline Kominsky-Crumb.
non-Jew is made visible in a schema where mice represent Jews, cats are Germans, pigs are Poles, and so on. Concerned with the dilemmas of representing
Jewish history, especially Holocaust history, Spiegelman is more interested in
representing Jews as an ethnos or a body politic than as individuals and therefore makes a graphic choice about self-representation that communicates his
ideas about how Jews as a group are perceived.9 In the epigraph that opens
Volume I, he quotes Hitler:“The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not
human,” a quote that evokes a history of German antisemitic imagery, especially the images in the Nazi propaganda film Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal
Jew), where photographs of Jews are intercut with rats scavenging for food.
To make Jews into mice in this book illustrates the dehumanizing effects of
antisemitism (or any racial thinking) while also protesting against that very
dehumanization. Maus II continues the discussion about representation with
a quote from a German newspaper from the mid-1930s connecting the
image of Mickey Mouse with Jews and implying that one’s perspective on
Mickey (or any) Mouse is shaped by the cultural lens through which it is
viewed.10
In substituting mice for humans, Spiegelman sidesteps the particular questions about the body that Kominsky focuses on (Does my nose, hair, face,
body look Jewish? Is this a good or bad thing?), but, in making all Jews look
like one another and different from non-Jews, he deliberately engages in a
type of racialist representation that he also critiques. In the first volume, which
25
3. Art considers various animal metaphors for representing Françoise. From Maus II: A
Survivor’s Tale/And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman, copyright © 1986,
1989, 1990, 1991 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division
of Random House, Inc.
takes place almost exclusively in the antisemitic past of Art’s father Vladek’s life
in Poland and Germany, and in the close domestic quarters of Vladek’s home,
the racialist representation of different groups seems to make sense.The only
contemporary Jews we see are Art,Vladek, and Vladek’s second wife, Mala, all
represented as mice both in the past and in the present.We can read their lingering contemporary mice-ness as a marker of the enduring physical racial solidarity of the Jewish people.At the same time, the mice bodies also remind the
reader that these Jewish characters are products of this Holocaust past, and that
perhaps their mice-ness is an indication of having been irreversibly affected by
the dehumanizing effects of racial antisemitism. Spiegelman’s graphic imagery
clearly shows that Nazis viewed Jews as a separate species and that this attitude
resulted in horrible crimes. But in Maus II Spiegelman forces the reader to ask
whether Jews also view themselves as a separate species. Does contemporary
Jewish identity rest on similarly dangerous assumptions?
Maus II opens with an image of the artist trying to refine the graphic
iconography of the book. We see a drawing pad with sketches of a frog, a
poodle, a moose, a bunny rabbit, all wearing the same striped shirt and scarf
(Figure 3). In the first frame, Art’s wife, Françoise, enters (also in striped shirt
26
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and scarf, and as a mouse) and asks, “What are you doing?” “Trying to figure
out how to draw you,” Art replies.
Françoise: Want me to pose?
Art: I mean in my book.What kind of animal should I make you?
Françoise: Huh? A mouse of course!
Art: But you’re French!
Françoise: Well. . . . How about the bunny rabbit?
Art: Nah, too sweet and gentle.
Françoise: Hmmph.
Art: I mean the French in general. Let’s not forget the centuries of anti-
semitism. I mean, how about the Dreyfus affair? The Nazi collaborators!
The—
Françoise: Okay! But if you’re a mouse, I ought to be a mouse too. I converted didn’t I?11
Spiegelman’s contemporary scene in Maus II has expanded beyond the world of
survivors and their children, offering a much fuller complement to the scenes
of Vladek’s past.The title of the volume,“And Here My Troubles Began,” refers
of course to Vladek’s troubles in the Holocaust, but also to Art’s troubles with representing the Holocaust, representing Jews, and, finally, his troubles with representation itself.12 In Maus II, Art needs to integrate his approach to Jewish history
with the contemporary world in which he lives. By insisting on representing
Jews (and Germans, Poles, and Americans) as inhabiting fundamentally similar
bodies, he finds himself caught in an essentialist trap. In Maus II, Spiegelman
forces us to ask if this mode of representation adequately reflects identity. He
turns to the French history of antisemitism to explain his problem with Françoise,
but it is unclear what impact (if any) this history has had on Françoise’s individual identity.
Spiegelman resolves the problem of representing Françoise by creating a tension between the text and the images.The question here is whether Françoise,
who has converted to Judaism, is a “real Jew”; in other words, a mouse, an individual with a body that looks like all the other Jews.There is something beyond religious identity at work in Spiegelman’s schema, and, he implies, in
contemporary Jewish communal rhetoric. What determines Jewish identity?
Can a person decide to become a Jew, that is, a mouse? The ability to change
one’s “species” would seem to subvert the scientific language on which the
idea of species is based. Indeed, Françoise subscribes to a nonracialized definition of what it means to be a Jew. She feels that if she has converted to Judaism,
she has become a mouse. During the entire conversation with Françoise about
“what she should be,” we slowly come to realize that graphically, Spiegelman
the artist also subscribes to this philosophy—the Françoise that speaks in these
panels is already a mouse.
27
Yet Spiegelman also acknowledges that his use of animal (or any fixed)
categories raises problems when attempting to represent individual identity.
As the conversation between Art and Françoise continues, the reader realizes
that the subject of Jewish bodies represents a central unresolved issue in their
relationship:
Françoise: You know, you should have married what’s-her-name. The girl
you were seeing when we first met?
Art: Sandra?
Françoise: Yes, then you could just draw mice. No problem.13
Françoise, who argues for being a mouse, also worries that she lacks that true
something that would make her a real mouse, that is, a real Jew. If only she were
born with a mouse body (or if Art had married someone else born with such
a body), there would be no problem of representation. Spiegelman resists the
simple biological explanation of identity by apparently allowing Françoise
to choose her self-representation, to be a mouse. But that identity is unstable
because, as she reveals a bit later, she only converted because Art’s father
insisted. Rabbinic certification made Françoise a mouse, but in whose eyes?
Art clearly loves the fact that Françoise is Jewish but not Jewish. He comments
a few panels later about his “prejudice against middle-class New York Jewish
women,” a category that obviously does not include Françoise (12). Like in
Self-Loathing, perception is crucial to Jewish identification. Jewish bodies in
Maus are given meaning by the communities in which they exist and the individuals who inhabit them.
We have seen how both Spiegelman’s and Kominsky’s work is rooted in
postmodernist explorations of the instability of representation. Kominsky celebrates the multiple possibilities of Jewish self-representation (with her many
different images of Aline) and Spiegelman uses the formal challenges he faces
in creating his graphic novel (such as Art’s discussion about whether or not to
draw his wife as a mouse) to alert the reader to the complexity of Jewish identity and history. One of the most prominent of contemporary Jewish graphic
artists, Ben Katchor, builds on these concerns about storytelling and identity
in his graphic novel The Jew of New York. Rejecting the device of the autobiographical, self-conscious narrator, Katchor delves into Jewish theology, mysticism, and language to investigate the ways our attitudes toward history, narrative,
and bodies shape contemporary Jewish identity. The Jew of New York begins with
the understanding that history is pluralistic, sprawling, and chaotic. Katchor
spins a weave of tales that take that chaos as a given. Katchor’s kaleidoscopic
vision of totalized Jewish energy, imagination, creativity, and suffering in the
1820s encodes a commentary on contemporary American Jewishness and contemporary comics. Katchor creates a series of characters who are all obsessed
with utopian schemes: one wants to carbonate Lake Erie and distribute seltzer
28
Andrea Mo st
4. Talmudic-style commentary on the plans for a seltzer delivery system. From The Jew
of New York by Ben Katchor, copyright © 1998 by Ben Katchor. Used by permission of
Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
water to all of New York City; another dreams of cataloguing all the sounds of
human digestion; yet another tries to create a new homeland for Jews in the
wilderness of New York State. If history is an inevitable mess, these characters
find solace in the messianic possibility of a future that follows an elegant plan.
Whereas Kominsky and Spiegelman are perpetually concerned with the
Jewish and the non-Jewish and what distinguishes them, Katchor is less interested in creating or exploring oppositions. Instead, Judaism and Jewish culture
provide the central organizing discourse of The Jew of New York. Katchor’s work
is not just about Jews; it is a Jewish book. Explicit Jewish characters or Jewish
religious practices may come and go, but Jewishness pervades the imagery,
characterization, metaphor, allegory, style, diction, and language of the book.
For example, on the inside back cover, a series of panels describe the operations of the “Lake Erie Soda-Water Company” (Figure 4).The subject of the
page—the manufacture and delivery of seltzer water to New York City—
evokes Jewish material culture. The design of the page is also Jewish. In the
center panel is a cross-section of a city street, with a view of the underground
conduit that will carry the seltzer throughout the city. Surrounding the center panel is a series of smaller pictures that comment on, amplify, or explain
elements of the center panel. The layout is talmudic, and the use of vertical
columns of text in different fonts and sizes alongside the pictures further
29
encourages this comparison.The philosophy of the story depicted is Jewish as
well. A closer look at the central picture reveals the name of God printed in
Hebrew in a cross-section of a stone or possibly a bone, deep in the earth underneath the seltzer delivery system.This detail transforms a business scheme
of making money by bottling water into a utopian dream with a specifically
Jewish messianic vision. The bedrock that supports this dream is a word, and
the word is the ineffable name of God (YHVH). Katchor is largely unconcerned about the dilemmas of Jewish self-representation that engage Kominsky and Spiegelman because by combining Judaism with comics—by making
Jewish comics—he has found a way to express elegantly, succinctly, and compassionately the instability and contingency of the postmodern world.All meaning, all dreams, all reality, rests on a word whose meaning is both unutterable
and infinite.
The seltzer delivery system, as pictured in the central panel, closely resembles a human system of veins and arteries. And the name of God appears
to be buried beneath that system. In his book, Katchor closely links bodily
functions with utopian visions, celebrating and even sacralizing vulgarity in a
very Jewish way. An observant Jew, upon waking in the morning, says two
blessings, one explicitly about bodily functions and the other about the soul.
Both are necessary, as in Judaism the body and all its processes are sacred. Observant Jews bless all of the activities of daily life: washing hands, getting dressed,
going to the bathroom. Blessings are recited before and after eating, with specific blessings for each kind of food. Foods themselves are carefully regulated:
the system of kashrut details how animals are to be killed, which foods may be
eaten, and in which combinations. Katchor is fascinated by this Jewish attention to the body, and his characters discuss matters of health, digestion, and ritual purity in great detail. Restaurant scenes, for example, proliferate in this
book. One menu offers “a bullock’s heart stuffed with veal forcemeat,” a dish
sure to cause indigestion, a problem that is alleviated by carbonated soda water,
the manufacture and distribution of which is depicted in the panels described
above. Likewise, a kosher butcher in the story is chased out of town when he
is discovered to have sold nonkosher cow’s tongue to his unsuspecting coreligionists.The sale of “unblessed tongues” literalizes the concept of irreverent speech, but it also draws attention to blessed speech as a function of a
specific, fleshy part of the body, the tongue.We see here a duality that is crucial to Katchor’s worldview; namely, that the tongue and mouth are the bodily source of both physical nourishment and language, the liminal space that
mediates the passage of both food and words into and out of the body. The
tongue fashions both body and soul.
Yet it is not only the individual body that is imagined in gastronomic
terms.As we have seen in the pictures of the seltzer delivery system, the whole
world is represented as a body as well, an inversion of the Jewish precept that
30
Andrea Mo st
5. The luminous staircase of human digestion. From The Jew of New York by Ben
Katchor, copyright © 1998 by Ben Katchor. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
each body is a microcosm of the world.14 The experience or representation of
“reality” therefore is inherently a digestive event. Another character, a kabbalistic dreamer,Yosl Feinbroyt, finds the sounds of digestion spiritually enlightening and has devoted his life to collecting and transcribing “the sounds of eating
and drinking” into a unique dictionary that includes words like “zhaloup” and
“choup.” Feinbroyt’s desire to render into text the nonverbal sounds humans
make seems ridiculous. Indeed, when he approaches a publisher of dictionaries with the results of his “research,” he is treated as if he were insane. Yet
Katchor represents Feinbroyt’s apparent folly as a path to spiritual enlightenment. In a series of panels in which Feinbroyt scribbles down the sounds he
hears in his notebook, Katchor includes text describing the mystical process of
Jewish numerology, whereby letters are combined to reveal divine secrets:
“Then turn all thy true thoughts to imagine the name and his exalted angels in
thy heart as if they were human beings sitting or standing about thee.”15 One
can’t help thinking of the name of God in the panel described above, which
lies at the heart of a circulatory system deep within the earth. The sounds of
the body are further sacralized as Feinbroyt, in an “ecstatic trance,” ascends a
“luminous staircase emblazoned with strangely familiar words of no earthly
language” (Figure 5).These words are the sounds of digestion he has been collecting. At the top is one word, “grepts,” written in both Yiddish and English:
the sound made when one belches after drinking seltzer water, “the eternal
sound of relief.”16 This amusing conflation of burping and God seems irreverent
31
but is actually a deeply Jewish valorization of the vulgar, the low, the material
stuff of life.17 The Jew of New York celebrates flesh, dirt, earthiness.Another passage features a character who makes a living selling dirt from the Holy Land
so that people may be buried with a bit of sacred earth.Yet another describes
how the wonderful seltzer water that produces that eternal sound is mixed
with the “many undesirable things” that find their way into the Overflow
Conduit, such as “printed books, guitars, pewter ware, boots and human cadavers.” However, Katchor writes,“not all of this foreign debris is of a [sic] insalubrious nature, in fact, some of it gives our drinking water its unique
flavor.”18
Bodies, flesh, and the material world are celebrated in Judaism because
they are examples of the wonders of God’s creation.The celebration of the body
in Judaism never extends, however, to the worship of the body as a divine
thing unto itself, to idolatry.The prohibition against idol worship—the insistence that the divine is ultimately unrepresentable and unknowable—is a central precept of Judaism. Katchor explores the dangers of mistaking bodies for
gods in his representation of Moshe Ketzelbourd, a formerly bourgeois merchant who goes to upstate New York to make money in the beaver trade and
ends up living outside, in the forest, giving up his Judaism and adopting the
ways of the animals, specifically those of the beaver. Ironically, as a creature of
nature Ketzelbourd is obsessed with an actress, Miss Patella, and has constructed
elaborate worship rituals to honor her. He has never actually seen Miss Patella
perform on the stage; his contact with her is exclusively through the pictures
he has seen of her in newspapers and on handbills that blow through the forest where he lives. In fact, Ketzelbourd “had no interest in attending actual theatrical performances.”“Who needs to sit two hours in a hot, crowded room?”
he asks. Instead, he is satisfied with faded pictures of his heroine:“simple wood
engravings; workmanlike copies of copies of the most conventionalized images of womankind, printed in black ink. An assemblage of convex lines—far
removed from any first-hand observations from nature.”19 Ketzelbourd’s lack
of desire to see the “real” Miss Patella is confusing. On the one hand, he seems
to find reproductions of reproductions of Miss Patella sufficient, as if he recognized the folly of searching for an authentic representation of a divine creature. On the other hand, he does worship these pictures, which implies that on
some level he mistakes the aura of authenticity for the real thing.20 Another
character remarks,“To make the leap of sensorial association from these crude
prints to the flesh of an actual woman required a reckless imagination.”21 Ketzelbourd has actually made two idolatrous leaps of imagination: assuming that
pictures can “stand in” for a real woman, and then, more importantly, assuming
that the real woman is divine.22
Ketzelbourd’s fanatical worship of Miss Patella is intertwined with his
slow transformation from Jew to animal. By the end of the book he has become
32
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almost (but not quite) indistinguishable from a beaver. He sleeps in a beaver’s
lodge, imitates the beaver’s mating ritual, and even uses his foot to create the
slapping sound of a beaver’s tail as he crawls on all fours.The more beaver-like
he becomes, the more Ketzelbourd becomes obsessed with constructing altars
to Miss Patella and conducting his worship rituals. Idolatry, the text implies, is
ultimately dehumanizing. The more animalistic he becomes, the less Ketzelbourd is satisfied with reproductions and the more determined he is to find
the “real” object of his worship.Toward the end of the book, Ketzelbourd travels to New York City and manages to locate the theater where Miss Patella is
performing in a dress rehearsal of a play entitled The Jew of New York. He hides
in the balcony to watch the play, but his long years of idol worship have dulled
his ability to distinguish the real from the fake.When, in the play, the character Major Ham attempts to seduce the character Miss Patella (played by herself ),
Ketzelbourd, “unable to distinguish between the actor playing Noah (Ham)
and the real man,” makes his third fatal leap, onto the stage, and bites the actor
in the abdomen, killing him. A stagehand, thinking he is a “wolf or an overgrown jackal,” then shoots and kills Ketzelbourd. Ketzelbourd’s fanatical idolatry is such that he dies for a misperception.
Through the device of Ketzelbourd’s worship of celebrity, the book criticizes a contemporary culture all too willing to dehumanize itself in the pursuit of a similar type of idolatry. But The Jew of New York does not allow the
reader to participate easily or complacently in this postmodernist critique.
Idol worship can take many forms, as we see in two interlocking scenes at the
end of the book. Upon returning to New York, Ketzelbourd had apparently
given “himself over to the humble passions of an animal.” But the transformation is neither simple nor complete.We are told that he is an animal “capable
of reading a newspaper, and handling money . . . with the power of logic and
wherewithal to buy a coach ticket to New York City . . . and ask directions of
a stranger.”23 In other words, despite his animalistic behavior, Moshe Ketzelbourd is still a human being. And human beings are made in God’s image.
While idolatry may be dehumanizing in The Jew of New York, that does not
mean that others have the right to dehumanize the idolater. After his death,
Ketzelbourd’s body is mistakenly identified as a rare species of animal, stuffed
and put on display in a museum.Viewers of the “Bowery Behemoth,” eager to
see this “authentic” and exotic creature in the flesh, file past, making jokes
about its/his likeness to people they know. Some even comment on the strange
fact that its “organs of reproduction” appear to be circumcised (Figure 6).24
The spectators—and readers—comfortably distance themselves from the true
horror of the stuffed human being posed before them by insisting it is a “scientific specimen.” Despite the bodily evidence before their eyes, they do not
see the specimen as a man.When an old friend recognizes Ketzelbourd (who
was his former business partner), he rushes to the glass case exclaiming, “He
33
This image not
available.
6. Ketzelbourd on display. From The Jew of New York
by Ben Katchor, copyright © 1998 by Ben Katchor.
Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of
Random House, Inc.
has a wife and three daughters; a whitewashed villa . . . he’s a wealthy man, a
baptized Jew!”25 A friend reassures him that he must be mistaken, that the “animal” just resembles Ketzelbourd:“In a city of this size, one learns to distinguish
between hundreds of faces each day; you’re out of practice.” The spectators
who pay money to witness this dehumanization fall prey themselves to the
lure of idolatry.They—and by extension the reader, who also eagerly looks at
Ketzelbourd’s naked body—worship at the easy altar of commercial spectacle
and hence are complicit in Ketzelbourd’s dehumanization.
At the same time that Ketzelbourd is being “distinguished” as a specimen
of rare circumcised animal inside the museum, a representative of the Berlin
Verein fur Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Society for Culture and Science
of the Jews) interviews Jewish passersby outside. He is eager to discover and
classify “cultural manifestations unique to the Jews of New York City.”26 When
questioned about his interviewing techniques, he insists that “a Jew is not
a museum specimen to be admired on Sunday afternoons. . . . Like all social
beings, he is subject to constant change and development—a creature of his
surroundings. It is this subtle ongoing metamorphosis that we endeavor to
study through the rigorous methods of science.”27 The juxtaposition of these
two scenes (inside and outside the museum), however, undermines the researcher’s assertion that the Jew is not a museum specimen. Indeed, a specimen
of “Jew” is on display in the museum at that very moment, albeit not directly
labeled as such.Two similar acts of idolatry and dehumanization are occurring
34
Andrea Mo st
simultaneously. In the case of Ketzelbourd, the dehumanization is a literal one:
he has been turned into an animal by having his stuffed, lifeless body put on
display. In the case of the “Jews,” the dehumanization is a cultural one, the result of having one’s culture and society studied as manifestations of group racial
behavior, and “scientifically” proven through standard methods of observation
and classification. Thus Katchor’s book, in a classically Jewish but also postmodernist vein, warns against any form of worship that insists on fixed meanings and stable truths, such as those determined by “scientific” methods. At the
same time, it insists that the only essential truth is that humanity is created in the
image of God, an always interpretable and infinite Idea.
Visual art has always created a problem in a culture that forbids the representation of the divine. The medium of comics links postmodernist thought
and ancient Jewish teachings about representation and idolatry, forcing us to
rethink the relationship between Judaism and representation, and between postmodernist theory and Judaism. In exploring how to depict Jewish content—
Jewish bodies and Jewish history—Kominsky and Spiegelman make expert use
of the innovations of postmodern art and literature. Self-consciously drawing attention to the processes of art-making within the very frames of their stories,
both artists privilege individual perceptions and raise questions about the possibility of stable historical truths. They combine the visual form of comics with
the philosophy of postmodernism in order to expose and critique the idea of
an authentic Jewish self (or, by extension, community). In The Jew of New York,
Katchor uses aspects of Judaism to meditate on the essence of Jewish identity,
not only in the content of his panels, but also in their form. His story about idolatry is also a study in the idolatrous impulses at work in any visual representation. In his work, Katchor takes postmodernist theory about language, image,
and representation and subjects it to an explicitly Jewish analysis. In a radical approach that only a medium celebrating the interplay between image and text
could manage, The Jew of New York visually expresses the Jewish relationship between Flesh and Word.
Note s
1. Bob Kane was born Kahn, Kirby was Kurtzberg, and Lee was Lieber. For an overview
of the role of Jews in the American comic book industry, see Arie Kaplan’s three-part
series “How the Jews Created the Comic Book Industry,” in Reform Judaism 32, no. 1
(Fall 2003), no. 2 (Winter 2003), and no. 3 (Spring 2004).
2. Kaplan quotes Jewish comic book artist Will Eisner: “When you’re sitting down to
write about an American hero within an American culture, you begin to devise
those characters or characteristics that you regard as gentile” (www.uahc.org/rjmag/
03fall/comics.shtml, p. 6).
3. A number of critics have pointed out the relationship between the tropes of the
comics superhero stories and American Jewish experience. See for example Harry
Brod, “Did You Know Superman Was Jewish?” (www.TatooJew.com/supermensch
.html), and “Of Mice and Superman: Images of Jewish Masculinity,” in Gender and
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
35
Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition, ed. T. M. Rudavsky (New York: New York
University Press, 1995), 279–293. See also Kaplan, “How the Jews Created the
Comic Book Industry,” and Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and
Clay (New York: Random House, 2000).
Kaplan notes that others have also seen the golem as the precursor for many of the
superheroes. See Kaplan,“How the Jews Created the Comic Book Industry,” no. 1.
When, in the mid-1950s, a U.S. Senate subcommittee began targeting comic books
for their supposed immorality and links to juvenile delinquency (often using barely
concealed antisemitic slurs against Jewish comics artists), the comics industry decided to self-regulate by creating the Comics Code Authority (CCA), which controlled the content of mainstream comics. One reaction against the CCA was the
development of the alternative comics world. Closely linked with hippie counterculture, underground comics reflected anti-establishment politics of the 1960s and
rejected the cleaned-up superhero comics approved by the CCA in favor of stories
about real people living alternative lifestyles. For more information see Bradford W.
Wright, Comic Book Nation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
Other examples of recent representations of Jewish bodies in comics include Will
Eisner’s autobiographical work To the Heart of the Storm (1990) and graphic novel
Fagin the Jew (2003), both of which deal explicitly with the challenges of stereotype
in representing Jews. Judd Winick and Farel Dalrymple’s new Caper series for DC
Comics focuses on three generations of a West coast Jewish crime family, with
highly sexualized portrayals of both Jewish men and women. James Sturm returns
to the Jewish fantasy body in his graphic novel The Golem’s Mighty Swing (2003), a
story set in the 1920s about a Jewish baseball team, the Stars of David, who turn to
the legendary Jewish strongman to help them survive a particularly difficult season.
Alan Oirich and Ron Randall hark back to the Jewish-created superheroes of midcentury in their Jewish Hero Corps (2003), which introduces a hilarious assemblage
of champions of Jewish memory like Minyan Man (can turn into ten men at will),
the Sabbath Queen (stops machines from working for twenty-four-hour periods),
and Dreidl Maydl (spins her enemies into submission).While the Jewish Hero Corps
characters sport the sleek muscle-bound bodies of superheroes, the women are
modestly dressed and the men wear yarmulkes.
Bob’s more conventionally attractive representations of Aline do not imply that
R. Crumb’s cartoons are in any way conventional. A pivotal figure in the development of the underground aesthetic, Crumb can be seen as the comics embodiment
of the slippery perversity of conventionality. Rather, both artists acknowledge that
the worlds they see have little relationship to conventional, normal, depictions of reality. And they have no apparent need to pin down a single stable truth they can
both agree on. Instead, they each live in the presence of the other’s twisted fantasy
version of reality and exploit these fantasies for their own and their partner’s happiness without ever entirely embracing them.
Some Jewish content appeared in more mainstream publications like MAD magazine (mostly Yiddishisms) as early as the mid-1950s, and by the 1970s, the X-Men
featured openly Jewish characters Magneto and Kitty Pryde (a.k.a. Shadowcat). It
was not until the late 1980s, however, that mainstream comics artists regularly featured explicitly Jewish characters. Howard Chaykin, creator of Reuben Flagg
(American Flagg), noted of his work:“I’m no longer a Jew masquerading as a gentile
through comics.” Spiegelman’s work was the first (from the mainstream or the underground) to cross over to the canon of American Jewish literature (Arie Kaplan,
www.uahc.org/rjmag/o4spring/comics.shtml, p. 5).
Maus I & II has received sustained critical attention as a highly innovative, deeply moving, and disturbing second-generation Holocaust narrative. An excellent recent collection that highlights major critical issues is Deborah R. Geis, ed., Considering Maus
36
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
Andrea Mo st
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003).A number of scholars (including Geis,
in her introduction) in the volume discuss Spiegelman’s choice of animal characters,
but none with this particular focus on the ways Maus illustrates the problem of contemporary Jewish identity. In his article “Disturbing Comics” (in The Language of
Comics:Word and Image, ed. Robin Varnum and Christina T.Gibbons [ Jackson:University Press of Mississippi, 2001]), Frank L. Cioffi offers a very useful overview of the critical controversy that ensued over Spiegelman’s choice of animal characters (117–119).
The epigraph reads: “The dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria
carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal” and connects
Mickey Mouse with the Jews:“Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down
with Mickey Mouse!” Spiegelman indicates with this opening that he is aware that
his work engages both German antisemitism and the century-long tradition of animal imagery in American cartoons.
Art Spiegelman, Maus II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 11 (emphasis in original).
See Michael Staub,“The Shoah Goes On and On: Remembrance and Representation in Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” MELUS 20, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 32–46, for an extended discussion of the title and its relationship to representation.
Spiegelman, Maus II, 12 (emphasis in original).
See the entry on “microcosm” in www.JewishEncyclopedia.com for a history of
this idea in Jewish thought.
Ben Katchor, The Jew of New York (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 32 (emphasis
in original).
Ibid., 33.
See Michael Wenthe’s article,“The Jew of New York: Sound, Sense, and Nonsense”
(http://www.indyworld.com/indy/winter_2004/wenthe_katchor/index.html), for
an exploration of Katchor’s use of language as a specifically visual image.
Katchor, The Jew of New York, back endplate.
Ibid., 20.
The obvious critic being invoked here is Walter Benjamin, whose essay “The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is crucial for understanding
Katchor’s work. Also underlying this discussion of the worship of reproductions is
the notion of the simulacrum, both in its original Latin meaning (the material representation of a deity) and in Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the sense of hyperreality created by postmodern simulacra. I will be exploring the relationship between the
theories of Benjamin and Baudrillard and Katchor’s work in a forthcoming, longer
version of this piece.
Katchor, The Jew of New York, 20.
Miss Patella’s name, which means “kneecap,” further emphasizes Ketzelbourd’s errors.
A part of the body, in this case the knee, is capable of symbolizing the whole person,
Miss Patella, because she is simply a person of flesh, blood, and bones, not a god.
In their essay “Self-Exposure as Theory” (in Thinking in Jewish, ed. Jonathan Boyarin
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 43–44), Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin
cite a talmudic text on the relationship between the body and the name of God,
which will form a critical foundation for my longer version of this essay on Katchor:
“All Israelites who are circumcised will come into Paradise, for the Holy Blessed
One placed His name on Israel, in order that they might come into Paradise, and
what is the name and the seal which He placed upon them? It is ShaDaY.The Shi’n
[the first letter of the root], he placed in the nose, the Dale’t, He placed in the hand,
and the Yo’d in the circumcision” (Tanhuma Tsav 14, cited in Boyarin, 44).
Ibid., 85.
Ibid.
Recalling “Home” from Beneath
the Shadow of the Holocaust
Ame rican Jewish Wome n Write r s
of the New Wave
Janet Handler Burstein
Although American Jewish literature was slow to absorb
the powerful effects of the Holocaust upon the Jewish life that survived it,
from the 1980s on American writers took renewed interest in the Jewish past.
Unlike their immigrant predecessors who had rebelled against inherited ethnic imperatives, and writers of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s who were concerned more with Americanism than Judaism, writers of the 1980s took up
divergent strands of the fabric of collective Jewish experience that had once
seemed so tightly woven, so whole. First described as belonging to a “new
wave” by Morris Dickstein in 1997, these writers were sometimes nostalgically warmed by that fabric, sometimes stifled by it, sometimes enraged by the
violence that tore it apart, sometimes carefully skeptical about its virtues—or
imaginatively inspired by its power, still, to move them.1
They moved with particular energy, innovatively, into the stream of Jewish writings about “home.” One of the most intimate of what Paul Celan
called the “little secrets”—obscured, now, by the shadow of the Holocaust and
rendered especially precious by the recurrent history of exile—the image of
“home” stirs both personal and collective memory. It focuses longing, deprivation, and the sense of early security—in some cases claustrophobia—on a
place that is always somewhere else. As Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi observed, Jews
have long built these feelings not only into political movements and family
myths but also into stories: the biblical narrative of Rachel’s departure from
her childhood home demonstrates that “the safest and most enduring hiding
places” for the “household gods” of “deserted homes were the stories that contained and superseded them.”2 Among women writers of the last two or three
37
38
Jan e t H an d l e r B u r s t e i n
decades those stories take the forms of fiction, essay, and memoir.They have in
common the motif of a journey that moves simultaneously in several directions, toward several goals. Journeys home can carry a writer toward a sometimes vexed and provisional reconnection with both an ethnic and a personal
past. They can move toward insight into a protagonist’s development and the
sometimes damaged bond with the family that shares her exile.They can lead
to clearer realization of places to which the roots of self still, atavistically, cling.
And they can achieve either acceptance of loss or imaginative re-creation of
the places of origin—drained, now, of sentimentality, seen in ways too complex,
even too dark, to be compatible with nostalgia.3
For women writers of the “new wave,” recollections of home are inflected
principally by gender and by new ways of imagining “the self.” The sense of
self as a constant, in-dwelling presence used to be everywhere in Western literature. From Jane Eyre and Maggie Tulliver to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, protagonists of British novels, in particular, encouraged readers to imagine that
experience simply developed a persona which was already latent, could already be glimpsed in or foreshadowed by the earliest vagaries of the child. But
postmodern writers offer a different understanding. As Patricia Waugh,Teresa
DeLauretis, and many other cultural critics have noted, more complicated
and disturbing insights into issues of subjectivity and subjective agency now
season contemporary work on issues of identity. These issues enter American
Jewish literature most memorably in Philip Roth’s Zuckerman stories (1979,
1981, 1983), which challenge, as Eugene Goodheart observed years ago, “the
realist assumption of ‘a natural being, an irreducible self.”4 Roth’s later work
The Counterlife (1986) demonstrates that the “unified self is sheer illusion.”5 As
this work’s narrative alternately knits and unravels the stories of two brothers,
it enacts—and fixes in American Jewish literature—the postmodern sense of
the self as essentially unstable and discontinuous.
In much recent work by American Jewish women writers, this postmodern awareness of the complexity of “selving”6 is coupled with a persistent interest in the search for origins. Deviating in this respect from earlier American
Jewish writers like Anzia Yezierska or Fanny Hurst, whose protagonists realize
themselves by leaving home and family, American Jewish women’s memoirs
and novels of the last two decades revisit the places of the authors’ or their parents’ childhoods and clarify formative elements of that journey.7 Responding
to felt discontinuities within their own experience, these writers highlight the
continuities that their searches bring to light as they reconstruct places of origin which disappeared in the Holocaust.8 They also play out dramas of reconnection with the European home-in-exile in which memory is the prime
mover.9 In all such work, the effort of writers to recall “home” can take the
shape of a literal journey back to Europe, during which the writer reengages
with—but does not necessarily accept—Jewish ways of being in the world.
Recalling “Home”
39
The effort can become research, which seeks out fragments of a collective or
parental past. Or it can appear as the imaginative, unsentimental re-creation of
a place where Jewish life once flourished. Immigrant memoirs and fictions
tended to thrive on implicit contrasts between then and now, there and here.10
But women’s writings of the new wave—almost always marked by awareness
of the Holocaust as a divisive, fragmenting, destabilizing force in contemporary experience—seek continuities, often imaged as reconciliation with people long estranged from the writer.These writings reveal an important secret:
that the journey home can still shape—for better or for worse—the writer’s
own sense of herself.
Precur sor of Wome n’s New Wave Memoir s
Perhaps the most striking feature of recent American Jewish women’s
memoirs is their insistence that the journey home begins with estrangement
from it—a separation not freely chosen but rather forced upon protagonists.
An initial sense of alienation from home is often represented as a rupture in
personal, filial relationships: like the relationship of the writer to her mother
or sister. Kim Chernin’s In My Mother’s House: A Daughter’s Story (1983)—in
some ways a precursor of new wave women’s memoirs—establishes this pattern as it sets the writer’s intense, prolonged estrangement from her mother at
the very beginning of her journey home.11 Chernin’s memoir insists that the
image of “home” she seeks to recall is deeply shadowed by her sense of estrangement.When Chernin decides to return to her mother’s house, the narrative initially invokes her memory of long alienation from that place and
from the mother she now reencounters.“Since I was a small girl,” she remembers,“I have been fighting with my mother” (7).Their efforts to clarify and to
honor their differences, and also to reconnect with one another, form the dramatic center of the memoir.
The subtext of Chernin’s memoir is the struggle of mother and daughter
to summon into being, through remembering and retelling, the homeplaces
that shaped them. For Rose Chernin, Kim’s mother, “home” was a Russian
shtetl. Kim cannot recollect her own, American home—and her mother’s
painful, frequent absences from it—without reaching behind it to the place of
her mother’s girlhood. What Rose has become, her daughter knows, “grows
up out of her past in a becoming, natural way” (15). But the trajectory of Rose’s
growth is marked from the beginning by gendered and ethnic complexities,
by deprivations, oppressions, and the struggle against them that are characteristic of the European “home” and that will reappear in later memoirs.As many
historians have noted, and as I have observed elsewhere, Jewish tradition excluded women from authority in communal and religious life and denied
them the education enjoyed by their brothers, fathers, and husbands.12 Ironically, Rose’s family was descended from the Vilna Gaon, “a famous rabbinical
40
scholar of the eighteenth century” (9).13 But Rose was born into a “village
where most women did not know how to read” (15).Thus scholarship, as well
as the spiritual life and the social status that Jewish tradition links with it, were
closed to her, as to her mother and sisters.
Kim’s grandmother especially, “that poor, broken woman” (15), haunts
Rose Chernin and sets in motion the struggle that will dominate her developing sense of self. Easygoing and gentle, unable to “stand up for herself,”
Rose’s mother was displaced first by her own father’s second wife and later by
her emigration to America. Unable to adjust to the New World, “she lived
through most of her days in that sorrow of mute protest which in her generation was known as melancholia” (15).When she became suicidal, her abusive
husband committed her to an asylum—from which her daughter, Rose, ultimately rescued her.
Even before this rescue, however, Rose had conceived herself as a fighter:
“I would lie awake at night and remember [his] fists beating at her, breaking
her down. Destroying her.And I knew it would not be me. I would not be my
mother and no child of mine would be my mother” (39). Kim, Rose’s daughter, will ultimately uncover the “helplessness and sorrow . . . the sense of unbearable despair that lives, forbidden, beneath” her mother’s adult persona,
which foregrounds her “will to fight” (82). That will—formed partly by her
mother’s suffering and partly by Rose’s own deprivations as the immigrant
daughter of a broken woman—drives Rose into political activity; she became
an organizer for the American Communist Party. When she heard the voices
of American strikers attacked by police on horseback, she identified them
with the cries she had heard at home in Europe, of Jews attacked by Cossacks.
In that parallel, she saw the shape of her adult self: “I had fought for my
mother and now I was ready to start fighting for the people” (92). In Rose’s
recollection of her epiphany, then, memory of both the personal and the collective European past, saturated in retrospect by the residue of both ethnic and
gender discrimination, grounds and intensifies adult political commitment in
a very different culture. Seeing herself as a champion of those whose spirits are
broken, who cannot fight for themselves, Rose’s political activity in America
“renews once again [the] ancient battle against the limiting of women” (107)
which broke her mother’s spirit in the Jewish shtetl. But, ironically, her work
for the Party, the frequent absences from home that work required, will alienate her from her own daughter.
Recognition and acceptance of difference between mother and daughter
becomes in this memoir the most salient ingredient in the reconstruction of
their relationship. Unlike Rose, her daughter Kim will define herself not as a
political activist, but as a poet—reacting, in part, against the preoccupations
and absences of her warrior mother. Again unlike her mother, Kim will feel a
“futile nostalgia . . . [a] sense of loss” (32) for the vanished spirituality of shtetl
41
life. She tries to explain to her mother,“What we—my generation—long for,
grew up in the shtetl”: “a sacred dimension to daily life, which held its own
alongside the terror and the violence” (106).The juxtaposition here of the sacred and the horrific embraces a disjunction that often scarred the experience
of European Jews. It also overlooks the particular problems of women’s handicaps in the European shtetl. Kim believes, for example, that one aunt’s gifts as
a writer might have been nourished by the spiritual life of the shtetl. But Rose
is contemptuous of this belief, knowing firsthand, as Kim does not, the forces
alive in that culture which silenced women. For Rose, politics takes the place of
religion. But for Kim, precursor of the new wave women writers who will take
up again—some to reclaim, others to transform—the thread of spiritual and cultural practices that alienated their parents, her later writings will chart the course
of her search for a woman-friendly religious life. Unlike Rose Chernin, but
like later women writers of the new wave, Kim will engage, instead of abandon,
the spiritual conflicts which alienated her mother.The image of the lost homein-exile that their joint narrative constructs will be rescued from sentimentality
by Rose’s anger—and also augmented by Kim’s longing.
Memoirists of th e New Wave
In subsequent women’s memoirs of the new wave, the fact of initial estrangement occupies an even more decisively historical and ethnic as well as
a filial context. Unlike Chernin, whose parents were immigrants, Helen Epstein,
Susan Rubin Suleiman, and Eva Hoffman are children of Holocaust survivors or
of refugees from the Nazi era. Gerda Lerner and Marianne Hirsch are themselves refugees.Thus the Holocaust explicitly shadows recollections of “home”
among these more recent writers. Their journeys of return fashion in the
mind places that, as Marianne Hirsch observed, have really been “irreparably
changed or destroyed by the sudden violence of the Holocaust.” Exiled “from a
world that has ceased to exist, that has been violently erased,” these writers “remember” home by recounting the story of their return.14 Expulsion, rather than
immigration, darkens the outset of all these later narratives of home as the writers struggle not only to reconnect with but also to see clearly—beneath the dark
memory of their forced departures—the place that cast them out.
The effect of this shadowlike awareness of women’s struggle with tradition
on the anti-nostalgic resonance of “home” cannot be overestimated. Gaston
Bachelard, a philosopher of science who turned his attention to art when he
began to understand that “the poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface
of the psyche,” explains:“Asking a child to draw his [sic] house is asking him to
reveal the deepest dream shelter he has found for his happiness. If he is happy, he
will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house which is well built on deeply
rooted foundations.”15 But if children are unhappy, the houses they draw will reveal their distress. Bachelard remembers drawings by Polish and Jewish children
42
who had lived under the German occupation during the war.They drew “motionless houses, houses that have become motionless in their rigidity.This rigidity and motionlessness are present in the smoke as well as in the window curtains.
The surrounding trees are quite straight and give the impression of standing
guard over the house.”16 Thus terror drains the vital capacity for movement from
children’s images of home. One suspects that new wave memoirs by American
Jewish women attempt in part to undo that rigidity, to recapture the energy for
life that was also part of the places of their parents’ or their own ordeals, places
whose images have gone still and static beneath memories of antisemitism, patriarchal repression, expulsion, and extermination.
That attempt is deeply inflected in new wave women’s memoirs, as it is in
Chernin’s work, by the desire for both clarification and reconnection. Gratifying that desire is not simple, for as narratives of return problematize places of
origin, they also fracture chronology and disregard contextual boundaries, as
postmodern works often do, moving in several directions at once: backward
through memory and forward into new relationships to the past; outward into
collective history and politics, and inward into the deep reaches of personal
experience.Anger and bitterness provoked by both personal and collective experience figure significantly in the process of clarification. For historian Gerda
Lerner, for example (Why History Matters, 1977), the journey home begins
with the recognition that collective Jewish experience in Germany largely determined the shape and scope of her choices in America. Her compulsion
to do history, she believes, rises from her early malaise as a German Jewish
woman; she works to clarify the link between herself and her consciousness of
“other members of the Jewish community.”17 For much the same reason that
Rose Chernin became a Communist, Gerda Lerner became a historian: because of the connection she felt between her own suffering and the historic
experience of the Jews.
Like Rose Chernin, Lerner adds to ethnicity the complicating element of
gender; she denies nostalgia and rejects Europe—on both personal and collective grounds—as a source of norms for a Jewish woman’s life in exile. Being
Jewish in Germany before World War II, Lerner remembers, “set one apart.
Jews were not ‘normal,’ we were not right, we were different.” Because she was
not only a Jew, but also a girl, moreover, “the life-line of Jewish learning was
out of my reach.All I got was indoctrination in gender restrictions and a thorough exposure to the great silences—the denial of the past, the suppressed
voices, the absence of heroines. . . . Thus I became a Jew and a Jewish woman
and double difference became imprinted on me—not pride, but embarrassment; not collectivity, but exclusion” (7–8). Reacting against her remembered
exclusion from “the life-line of Jewish learning,” Lerner refuses to set foot in
a synagogue, a self-determined alienation that lasts for over fifty years and
43
enlarges as a woman the exile imposed upon her as a Jew by the Nazis (8). Like
Russian-born Rose Chernin, Lerner abandons Judaism and turns instead toward feminism, substituting political activism—itself, ironically, a feature of
European Jewish women’s experience—for religion.
Laura Levitt, in Jews and Feminism:The Ambivalent Search for Home (1997),
carries this refusal to sentimentalize traditional Judaism as a spiritual “home”
for Jewish women to its most recent incarnation in America, where her father’s acculturation meant the surrendering of Jewish tradition.18 Levitt, who
like Rose Chernin was a Communist, will define herself politically: as a liberal
American feminist. But unlike Rose Chernin, who remained estranged from
traditional Judaism, Levitt returns as an American feminist “to study Jewish
texts . . . to come to terms with this complicated legacy” (24).Thus, in some
new wave writers, the journey “home” provokes desire to gather in what has
been lost or denied.The trajectory of “selving,” for them, is bent by desire: to
retrieve what they believe has been withheld.
For others, the European “home” remains a place in which gender, coupled
with ethnicity, meant deprivation, alienation, and exile. Their self-realization is
shaped by the effort not to remedy or compensate for past losses, but simply to
see them clear, to feel and to mourn them, and to hold them—though not cling
to them—in remembrance. “After you remember and record,” the memoirist
Susan Rubin Suleiman tells herself in Budapest Diary (1993),“it’s time to move
again—and not toward new forgetfulness, but toward new experience.”19 This
second mode of engagement, which refuses to abandon or forget even as it refuses to dwell nostalgically on the past, is the more characteristic mode among
recent American Jewish women writers.
The sense of penetrating silences to discover a connection whose vitality
enriches one’s present life is particularly strong in memoirs like Suleiman’s or
Helen Epstein’s, which describe the journey home partly as a search for the
lost, beloved, mother. In some cases she is the mother in her own European
girlhood: young and playful before the difficult years of adolescence, exile, and
marital disappointments. Or she is the mother of the writer’s childhood: happy
and strong before the disturbances of the Holocaust.“How I had loved her, my
beautiful mother who knew how to play,” Suleiman recalls after her mother’s
death; “I had to take my children to the place where I had known her as a
young woman” (11). Like a pilgrimage to that place, the writing itself performs its own part of the work of mourning.20 As it moves between America
and Europe, between now and then, the fluid narrative movement itself begins
to reanimate the image of “home” and the estranged mother that had gone rigid
in memory with pain and loss.
The effort to clarify and reconnect—twin desiderata of all these memoirs—
anneals estrangement and also constructs the memoirist by revealing the
44
formative power of circumstances over the never fully understood little secrets
that estranged mothers from their daughters. Suleiman’s memoir of return will
uncover at last an explanatory seed of bitterness that estranged her for many
years from her mother, healing by the work of the journey itself this filial conflict which can finally be understood within the wider context of the mother’s
life.As Suleiman remembers her mother “mourning her first love” and suffering
her husband’s repeated infidelities, her research also brings to the narrative surface the historic sexism and antisemitism of the culture that formed and finally
expelled her mother (118, 90). These personal and historical clarifications free
the memoirist to recognize “traces” of her mother in herself, a residue that reforms a connection shadowed—as human connections often are—by unspoken
pain.As she unfolds the documents that her search for origins has uncovered, as
she places them “one on top of the other,” they not only “tell a story”; they also
confirm that “the continuity of generations has prevailed over war and destruction, and I am the beneficiary of that victory” (219). Her trip to Budapest is a
return in two ways: she has made herself at home there, relearning the language,
making friends, learning to move freely around the city; she has also reconstructed her mother’s life there, clarifying and repairing the filial connection between them. Both accomplishments reshape her sense of option and agency, of
self. Helen Epstein too will uncover, in Where She Came From (1997), the cultural and historical matrix of the Holocaust that destroyed her mother’s expectations for herself and silenced her memories of the camps.21 She will refashion
the bond between them, reshaping the maternal image which her memory will
keep, so that her own life can continue separately, after the beloved mother is
gone.22
Like lenses that bring distant things closer, new wave Jewish women’s
memoirs almost always open with the large historical fact of collective expulsion and exile, and almost always narrow, in the end, to the most intimate personal and family estrangements. The memoirs suggest that culture, history,
family, and self are inextricably layered, like Suleiman’s documents, or folded
into one another. Lerner’s essays open with the collective, cultural issues that
shaped her sense of herself as a woman, a Jew, a German: gender, ethnicity, and
nationality tucked inside one another like nested Russian dolls. But later in
the collection Lerner also attributes the long estrangement from her beloved
sister, and their reconnection, to the most intimate loss and recovery of “deep
memories,” of the “sound, the rhythm, the forms of [her own] unconscious.”
She believes that fascism stole these from her when it stole her native language,“as it had stolen all my worldly possessions” (33, 48). Personal losses are
thus folded into the collective loss of home, culture, language. Epstein and
Suleiman also interweave the collective with the personal, the form of their
memoirs lacing together the most intimate pain of personal loss and betrayal
45
with the public, political, social facts of antisemitism and the suppression of
women.
Always aware of the complexity of the image they reconstruct, even memoirs most deeply committed to remembering the lost childhood home as a
paradise refashion it as darkened by personal and collective grief, pain, and estrangement. Such shadows subvert nostalgia by emphasizing and problematizing specific historical and ethnic components of “home” for Jewish women
writers.These writers also make explicit the personal resonance of collective,
ethnic experience. For example, although she calls her childhood home “Paradise,” Eva Hoffman, in Lost in Translation (1989), like the other memoirists,
opens her recollection of the homeplace with the bald statement of her emigration from it.23 Expulsion, however, is not the only shadow thrown back,
retrospectively, upon the child’s earliest memories of home. Hoffman remembers her mother, in the “middle of a sun-filled day,” “suddenly, while she’s
kneading some dough, or perhaps sewing up a hole in my sweater’s elbow,”
beginning “to weep softly” as she remembers the death of her sister in a Nazi
gas chamber. Shadows of the Holocaust thus darken Hoffman’s “paradise”
from the beginning. Happy, protected by a strong father who adores her, yet
born in Poland just after the war to parents once hunted by the Germans and
unprotected by their countrymen, Hoffman will always know both the lesson
of the secure, beloved child: that “everything is changeless and knowable”; and
the lesson of the vulnerable Jew: that “this moment will not last,” that its “fullness,” once “perfectly abundant,” “will be gone” before she takes another step
as she walks home from school (6, 16–17). This perceptual complexity owes
much to the historical circumstances of the war and occupation, in whose
wake her mother’s terrible memories, fully shared with a child old enough to
“keep every detail,” complicate the otherwise luminous image of the homeplace and Hoffman’s experience in it.
Virtually every element of the home she lovingly describes comes complete with its shadow of risk and potential loss. Her recollection of other
people—Poles, for example—is deeply divided between her refusal, on one
hand, to believe that her friends look on her “as a dark stranger,” and her
mother’s insistence, on the other, that “there’s an anti-Semite in every Pole”
(33). Her ethnic identity is itself ambivalent: Jewishness is, at first, “filled with
my mother’s tears and whispers in a half-understood tongue,” but this mother
also teaches that “it is something to be proud of—something to stand up for
with all one’s strength” (2).24
Ultimately, memories of the Holocaust and awareness of historical and
contemporary cultural hostility toward Jews not only provoke Hoffman’s parents’ cynical loss of faith in politics but also force them to emigrate.The image
of Hoffman’s beloved friend’s apartment on the eve of his emigration captures
46
her awareness of doubleness in this place: his “apartment has been transformed
from a place in which people have lived cozily and for a long time into a space
from which they are fleeing. . . . The familiar rooms, which used to be warm
and muffled with their thicknesses of furniture, now echo with emptiness and
the wooden crates that line the hallway” (82). Her perception of place having
thus doubled and split even before she leaves home, scarred by the undertone
of remembered coziness within the moment of alienation, Hoffman knows
how crucial an attachment to home is to one’s sense of rootedness in experience (74). But she also knows how fragile, provisional, that attachment turns
out to be (83).“Poland is home, in a way,” she concludes,“but it is also hostile
territory” (84): the initial qualification, followed by the radical contradiction,
underscores the decidedly anti-nostalgic tenor of this Jewish woman’s recollection of “home.”
Relieved of sentimentalities, the homeplaces themselves ultimately emerge
with great clarity and poignance. Mark Schechner once argued that “there is
no agreement about what might be called ‘home’ ” among contemporary
American Jewish writers.25 But the places of origin that these Jewish women
writers painstakingly uncover through months of patient research reveal surprising similarities to one another.Whether the narratives are set in Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, or Poland, the urban homeplaces in these works bear a family likeness to one another. Disfigured in every case by ethnic hatreds of the
past and by the disabling of women, they are marked as well by the sense of
possibility and drama present in great cities, by the powerful presence of protective, nurturing forces within the family, and by awareness of an ethnic
community whose status becomes precarious but whose existence always
opens a wider lens onto troubles that might otherwise have been experienced
as purely personal.These homeplaces are grounded on what Bachelard called
“deeply rooted foundations”—not in space, but historically, in time. These
narratives trace the long presence of the Jews in these places back to the Middle Ages.
Lang uage as “Home”
Among these women writers, moreover, there is also agreement on the one
certain way to get “home” again.The strongest thread through the labyrinth of
exile and forgetfulness is language.“Language equals home,”Alice Yaeger Kaplan
insists; “language is a home, as surely as a roof over one’s head is a home.” It
is the place “where our bodies and minds collide, where our groundedness
in place and time and our capacity for fantasy and invention must come to
terms.”26 Its loss is chief among the losses mourned by exiles. Gerda Lerner
accuses the Nazis of robbing her of her mother tongue. She discovered when
the songs of her childhood reentered her memory that German—which she
had refused for years to speak or to read—held her “deep memories, resonances,
47
sounds of childhood” (39).What had been lost to her had sunk “into a deep hole
of oblivion.” But when she began to speak German again, she remembered
“what was lost and what it cost and what might have been had I been able to be
a writer in my own language.” She becomes painfully conscious of the split
opened by loss of the mother tongue: between feeling and thought; between the
conscious learned faculties and the rich vibrations of the unconscious. This
writer of many books and founder of women’s history confesses that she envies
“those who live in the power of their own language,”“who were not deprived
of the immediacy by which creativity finds its form.” Despite her brilliant career
as a writer of English, Lerner believes the loss of her original language is a wound
that “can never heal” (48).
Susan Suleiman sets this loss in the first line of her memoir when she recalls that everyone on the bus that took her family away from home, to safety
in exile, “spoke a language different from our own” (4). “American speech,”
she says, became her home; “although I never forgot my native tongue, my
knowledge of it was frozen in time” (8). She recovered that shred of memory
when she returned to Hungary to “unforget” what she had once known.The
process is difficult, but revelatory. First she tests herself by asking a new friend
whether she can “ ‘pass’ for a native Hungarian or whether he could tell I
didn’t live here the moment I opened my mouth.” But then she asks herself
why it should matter to her whether or not she passes as a Hungarian. She has
transformed language into a sort of trial or test of her “at homeness” in her native place (171). Realizing this, she begins to see more clearly the part of herself that still worries about not fitting in anywhere, even in her native city. As
her vocabulary and her accent improve, and as she learns her way around Budapest again, she realizes also that one assumption she had conceived as fundamental to her life in exile is not correct. One home, one language, does not
displace another, as she had always believed it did. Budapest does not displace
other cities where she feels at home, any more than English displaces Hungarian or French. Instead each place, each language, is added to the others;“when
I leave here,” she knows,“the door will not slam shut behind me” (171).Thus
both her postmodern sense of her self as multiple rather than single, and her
complex engagement with many “homes” in the world have been profoundly
affected by her return to Europe and her reclaiming of the mother tongue.
Suleiman’s insight here, like Lerner’s, reveals the effect that loss and recovery of one’s native language have on the felt complexity and fluidity of the
postmodern self. Eva Hoffman develops this insight by musing on the way in
which learning a new language invents another self. As an adolescent she
chooses English for the language of her diary, fearing that Polish is becoming,
for her, “a dead language, the language of the untranslatable past” (120). But
the mother tongue does not go silent in her; rather, it whispers the existence
of a shadow hidden beneath the “public” self,“my English self,” that her present
48
life in Canada is constructing. English begins “to invent another me,” she confesses.The “I” she cannot write in English, however, survives in Polish, a living
residue of the self she “would have grown into” had she been able to stay at
home (121).
Lerner is also haunted by awareness of another, undeveloped, self who
might—if not expelled from home—have found “a richer, more poetic form
for what I had to say” (48). And Suleiman, too, walks the streets of Budapest
preoccupied with the thought of what her “life would have been like had we
not left.” She hears from another exile the same disconcerting awareness:
“ ‘Every time I walk down the street, it’s as if my doppelganger were walking
behind me,’ ” this other exile tells the memoirist.“Who is my doppelganger?”
Suleiman asks (90). It’s the question that resonates within all these narratives:
Who is the self for whom this place, this language, was home?
Two Nove lists of th e New Wave
These writings further reinforce the notion that, for American Jews, the
European world that vanished with so many of its people in the Holocaust remains a haunting presence. Perhaps because, as Ezrahi and others suggest, it has
been “incompletely mourned.” And perhaps, as I have argued elsewhere (in
“Traumatic Memory”), fiction participates as fully as memoir and autobiography in the work of mourning, by re-imagining in all its concrete specificity
what cannot be remembered because it was never directly experienced. Even
as they participate in the process of mourning, moreover, fictions also embody
and dramatize issues that can remain deeply embedded in other modes of
discourse.
In this way, recent novels by Rebecca Goldstein and Lilian Nattel perform
what Jane Tompkins describes as “cultural work.”27 Indeed, they not only help
to clarify cultural issues that would remain otherwise obscure, but—as the
generic boundaries between fiction and nonfiction grow thinner and more permeable every postmodern day—they also help readers to discover how thoroughly imagination enriches the work of memory and historical research—and
vice versa.
In the shtetls brought to life by Rebecca Goldstein and Lilian Nattel, as in
the one remembered by Rose Chernin, the “ancient limiting of women” is a
salient, persistent feature.The struggle against it subverts nostalgia as it shapes
the pattern of strong women’s selving. In Shluftchev by the Puddle, a Polish
shtetl imaginatively recalled in Goldstein’s Mazel, “girls were all supposed to
be pressed out from the same cookie cutter, anything extra trimmed away.”28
There, Leiba, mother of many children, teller of true stories, can sing only in
the dead of night because Jewish men are forbidden to hear a woman’s singing
voice (51). One daughter’s struggle against such limits ends in suicide; another’s in rebellion. A third, Fraydel, a profoundly creative, “pious woman,”
49
never “taught to read the Hebrew prayers,” is “in love only with what was
marvelous and strange, with things too bright or too dark to live anywhere but
in her mind” (89, 128). If “she had been a boy, they would have called her an
illui, a prodigy” (127). But because she is a girl, they call her crazy. She dances
with the gypsies and longs to run away with them. She reads and makes stories, hungrier for words than for food (68). As she grows up she falls silent,
angry not “at a ‘this’ or a ‘that,’ at a something that could be altered or erased,
emended or ended”; she feels anger “with the world itself ” (126).And just before her arranged marriage to a man she doesn’t love, she drowns herself.
Fraydel’s death is mourned untiringly by her small sister, Sorel. For this
child, “the whole look of the world” had “shifted when Fraydel came near. An
excitement swept after her, like the long swirling train of a noblewoman’s dress,
and it rearranged the world” (71). Unable to rescue her from despair, unable to
foresee or forestall her suicide, Sorel at first clings to the memory of her lost sister. But she wakes one morning “with her sense of the world reinstated” (165),
hungry for life in a world that was changing, opening to the political and intellectual excitements of Warsaw after the family leaves the shtetl. She learns to
perform herself. She defies limitation by gender, taking a name, Sasha, that is “a
man’s and a woman’s, too” (199).And she becomes an actress in the Yiddish theater, telling Fraydel’s story at her first audition and speaking in the “quivering
Galician voice” (240) that had once been her sister’s: “a voice . . . like a reflection on unstill water” (19), a voice “that wouldn’t let you go, that held you fast”
(240); a “voice like no other come from out of the lonely wind” (243). Sophisticated now, made “theatrical by its mastery of . . . a Yiddish so highly Germanized that really it was hardly even Yiddish anymore” (209), Sorel/Sasha’s voice
tells of loss and estrangement, liberating into public life the nightsongs of her
mother as well as the now silenced storying of her dead sister. Retelling Fraydel’s tale of the beautiful girl who—like Fraydel herself—deserts her crooked
betrothed to dance instead with death, Sasha not only restores the voices of her
beloved sister and mother, but also carries into postmodern, urban consciousness
the pathos and tragic loss of women’s gifts in the shtetl.
Like Rose Chernin, made into a fighter by despair at her helplessness before the suffering of women broken by shtetl life, Sasha rebels against the home
of her childhood, its “atmosphere made unbreathable by piety and ritual. . . .
She had taken no small pleasure in breaking the tiresome taboos with as much
noise and commotion as she could muster. . . . And her spirit of rebellion
hasn’t given an inch over the years” (19). Unlike her mother, who accommodated herself to the limits of the shtetl, and unlike her sister who was broken by
them, Sasha strides into a world first opened by the enlightenment and then
destroyed by the Holocaust.
Gender, culture, history thus cooperate in the “selving” of this character,
whose own daughter and granddaughter carry forward into America the gifts
50
of women that could not flourish at home in the shtetl.These two generations of
American women bracket the novel’s interest in both the past and future:
one is a student of myths and classical literature (mythology and the classics);
the other is a scientist.They bracket, as well, evolving feminist attitudes toward
men and marriage: one arranges to use an attractive man whom she will never
see again to father her child; the other settles into conventional domesticity.The
novel is deeply concerned with the shape of time, circling back and forth narratively to suggest the interlacing of widely divergent moments in each character’s
life.The present becomes a kind of frame for the past here, as Goldstein reconstructs both the shtetl and the urban world of the haskalah (Jewish enlightenment),
engaging, like other new wave writers, with segments of European culture. She
uncovers in the process the alternatives that were open to gifted women within
those homeplaces: accommodation, rebellion, self-destruction. In three shtetl
women, a mother and two daughters, she allows readers to envision the “doppelganger” self that haunts the imagination of the émigré memoirists.
Formed partly by restrictions like those that shape Goldstein’s shtetl
women, characters in Lilian Nattel’s The River Midnight (1999) develop a collective power that makes possible the imagining of more generous options for
female “selving.”29 In Nattel’s Polish village of Blaszka, girls learn early that “a
woman doesn’t do what she wants, only what she has to” (26). One woman,
for example, gives thanks when her rebellious niece is temporarily transformed by remorse into a meek and “proper girl at last, as obedient as anyone
could ask for” (167). Learned religious men, powerful authority figures in the
shtetl, tolerate “only black and white, kosher and trayf, pure and impure”; they
have condemned this woman to “the no-man’s land of the agunah, the abandoned woman whose husband has disappeared without divorcing her and
who is forever forbidden to love or to marry again without his consent” (154).
This woman, and others like her in this novel, see clearly the limits that shtetl
life imposes on them but manage to transgress these limits in ways that preserve the shtetl’s continuity without entirely foreclosing the satisfaction of
individual needs. Nattel’s portrayal of the shtetl as home thus imaginatively
enlarges women’s options.
In Nattel’s women, ethnicity fosters a sense of gendered identity that is,
though restrictive, both benign and powerful. Concentrating on not one but
four female protagonists, the novel develops from the beginning a strong sense
of what “selving” might have meant to European Jewish women. Each protagonist will be restrained by the “ancient limiting of women” in traditional
Judaism. But each one, supported by the others, will move through those ancient limits toward fuller self-realization. The agunah, one of four girls who
called themselves “vilde haya,” or wild creatures, will ultimately transgress the traditional injunctions, quietly taking a lover while her community looks the other
way. Another of these girls, deprived by the domestic and maternal cares of a
51
large, beloved family of the intellectual life her father prepared her for (35–36),
will initially mourn her inability to study in Warsaw. But after a disillusioning
visit to that city and its intellectual ferment, which seems detached from the
living truths of the shtetl as she knows them, she begins to write and to publish stories in Yiddish, the shtetl language she had once despised. She has learned
that what she knows about life “can only be said in the mama-loshen, the
mother tongue of shtetl Jews,” rather than in Polish, or German, or Russian—
languages of the intelligentsia (100, 75). A third woman, longing for erotic
satisfactions withheld by her loving but impotent husband, will discover pleasure in innocent pursuits that moderate her need, quiet her demands, and
ultimately restore her husband’s sexual prowess.30 And a fourth, the fearless
healer-midwife, Misha, unmarried but heavily pregnant, teaches the women
that “even a woman trapped in the ordinary way, worn out from her pregnancy, with her feet swollen, isn’t completely helpless” (101). Later, alone in
labor as the community gathers for Yom Kippur, Misha’s moans will summon
to her aid all the women of the shtetl.
The spirituality of these shtetl women deviates markedly from traditional
expectations. But they neither abandon nor rebel against tradition. Rather,
they adapt it to their needs. During the highest holy days, for example, they
gather at the grave of Misha’s grandmother—herself a healer and midwife—
and pray “that their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers
would intercede for them with the Holy Court. . . . At this time of year, as at
other times of life and death, dread and relief, danger and birth, the women
stood together arms linked, a net that gathered up their compassion, and let
their grudges fall through” (177). One of the vilde haya, in despair, prays for
help to her mother, sister, grandmother . . . “to all of the women with their
dangerous gifts” (176). And on the night of Misha’s labor, the women of the
shtetl leave their section of the synagogue to help her: “the mekhitza [a symbolic or literal barrier that divides men from women in the synagogue] can’t
contain them, they are like the river in spring flooding the banks with wild
excitement, carrying its rich mud to Misha’s garden. The women flow from
the gallery, all of them, so many women pouring down the stairs and across the
square as if all the women that ever lived in Blaszka were flowing down to
Misha” (180). The powerful fluidity of the image articulates the collective
strength of an ethnic and gendered community gathered by a single purpose.
It suggests as well what the plot as a whole demonstrates: that the gendered
limits imposed upon these women are as little likely to contain their energies
as the banks of a river in spring.
Here, in Nattel’s novel, the image of home as shtetl and of the likelihood
of female solidarity and satisfaction within it are imagined in ways that deviate
significantly from the recollections of women who actually lived there. But the
difference between what we imagine and what we remember is not always so
52
clear, when we know that both fictional and historical “realities” depend to
some extent upon imagination.The difference points, one suspects, to a recognition and a desire articulated also by Goldstein’s novel and Chernin’s memoir:
a recognition that women of the shtetl possessed enormous creative power. In
Nattel’s work, such recognition is accompanied by the wish that this power
might have found expression, that mothers, sisters, friends might have, collectively, circumvented the restraints which worked to silence and suffocate them
as individuals. One wonders whether such a wish also finds expression in the
memoirists’ efforts to reconnect with mothers and sisters from whom they have
become estranged.31 In Mazel, Goldstein imagines the rebellious sister, Sasha,
carrying into an American future, through her daughter and granddaughter, the
gifts of her mother and sister. Goldstein even writes a final scene, set in the
American diaspora, which gathers three generations of loving women into a
collective as they perform a communal ritual.Traditionally observant in many
respects, yet hospitable to its women’s gifts, the culture that supports this ritual
remembers Fraydel and the bitter cynicism that her loss and all the other losses
still engender, without missing a step in the collective joy of a wedding dance.
Conc lusi ons
On the whole, these fictions that recall home-as-shtetl from a woman’s
point of view restore to its image the erotic, imaginative, and fully embodied
givens of women’s lives there, as well as the pathos of women’s struggles against
traditional restraints. In the memoirs, the site of this struggle and renewal is
only the family, not the community. But in the fictions, sisters, friends, and
neighbors, as well as mothers, daughters, and granddaughters, carry forward
gifts that individuals cannot always carry alone.
In these works by American Jewish women writers of the new wave, then,
novelists reconstruct the gendered repressions of the shtetl and imagine the female bonding that might overcome them, while memoirists engage with the
urban European past, probing the silences of their exiled mothers and sisters
to clarify and to reconnect with the homes and the languages that shaped
them. In both genres, writers work to recover what time and the Holocaust
have virtually erased. “Each one of us,” Bachelard believed, “should speak of
his [sic] roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches: each one of us should make
a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows.”32 In such maps, these women
writers are tracing not only the homeplaces of the past but also the shape of
the self, the family, even the community that might spring from them.
Note s
Sections of this essay appeared in Contemporary Literature and in my book Telling the Little Secrets: American Jewish Writing Since the Eighties (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2006).
53
1. Morris Dickstein, “Ghost Stories: The New Wave of Jewish Writing,” Tikkun 12,
no. 6 (1997). Andrew Furman had used the term earlier, but in a more general way,
to refer to post-immigrant writers (Contemporary Literature 36, no. 4 [1995]: 635).
Both Dickstein and Furman have argued, as Thane Rosenbaum suggested to me in
conversation, that writers from the 1980s on participate in a “literature of return.”
But I am arguing here for a more complex, more conflicted reading of the ways in
which current writers reengage with the collective past.
2. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish
Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 15.
3. For the most part, male memoirists and fictions writers, unlike their female counterparts, augment the discourse of home by deepening one’s sense of the ambivalence
that clings to both the place itself and the journey that recollects it. See chapter 4 of
my Telling the Little Secrets: American Jewish Writing since the Eighties (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
4. Eugene Goodheart, “Writing and the Unmaking of the Self,” Contemporary Literature 29, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 438.
5. Ibid., 441.
6. In using this word I follow the lead of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote that
“each mortal thing does one thing and the same: / Deals out that being indoors
each one dwells / selves—goes itself, myself it speaks and spells” (from “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”).
7. Ezrahi describes literal journeys as pilgrimages to a site that has become “a substitution for Jerusalem as the ruined shrine” (Booking Passage, 17). But this essay will
demonstrate that for American Jewish women writers of the new wave, Europe is
less “shrine” than actual place of family origin, ordeal, and in some cases extermination.
8. But thirty years ago Ruth R.Wisse argued that American Jewish writers were setting their fictions in Europe because the Jewish atmosphere in America was thinning out (“American Jewish Writing, Act II,” Commentary [June 1976]: 40–45).
Ezrahi has also argued that for American Jews the journey back to Europe becomes
a search for “authenticity” or “normative models” (Booking Passage, 220, 221).
9. Memory of the past, as Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi has recently reminded us, has always
been a “central component of Jewish experience” (Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish
Memory [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982], xiv), reinforced not only by
daily prayers that command remembrance but also by major festivals that punctuate
the ritual year by recalling the collective past. Since World War II, however, Ezrahi
notes, the traditional “mandate to remember takes on deadly earnestness for Jewish
writers; every act of recollection becomes a gesture of re-collection, or rescue, measured . . . by its function as one more defense against oblivion” (Booking Passage, 205).
10. See, for example, Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1940; reprint, Salem, N.H.: Ayer,
1987).
11. Kim Chernin, In My Mother’s House: A Daughter’s Story (New York: Harper & Row,
1983).
12. See my Writing Mothers,Writing Daughters:Tracing the Maternal in Stories by American
Jewish Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), chapter 1; Susan Glenn,
Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
13. According to Allan Nadler (The Faith of the Mithnagdim [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997], 127) the Gaon of Vilna was “the most accomplished Talmudic scholar in European Jewish History.”
14. Mariane Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 419–420.
54
15. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (1958; reprint, New York:
Beacon Press, 1994), xv, 72.
16. Ibid., 72.
17. Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 5.
18. Laura Levitt, Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home (New York: Routledge, 1997).
19. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 229.
20. Dominick LaCapra develops out of Freud the necessary insight into the manner in
which writing of this sort functions in the process of mourning (see Janet Burstein,
“Traumatic Memory and American Jewish Writers,” in Modern Jewish Studies 11
[1999]: 188–197). If “remembering, repeating, working through” are all crucial parts
of this process, writings like Suleiman’s and Epstein’s focus particularly on the stage
of “working through” by enabling perspective on traumatic experience: by helping
the writer to acquire critical distance, by adding interpretation to experience, and
by making more specific what was lost so that one might feel again the anguish of
losing.
21. Helen Epstein, Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History
(New York: Little, Brown, 1997).
22. This idea is worked out in greater detail in Burstein,“Traumatic Memory.”
23. Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation:A Life in a New Language (New York: Dutton, 1989).
24. But compare Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s reading of this work, which emphasizes the unreality of Hoffman’s nostalgic representation of her childhood home (“On Language Memoir,” in Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, ed.Angelika Bammer
[Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994], 59–70).
25. Mark Schechner,“Is this Picasso, or Is It the Jews?” Tikkun 12, no. 6 (1997): 41.
26. Kaplan,“On Language Memoir,” 63, 64.
27. Jane Tompkins, “The Cultural Work of American Fiction” in Sensational Designs
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xi–xix.
28. Rebecca Goldstein, Mazel (New York:Viking, 1995), 8.
29. Lilian Nattel, The River Midnight (New York: Scribner, 1999).
30. It is important to note that he has been rendered impotent by traditional fears of
women’s seductiveness and by traditional devaluation of male lust, for this novel insists that the shtetl constricts the behavior of men as well as women.
31. This wish to restore individual women to their home in a collective finds expression as well in E. M. Broner’s A Weave of Women (New York: Bantam, 1978), and Kim
Chernin’s The Flame Bearers (New York: Random House, 1986).
32. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 11.
⡣
Theater
British director Tyrone Guthrie observed in the 1960s
that if Jews were to withdraw from the American theater, it “would collapse
about next Thursday.”1 Transposed to the present, such a withdrawal might
lead to a collapse a day or two earlier. Hyperbole aside, since the earliest days
of vaudeville, Jewish participation and presence in American theater—from
playwrights to producers to impresarios to actors to craftspeople to critics to
season subscribers—have rivaled if not surpassed that in music, film, and television. From the creative side alone, fully one-third of the nation’s Best Play
honorees during the first half of the twentieth century were Jews; from the inception of the Tony Awards in 1947 through 1990, plays and books for musicals by Jews were nominated nearly every year, and thirty won.2
What distinguishes the impressive output of Jewish playwrights in recent
times, as with the other cultural forms, is its explicitly Jewish content.Whereas
in the pre-multicultural age ethnicity tended to be treated with “timidity
or ambiguity,” contemporary Jewish playwrights, and more recent work by
dramatists from earlier generations, has increasingly and unabashedly, if not
uncritically, examined Jewish characters and themes.3 A short list of prominent
post-1970s playwrights who have identified as Jewish and who have written
about Jews includes Jon Robin Baitz, Richard Greenburg, Allan Havis, Barbara Kahn, Tony Kushner, Barbara Lebow, Jennifer Maisel, Karen Malpede,
David Mamet, Emily Mann, Donald Margulies, Elizabeth Swados, Jeffrey
Sweet, Alfred Uhry, and Wendy Wasserstein. Of the “older generation,” Israel
Horowitz is still writing about Jews, as were Herb Gardner and Arthur Miller
in their later years (they died in 2000 and 2005, respectively).4
Generational periodizing is always problematic, of course, given that
historical generations—themselves discursive constructions—overlap messily
rather than stop or start at specific points. Indeed, part of the reason Jan
Lewis chose Wendy Wasserstein as the prime focus for her analysis of postmodern American Jewish theater is that Wasserstein’s work spans and straddles
“generations”—in the chronology of the plays’ production dates, in the ages
of the plays’ characters, and, most significantly, in the attitudes exhibited by the
55
56
Th e a t e r
characters toward their Jewishness.Wasserstein bridges the gap, in other words,
from the modern to the postmodern, especially in regard to what Lewis terms
the “performance” of Jewish identity. Applying Harley Erdman’s synthesis of
William Boelhower’s notion of identity as “processual” and Judith Butler’s
notion of it as a “performative accomplishment,” Lewis traces Wasserstein’s
relation to Jewish identity as it developed from her earlier plays (Uncommon
Women and Others, 1977; Isn’t It Romantic, 1982) to her mid-career hit (The Heidi
Chronicles, 1989) to more recent work (The Sisters Rosensweig, 1992; An American
Daughter, 1997).
Any discussion of postmodern Jewish theater, indeed of postmodern theater in general, would be seriously remiss without a consideration of the work
of Tony Kushner. James Fisher, author of a book and editor of an anthology on
Kushner (The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope, 2003; The Theatre of
Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of Tony Kushner, 2006) takes on
this complex subject here. Focusing on three plays, the two-part Angels in
America (Millennium, 1992; Perestroika, 1994), It’s an Undoing World (1995), and
A Dybbuk (1995), Fisher sees Kushner as a quintessential Jewish postmodernist
who incorporates a “New Kabbalah” into his work and creates through his
characters a “metaphorical Jew” as a means of probing the political and spiritual dilemmas of the postmodern world. Jewishness and postmodernism are
not Kushner’s sole creative catalysts, of course; Brechtian historical awareness
and alienation technique, the “fabulousness” of twentieth-century gay culture,
and a fiercely progressive political consciousness crucially inform Kushner’s
oeuvre. It is in Kushner’s ambivalent relation to Judaism, however, and in the
dialectical relation Kushner perceives between Jewish mysticism and the modern world, that Fisher finds the richest vein of the “spiritual exploration in his
plays.”
Note s
1. Quoted in Ellen Schiff, ed., Awake and Sing: Seven Classic Plays from the American Jewish Repertoire (New York: Penguin, 1995), xv.
2. Ibid., xviii.
3. Ibid., xvi.
4. This information was provided by Jan Lewis. In addition, William Finn and James
Lapine (the latter of whom is Jewish) have written a popular musical trilogy, Falsettos, about Jews and the gay community. For a more comprehensive list of Jewish
American playwrights, see Ellen Schiff and Michael Posnik, eds., Nine Contemporary
Jewish Plays: From the New Play Commission of the National Foundation of Jewish Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).
“Your World Is Very Different
from Mine”
Troubling Jewish Ide ntity
in Po stmode rn Ame rican Theate r
Jan Lewis
“Who is a Jew?” I write this question on the blackboard on
the first day of an undergraduate seminar entitled “Jews on Stage and Screen:
The Performance of an American Ethnicity.” My students at the University of
Judaism in Los Angeles, where I teach this course, are often surprised by my
question, since most of them believe that they can easily define Jewish identity. Majoring in a range of studies in the sciences and humanities, they selfidentify across a wide spectrum, as Modern Orthodox, Conservative, Reform,
Reconstructionist, and secular Jews.They offer me numerous markers for Jewishness, including religious observance and ethical codes, as well as linguistic,
dietary, and other behavioral connections.We spend the first class period discussing these indicators, debating how someone might identify as Jewish,
and how we might identify someone, including ourselves, as Jewish. Arguing
about how much or how little we can point to with certainty, we find no consensus. I suggest to the now-bewildered students that there may not be any
solid answers to the question of what constitutes Jewish identity, and that this
uncertainty will inform our course of study. Over the rest of the semester, we
read numerous play and film scripts about a variety of subjects that one might
connect to Jewish identity, and we view theater, film, and television performances by Jewish and non-Jewish actors in so-called Jewish roles. Although
we entertain many possibilities for qualities that would make a script or a performance “Jewish,” we never completely agree about which of these would assure a definite understanding of that identity.
The diversity of opinions expressed by the students enrolled in “Jews on
Stage and Screen” mirrors how this subject is discussed in the larger American
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Jewish community. A study entitled American Jewish Identity Survey 2001: An
Exploration in the Demography and Outlook of a People, compiled by the Center
for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
and reissued in 2003, provides statistics regarding what its authors call “the
contours of Jewish identification” in the contemporary United States. In the
introduction to their survey, the authors declare, “America’s Jews are divided,
perhaps as never before, over a question that would surprise most other Americans who are not familiar with the Jewish heritage or the Jewish community
in any way. That question is, quite simply: ‘Who is Jewish?’ ”1 Related questions confronting twenty-first-century American Jews, according to the survey, include:“What does ‘Jewish’ mean?”“Who gets to decide?” and “How do
those who call themselves ‘Jewish’ or are labeled as such by others signify that
identity or social status to themselves and others?”2 The survey reveals that
those in the United States who associate themselves with the identity “Jewish”
do so in varying forms and degrees of religious and cultural affiliation, with
about half regarding themselves as nonreligious (secular) Jews. Overall, the
report suggests that, as with the Jewish students in my university classroom,
twenty-first-century American Jews hold widely divergent understandings of
what might signify Jewish identity, and what Jewish identity might mean to
those who interact with it.
In this essay, I examine some of the ways in which that diversity may be
understood by contemporary practitioners, critics, and audiences of Jewish
American theater writing and production. This investigation is informed by
aspects of postmodern thinking, which, as I will explain, provide its point of
departure. I then explore how a postmodernist critic might read Jewish identity in five American theater works written during the last decade of the
twentieth century by the late Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Wendy
Wasserstein. Lastly, I investigate a recent Broadway revival of the American
musical theater work most often associated—by Jews and non-Jews—with
Jewish identity: Stein, Bock, and Harnick’s Fiddler on the Roof.As theater historian and critic Stacy Wolf points out, “All writing about performance is incomplete, but usefully so.”3 It is my hope that what follows is, though
necessarily incomplete, a useful contribution to the current, wide-ranging discourse on performances of ethnicity on the American stage.
Po ssibilitie s for Troublemaking
The current lack of a consensus among American Jews regarding what
constitutes Jewishness is not a new phenomenon. As Hana Wirth-Nesher reminds us, Jews have hotly debated definitions of Jewish identity since the European Enlightenment, “when every aspect of Jewish identity was called into
question.”4 Eric L. Goldstein points out that once Jews became active members of the larger gentile societies of Europe and America, they were forced to
“Your World Is Very Different from Mine”
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consider and define what factors made them part of or separate from larger
cultures in which they lived.5 During the late nineteenth century, Goldstein
notes, many American Jews viewed themselves as distinct from gentile Americans not only through their religious affiliation, but also via what they called
“race”:“biology, shared ancestry, and blood . . . because it gave them a sense of
stability at a time when many familiar markers of Jewish identity were eroding.”6 After World War I, as racial definitions of Jewishness waned in popularity
among American Jews, more flexible constructions of Jewishness developed,
based on the then-emerging concept of ethnicity.7 When applied to American
Jewish identity, ethnicity came to suggest behavioral traits including but not
limited to physical and vocal mannerisms, engagement in song and dance,
food preparation, use of Yiddish, Hebrew, or Ladino, family traditions, and celebrations of holidays, which can either be connected to or separated from religious observance. More recently, however, some argue that ethnic identity
has become a matter of individual preference, that it is “not a matter of who
you are descended from, but what group you consent to join.”8
The concept of postmodernism, which challenges master narratives and
offers alternative, non-authoritative means of perceiving and conceiving of
societies and cultures, is both consonant with this consent-based notion of
identity as well as a formative influence on it.Theater historians/critics Janelle
Reinelt and Joseph Roach emphasize that postmodernism “reflects the collapse of categories themselves” and “distrusts claims to authenticity, originality or coherence.”9 Using a postmodernist approach, we no longer propound
“real” or “true” explanations for texts or experiences, or, by extension, ethnoreligious identities, because we accept that meaning may be interpreted according to various perspectives, and identity may vary according to the person
who inhabits or encounters it. Poststructuralism, a theoretical perspective related to but not coterminous with postmodernism, further problematizes discussions of identity through its critique of essentialism: the idea that some
element is an integral essence of a subject and applies to it in all its forms.
Poststructuralism views such an essence as a contingent and unstable linguistic construct, rather than as inherent and absolute.Thus, poststructuralism presents challenges to notions of innate racial, cultural, ethnic, or religious identity,
such as American-ness,Asian-ness, Blackness,Whiteness, Christian-ness, or Jewishness, understanding these identities to exist but in myriad and endlessly
malleable forms.
This kind of postmodern/poststuctural stance encourages us to entertain
multiple, flexible possibilities for American Jewish identity. In his Staging the
Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860–1920, theater historian
Harley Erdman provocatively examines such possibilities. In making his case
for what he calls an “instability of identity” in theatrical performances, Erdman
draws from the writings of cultural historian William Boelhower, who, Erdman
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explains, views ethnicity as “processual,” an act of interpretation, a way of
defining oneself in relation and in opposition to others.10 Erdman synthesizes
Boelhower’s critique with theories of gender identity developed by Judith
Butler in her groundbreaking Gender Trouble. Butler also argues for an understanding of gender as something “in process,” but goes further to describe it as
constructed rather than innate and as deriving from individual performance
and perception.11 One of Butler’s most salient points is that “the appearance of
substance [in gender] is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative
accomplishment,” the result of “a public action.”12 Linking Butler’s and Boelhower’s anti-essentialist understandings of identity as located in “action rather
than essence,” Erdman argues that ethnic identity, like gender, is something
“we perform as both actors and audience members in daily encounters.”13
Here Erdman, like Butler, uses the concept of “performance” expansively, to
include something which occurs in everyday life, publicly and repeatedly,
and which thus can be critiqued in its normative form and be “subverted”
(Butler’s term) through more conscious engagement with the performative
process.
Not only are the words “perform/performance” and the related terms
“enact/enactment” extremely useful for postmodern discussions of ethnic identity; they also easily cross over into studies of ethnicity in the theater, because
they are among the terms often used in discussions of that art form. I will frequently use these words in my analyses; by applying both the Butlerian and
theater-associated meanings to these usages, I hope to promote the potential for
provocative instability in my exploration of staged ethnicities. In this context,
performance includes not only something an actor does on a stage, but also any
extratextual public enactment, such as an interview given for a magazine or
newspaper, or a series of publicly distributed photographs. Using this polysemic
terminology enables me to look for ways to subvert preconceptions and stereotypes of Jewishness.This anti-essentialist process permits me, as Butler does for
gender, to make “trouble” for Jewish identity in American theater.14
Specifically, how does this idea of trouble, or “troubling,” apply to examinations of Jewishness in the American theater? Like Reinelt and Roach, many
contemporary theater critics resist discussions of performance that privilege singular markers of religious, ethnic, cultural, national, or racial identities. Instead,
we seek discourses that reveal the multiple, sometimes contradictory layers of
identity in theatrical performance or writing, as well as a self-consciousness on
the part of the performer or writer that no single aspect of identity is authoritative. As Wolf notes, in such postmodern theater criticism, “meanings emerge
through a negotiation or a ‘struggle over meaning’ among text, context, and
spectator.”15 That struggle, as I engage it here, may—indeed, hopefully will—
cause trouble when it flies in the face of previously accepted conceptions of performances, written or bodily enacted, of Jewish identity.
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To a postmodern critic of theatrical performance, modernist critiques of
secular or religious American Jewish identity, especially those founded in a history of diaspora, oppression, and/or so called “liberal” politics, tend to be essentialist and therefore misleading.16 For example, Ellen Schiff, editor of three
valuable anthologies of Jewish American plays, considers Waiting for Lefty, Clifford Odets’s 1935 play about a Manhattan taxicab strike, a Jewish play because
of its “socio-political bias,” which “reveals a traditional Jewish emphasis on
human worth, equity, and moral rightness.”17 Certainly, a combination of forces
including religion, social circumstance, and a history of persecution seems to
have produced a proclivity among many self-identified American Jews toward
social consciousness, even toward a left-leaning political bias. As Schiff points
out, so-called “Jewish” playwrights, including Odets, Arthur Miller, Elmer
Rice, and others, reflected this sociopolitical bent in the plays they wrote
beginning in the 1920s, texts that disparaged injustice and discrimination in the
United States.18 However, one cannot identify a play as Jewish simply because
it champions liberal ideologies. The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape
(1921), two plays by Irish American playwright Eugene O’Neill, the winner of
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, preceded Jewishly identified playwrights in critiques of racism, avarice, and even capitalism; Arthur Miller himself wrote that when O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh opened in 1939, he (Miller)
was “struck by O’Neill’s radical hostility to bourgeois civilization, far greater
than anything Odets had expressed.”19 Further, since the 1960s and continuing
through the present, many non-Jewish ethnic communities in the United
States that have experienced political and social oppression, including forced
dislocations from homelands (African Americans), genocide (Native Americans), economic oppression (Mexican Americans), and concentration-camp
imprisonment (Japanese Americans), have become active in theater-making.
Plays from these communities, such as works by the ensemble Culture Clash
and writers like Nilo Cruz, Philip Kan Gotanda, David Henry Hwang, SuzanLori Parks, Luis Valdez,August Wilson, Elizabeth Wong, and many others, decry
political, economic, and social inequities in voices parallel to and perhaps even
more provocative than those of Odets and Rice.20
Additionally, Schiff notes that she has selected the plays for one anthology
based in part on the following criteria: “In subject or in point of view, each
play incorporates what sociologist Steven M. Cohen and political scientist
Charles Liebman call the ‘competing impulses: the urge to integrate into modern America and the urge to survive as Jews.’ ”21 Again, a review of contemporary playwriting in the United States suggests that what Cohen and Liebman
have described is also part of a larger American immigrant experience, in
which numerous ethnic and/or national groups (Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans,
and so on) have sought a balance between assimilation and acculturation; the
plays of multiple award-winning Amerasian writer Velina Hasu Houston are
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excellent examples.22 Thus, a predisposition to write about the complexities
of diaspora and/or the multiple issues associated with the minority experience
in the United States does not, by itself, make a playwright or her/his plays
Jewish.
The problems associated with the essentializing of American Jewishness
become clearer if we look at current writings by historian Stephen Whitfield,
playwright/screenwriter/director David Mamet, and, once again, Arthur
Miller, all regarding Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman.Whitfield believes
that, as constructed in the play’s text, the Loman family defies ethnic or religious identification, and thus the patriarch Willy Loman “could be experiencing the anguished failure of any father.”23 However, perhaps because Salesman
is such a landmark in the American theater and Miller sometimes self-identified
as Jewish, there are those, such as Mamet, who have tried to form associations
between Salesman and Jewishness. Mamet reads the Lomans as Jewish characters, even though they are never overtly defined as such. In addition, according to Whitfield, Mamet complains that, because Miller failed to make the
identification specific, Salesman “is lost to the Jews, its rightful owners.”24 This
notion of cultural or ethnic ownership, and alleged ethnic closeting, is problematic in part because it implies an essentializing of both the ethnicity and
the work of art, so that one can fit neatly into the other. Further complicating
the issue, in 2000, the year after Whitfield’s description of the Salesman debate
was published, and fifty years after the play’s Broadway premiere, Miller announced cryptically of the Lomans:“As Jews light years away from religion or
a community that might have fostered Jewish identity, they exist in a spot that
probably most Americans feel they inhabit—on the sidewalk side of the glass
looking in at a well-lighted place.”25 In calling the Lomans Jews after the fact,
Miller, it seems, believed in a fundamental, innate Jewishness that transcends
private or public experience and acknowledgment—what one might call a
Jewish “sensibility,” which Mamet suggests and which Whitfield, elsewhere in
his text, also appears to accept as given.Arriving at a clear definition of such a
sensibility is not only difficult, it is, for the postmodernist critic, misguided, in
that it assumes an authoritative Jewishness.
But how can we talk about the Jewishness of a work for the theater if
we cannot assume that we know what Jewishness means? From a postmodern
perspective, the problem suggests its own solution. Understanding that identity is fluid and not fixed, we approach the notion of Jewishness in the theater
as individually constructed by its creative artists, audiences, and critics. We
look at a text or performance and ask, “What does this experience provide
which might be interpreted as an expression of Jewish identity, and how might
that expression operate?”We investigate possibilities rather than fixing meaning. Such an investigation might include readings of linguistic rhythms suggesting Yiddish language roots, specific cultural references that indicate a
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character’s heritage, performances of popular stereotypes of Jewish Americans,
the presence or lack of Jewish religious markers, and other elements. In the
following analysis of several works by another prominent playwright, I will
show how a postmodernist critical approach can be applied.
We ndy Wasse r stein: Plays about
the Po ssi b i l i t i e s
Celebrated American playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s theater works have
been produced nationally and internationally since her play Uncommon Women
and Others premiered off-Broadway in 1977. Her plays have won numerous
prizes, most impressively the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for
Best Play, both earned by the 1989 Broadway production of The Heidi Chronicles. She has been the subject of many interviews and critical essays, and several of these discuss her disposition for constructing characters who embody
something that both the playwright and her critics have called “Jewish.”26
Each of Wasserstein’s three produced nonmusical plays of the 1970s and 1980s,
Uncommon Women and Others (1977), Isn’t It Romantic (1982), and The Heidi
Chronicles (1989), includes one or more characters who encourage such an
identification through speech that includes Yiddish expressions and Yiddishinflected sentence structure, self-comparisons to popular post–World War II
stereotypes of Jewish behavior, and/or references to involvement in Jewish religious observance.While variously articulated in these three early Wasserstein
plays, assumptions regarding Jewish identity are disrupted in Isn’t It Romantic,
but those disruptions, while entertaining, never earn real significance in the play.
In contrast, in Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig, which opened on Broadway
in 1992, performances of Jewishness and responses to them are catalysts for
heated disputes in which stereotypes are vigorously questioned and destabilized. I read both Sisters and Wasserstein’s next Broadway play, An American
Daughter (1997), as postmodern deconstructions of Jewish American identity,
in that they artfully and vigorously challenge fixed, reductive essentialisms about
Jewishness and suggest possible alternatives for that lived experience.
In Uncommon Women and Others,Wasserstein examines the confusing array
of choices regarding career and family that confronts a group of young American women at a prestigious women’s college in the early 1970s.27 Drawing on
her own discomfort as a Jewish student at Mount Holyoke College, Wasserstein positions one of her five principal characters, Holly Kaplan, as different
by virtue of her Jewishness from the others, who are all gentile.28 Perhaps because of her anxiety regarding this difference, Holly makes self-deprecating
jokes about her relationships with Jewish traditions, language, men, and beliefs. However, Wasserstein only highlights the problematic aspect of Holly’s
difference in one moment, when one of Holly’s dorm-mates casually mentions the exclusionary antisemitism of her country club. For the rest of the
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play,Wasserstein skirts issues relating to ethno-religious prejudice. Instead, her
goal seems to be to illustrate the gender-related problems which connect rather
than separate these young women. Thus, the playwright depicts Holly’s confusion as she considers traditional/stereotypical versus contemporary expectations for her future (should she marry a doctor, have a medical career of her
own, do both?) and then deftly illustrates how similar confusions frustrate each
of the young female protagonists, regardless of their religion or ethnicity.
Culturally specific difference gains a stronger presence in Wasserstein’s
Isn’t It Romantic, produced off-Broadway five years after Uncommon Women.29
Here, the anxieties regarding options for careers, marriage, and family which
were the primary subject matter of Uncommon Women are dressed in entertaining ethnicities and performed by a pair of young women, accompanied by
their mothers and several supporting male characters. As before, Wasserstein
suggests Jewish identity through the use of Yiddish phrases,Yiddish-inflected
speech patterns, a common Jewish surname, and references to Jewish cultural
traditions and expectations. These are expressed by struggling writer Janie
Blumberg, her meddling parents,Tasha and Simon, and her doctor boyfriend,
Marty Sterling. In stark contrast to the Blumbergs, Wasserstein presents both
Janie’s best friend, Harriet Cornwall, and her executive mother, Lillian, as gentiles with ambition and business acumen. A great deal of the comedy in this
play is the result of the cultural collisions between the Blumbergs and the
Cornwalls. For instance, Harriet misunderstands Janie’s references to “naches”
(Yiddish for “joy”) and misuses the word when she insists to Janie,“You and I
deserve a little nachos.”30 The mothers, Tasha and Lillian, have a similar encounter in which Tasha uses her family’s Yiddish-inflected expression,“Everything presses itself out.” Like her daughter, Lillian eagerly picks up on the
foreign cultural idiom and tries to use it, but gets it wrong, reassuring Tasha,
“Sooner or later you can have everything pressed.”31 From scenes like these,
one might assume that Janie, Harriet, and their mothers perform stereotypes
of Jewish and gentile behavior, but while that is true to some extent,Wasserstein also makes sure we understand the reverse: that these women also embody traits which contradict stereotypes. Tasha is a slender, energetic, happily
married Jewish mother who does not cook. Although Harriet decides that
marriage and children are her immediate priorities, a choice that would make
Tasha very happy, Janie turns down a proposal from the Jewish doctor and insists on independence. Even the Cornwalls’ business acumen can be seen as a
reversal of a trait stereotypically attributed to Jews. These performed challenges to Jewish and WASP stereotypes are engaging, but, as with Uncommon
Women, they remain peripheral to the text’s chief concern, an investigation of
gendered life choices.
Wasserstein’s next produced play after Isn’t It Romantic was the multiple
award-winning The Heidi Chronicles.Wasserstein told several interviewers that
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she deliberately constructed Heidi Holland, the principal character, as a gentile, because Isn’t It Romantic and Wasserstein’s 1986 musical Miami, which received only an unsuccessful workshop production, were criticized by her
colleagues and friends for being problematically “too Jewish.”32 However, although the eponymous lead and most of the other roles in Heidi are gentiles,
Wasserstein does include two supporting characters who are Jewish: Heidi’s
sometimes-boyfriend Scoop Rosenbaum and his fiancée, Lisa Friedlander.
Scoop, who refers to himself as a “nice Jewish lawyer,” marries Lisa, a children’s
book author, in an offstage Jewish ceremony, complete with hora music.33
Oddly, while Lisa is offstage, Scoop and his gentile friends reveal their contempt for the Jewishly identified Lisa. One wedding guest snidely remarks that
the bride, being “from the best Jewish family in Memphis,” requires a husband
who will be rich like her father.34 Shortly thereafter, Scoop reveals to Heidi
that he married Lisa instead of Heidi not, as Heidi believes, because Lisa is
Jewish, but because Lisa can’t compete with him intellectually and professionally, as Heidi can.35 Scoop and his friends seem to regard Lisa as a spoiled Jewish American Princess who prefers material possessions to a more deeply
rewarding marital partnership. Countering these contentions, however, Lisa,
during her brief appearances onstage, appears intelligent, good-natured, and
unspoiled. Furthermore, as the play progresses, Scoop engages in extramarital
affairs and behaves with increasing narcissism; ultimately, it is the Jewish man
in this script who performs the self-indulgence often attributed in contemporary clichés to Jewish women. By marginalizing these Jewish characters while
also using them to comment on stereotypes,Wasserstein seems to have it both
ways in The Heidi Chronicles, placating yet also partly avenging her “too Jewish” accusers.
After winning the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Heidi, Wasserstein
traveled in Britain and Europe. Interestingly, when asked about her experiences
abroad, Wasserstein told an interviewer that she frequently found herself the
target of thinly veiled antisemitism, which surprised and distressed her.36 She
added that she wrote her next play, The Sisters Rosensweig, in part to address,
more directly, the criticisms about the “too Jewishness” in Miami and Isn’t It Romantic, her personal experiences as a Jewish American traveling abroad, and the
ramifications of both for her life and writing.37 Contradictory feelings about
constructions of cultural and religious identity are foregrounded in this play,
generating most of its major confrontations and accelerating its dramatic action. Given its subversion of essentialist notions of Jewishness, Sisters provides
an emblematic example of the performance of ethnic identity on the contemporary American stage.
The principal characters of The Sisters Rosensweig are, as the title suggests, three middle-aged sisters reared in the Brooklyn household of Rita
and Maury Rosensweig.These women gather in August 1991 at the London
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1. The eponymous Sisters Rosensweig, in the 1994 Lincoln Center Theater production
presented by the Centre Theater Group/Ahmanson Theater. Left to right: Joan McMurtrey (Pfeni Rosensweig), Caroline Aaron (Gorgeous Teitelbaum), and Mariette Hartley (Sara Goode). Photo by Carol Rosegg/Martha Swope Associates.
home of the eldest sister, Sara Goode, an affluent, twice-divorced bank executive, for her fifty-fourth birthday celebration. The middle sister is Gorgeous Teitlebaum, a housewife and budding talk-show host who lives with
her husband and four children in suburban Massachusetts. The youngest
sister, Pfeni Rosensweig, who has never married and has no children, is a
world-traveling journalist. Over the weekend, these women struggle to understand, as Deborah K. Anderson writes, “who we are, who we have been”
and, I would add, who “we” might become, individually and as a family whose
lineage is Rosensweig.38 In almost every scene of the play, this emotionally
laden heritage—part Yiddish language, part Jewish religion, part family history and cultural memory—becomes a bone of contention as it is invoked,
embraced, and assailed (Figure 1).
The gadfly for this controversy is Sara, who has distanced herself as much
as possible from her Brooklyn roots, especially that part she associates with Jewish identity, something she finds repugnant and a liability. Having left New York
City to run a bank in London, Sara has adopted a British accent, dates an antisemitic British aristocrat, and, in the play’s first scene, tells her seventeen-yearold daughter, Tess, that they no longer have any connection to the ethnic or
religious identity of Sara’s family of origin. Sara’s behavior indicates that she
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conceives of Jewishness primarily along negative stereotypical lines. Mervyn
Kant, an American widower visiting London with the American Jewish Congress, is attracted to and flirts with Sara, making connections between their
shared New York upbringings. Sara dislikes Merv’s ebullient self-identification
as Jewish, dismissing him for being, in her words,“a certain type.”39 She further
resents Merv’s attempts to connect her to a Jewish identity; despite a shared
background as teenagers, she insists, they have nothing in common. Even after
a pleasant sexual tryst with him, she rejects Merv because,“Your world is very
different from mine.”40 What Merv needs for a mate, Sara believes, is someone
like her sister Gorgeous, whom Sara considers another Jewish stereotype.
Gorgeous, who is touring London with her temple sisterhood, is overaccessorized, gives unsought advice to everyone, and frequently invokes her
rabbi’s opinion. She also warns Merv, and the audience, to resist thinking of
her as a cliché.41 Sara, however, finds her sister’s flamboyance, meddling, and
religiosity offensive. Her irritation peaks when Gorgeous tries to light Sabbath candles: Sara interrupts, insults the ritual, and makes sure that the candles are immediately extinguished.42 This level of hostility seems out of
proportion and undeserved, but when Sara reprimands Gorgeous—“You are
not our mother”—we understand a probable motivation.43 Gorgeous’s beliefs
and behavior unpleasantly remind Sara of their mother, Rita, an immigrant
from Poland who, in Sara’s memory, performed a female Jewishness of excessive manipulation, acquisitiveness, and religion. In her expressions of contempt
for both her sister and suitor, Sara reduces Merv and Gorgeous to similar stereotypes of excess, which Merv understands:“You mean we’re both a little too
lively and a little too Jewish.”44
Paradoxically, as Daniel Sullivan, director of the Broadway premiere of
Sisters, explains, of all the sisters, Sara most clearly recollects and performs her
family’s old-world inflections and heritage, even as she resists those associations.45 In Sullivan’s 1993 Broadway premiere, Sara’s pronunciation of the
play’s various “Vell” and “Vhat?” expressions sounded more Eastern European
than those of her siblings.46 Sara comforts Pfeni in a moment of sadness by
murmuring, “Shah, Pfeni, shah!”—a Yiddishism she surely learned from their
mother.47 And in what some might recognize as a rabbinic tradition, Sara responds to Tess’s identity crisis by telling a story about Tess’s grandmother and a
band of marauding Cossacks who fled when they encountered the beautiful
and intelligent Rita.Tess, Sara adds proudly, is just as beautiful, smart, and brave
as her grandmother and will doubtless be able to figure out who she is.48 In
these moments, Sara reveals an affection for her Rosensweigs-of-Brooklyn
past, which, for the most part, she has chosen to suppress in the service of establishing a separate non-Rosensweig identity.
By the play’s end Sara, somewhat chagrined, learns the limitations that her
reductive thinking has imposed on her relationships with family, friends, and
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her own personal development. It takes a confrontation in which Gorgeous finally loses her patience for Sara to realize that her sister is a responsible, intelligent adult, not a caricatured Jewish American mother, daughter, or princess.
Sara also discovers that she appreciates Merv’s persistent attentions. She listens
when he tells her, “There are real possibilities in life, Sara,” and, near the end
of the play, she shares that philosophy with her daughter.49 In the play’s final
moments, Sara announces,“My name is Sara Rosensweig,” reclaiming her past
and anticipating the possibilities for her future.50 While I don’t want to imply
that Wasserstein had such a theoretical strategy in mind when writing The Sisters Rosensweig, I perceive a postmodernist aspect in Sara’s dramatic arc. By the
play’s end, events and people have troubled her fixed assumptions about herself, her sisters, her mother, and Merv.Although the character would never use
these words to describe what she is thinking, Sara’s transformation in Sisters
contains a growing awareness of the flexibility, the nonfixedness, of identities,
including the numerous nonrestrictive ways to associate with one’s own and
others’ Jewishness.
The constructions of Jewishness are even more provocative and complex
in Wasserstein’s next play, An American Daughter, which opened on Broadway
in 1997, also directed by Daniel Sullivan.51 The central action of the play revolves around Dr. Lyssa Dent Hughes, a prominent Washington, D.C., physician and a descendant of Ulysses S. Grant. Lyssa has been nominated for the
post of surgeon general by a president not unlike Bill Clinton. Unfortunately,
her husband mentions to a journalist that Lyssa once ignored a jury duty notice. Her situation roughly paralleling the Zoë Baird/Kimba Wood “Nannygate” scandal of the first months of the Clinton presidency, Lyssa endures an
intense media savaging. Her husband makes matters worse by cheating on her
with a former student.After a week of enduring these public and private crises,
Lyssa realizes she will not be confirmed as surgeon general and withdraws her
nomination.
Wasserstein has set these events during the Jewish High Holy Day observances, and this choice highlights the differences between the play’s two
Jewish-connected characters. Lyssa’s best friend, Dr. Judith B. Kaufman, not
only provides emotional support for Lyssa throughout the play, but also spends
much of her time offstage attending High Holy Day services and much of
her time onstage discussing her spiritual and emotional journey through these
Days of Awe. In contrast, Lyssa’s husband, Walter Abrahmson, a professor at
Georgetown University and a descendant of Russian Jews, does not attend
High Holy Day services. Walter tells a friend that he gave up his Jewish religious identity and became “agnostic” right after his bar mitzvah.52 He does
not even seem to consider himself a secular Jew.Able to remember and explain
the High Holy Day observances, Walter performs no other scripted markers
of Jewishness. Unlike Sara,Walter is not antagonistic to Jewish observance or
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2. Gail Grate, as Judith B. Kaufman, and Johanna Day, as Lyssa Dent Hunt, in the 2003
Arena Stage production of American Daughter. Photo by Carol Pratt.
experience; rather, he seems to regard both as curiosities from which he is
happily removed.
While Walter’s lapsed Jewishness is mentioned just once in Daughter, Judith’s Jewish identity is a frequent subject of conversation, perhaps because the
character is an anomaly—the dark-skinned daughter of an African American
Baptist mother and what her family called “a freedom rider Jew.”53 Having
converted to Judaism in childhood, the adult Judith performs a self-confident
religious and cultural Jewish identity, frequently discussing her religious convictions and her experiences at her temple, and inserting Yiddish expressions
into her conversation, including ironic references to herself as a shvartze (a Yiddish term for Black person, usually considered derogatory). At forty-two, Judith has endured unsuccessful fertility treatments for the past five years. She
uses the introspection emphasized during the High Holy Days to lament her
infertility, turning her observance of the holiday into a crisis of faith. By the
close of Yom Kippur, which coincides with the conclusion of the play, Judith
sadly quits her efforts to become pregnant (Figure 2).
As an African American Jewish convert, Judith is unique among Wasserstein’s Jewish-identified characters. For one thing, unlike Sara, Gorgeous, and
Pfeni, Judith has no Jewish mother living or dead to influence or have expectations of her. Further, there are no African American Jewish female stereotypes for Judith to imitate or reject and few models for her to follow. Judith
has taken advantage of the “possibilities” that Sara also encountered. Born
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Black, and Jewish by choice, Judith has an unusual freedom from outside influences to construct her religious, ethnic, and cultural identities. She is a startling presence in Daughter, reminding the audience each time she is onstage to
abandon all preconceptions of what might constitute a Jew.
Further potential for reading Jewishness in Daughter lies in Wasserstein’s
choice to place Lyssa’s and Judith’s odysseys of thwarted desire within the parameters of the Jewish High Holy Days.While the Sturm und Drang of the major
plot—Lyssa’s struggle to retain her nomination in the face of mounting, mediadriven public hostility—plays out before us, Judith marks Rosh Hashanah observances with expressions of hope that metamorphose into regrets and despair
at Taschlich (the Rosh Hashanah ritual wherein Jews metaphorically cast away
their sins and/or regrets into a body of water), and into acceptance when the
shofar’s call signals the close of Yom Kippur. As Judith points out, Lyssa withdraws her nomination for surgeon general at almost the same moment that
Judith gives up on her “final quest for fertility.”54 Judith’s is the more intimate
passage, a subplot of disappointment that parallels and counterpoints Lyssa’s
public battles. At the end of her ordeal, each woman, bruised but not beaten,
reengages with life, much as Jews emerge from the Yom Kippur fast weak and
chastened, but charged with hope for the future.
As if responding to the questions posed in the American Jewish Identity Survey 2001, The Sisters Rosensweig and An American Daughter suggest a range of
possibilities for how American Jewish identity might be lived, expressed, and
understood by Americans in the late twentieth century and beyond.The principal characters in Sisters perform interrogations of religious and secular Jewish identity, testing the sustaining value of their Eastern European American
Jewish immigrant heritage and destabilizing assumptions regarding Jewishassociated social and private behaviors. Daughter’s performances of American
Jewish identity further challenge such limiting preconceptions. Here, the oncedespised schvartze claims religion and culture, while the bar mitzvah boy abandons both; and though the Jewish man marrying the gentile girl is by now a
cliché in fiction and in experience, the mixed-race daughter who converts to
Judaism is an original. Wasserstein’s construction of Judith as a Jew shatters
modernist notions of a singular, stable, monolithic identity. As world culture
becomes more and more global, and people from many faiths and cultures
form lives together, Judith represents one intriguing possibility for the future
of American Jewishness, and for postmodern identity altogether.
Po st sc ript: Fiddle r on a Po stmode rn Roof
In February 2004, an unexpected controversy regarding expectations of
so-called authentic Jewishness arose regarding that year’s Broadway revival of
Fiddler on the Roof, directed by David Leveaux. It is probably fair to say that,
for better or worse, Fiddler, which portrays the joys and sorrows of life in a
71
Russian Jewish shtetl in the early 1900s, has a national and international reputation as the definitive Jewish American musical. It was a smash hit in 1964, setting box-office records and winning nine Tony Awards.The production starred
Zero Mostel as Tevye, the tradition-bound milkman of Sholem Aleichem shortstory fame who argues with God and endures Russia’s pre-revolution pogroms
while trying to eke out a living and marry off five daughters. Before the 2004
revival opened, many of us in the American professional theater community
heard with interest that film star Alfred Molina, whom we had also seen perform
brilliantly on the stage, was cast to play Tevye. Molina, at least to my knowledge,
does not identify as Jewish, and as other actors, some of them publicly identified
as Jews but most as non-Jews, were added to the cast, we grew optimistically expectant: with such diverse casting, might this forthcoming production depart
from the conventional reconstructions of the original that we had seen over the
years? Then, during the revival’s New York previews, author and former Tikkun
literary editor Thane Rosenbaum wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times in
which he criticized the Fiddler production for attempting to be “universal,”
which resulted in its “absence of Jewish soul.”55 Using terms like “untrue” and
“deracinated of its uniquely cultural imprint,” Rosenbaum wondered if the production simply wasn’t “Jewish enough” to be satisfying.56
Ben Brantley, critic for the New York Times, echoed some of Rosenbaum’s
concerns in his review of the revival’s opening night. Brantley wrote that the
production, jokingly known among insiders as “Goyim on the Roof,” lacked
“gusto, earthiness, warmth”—and here my eye stopped—“soul of any kind.”57
While crediting the director with working against the “usual stereotypes,”
Brantley blamed Leveaux’s “dogged miscasting” and wrong-headed directing
for the show’s lack of “human passion and idiosyncrasy”: Molina, as Tevye, was
too reserved; the three eldest daughters were “interchangeable”; Nancy Opel,
as Yente (the matchmaker), was “oddly youthful and well-dressed”; and Randy
Graff, playing Tevye’s wife, Golde, with “her fine bone structure,” was too
pretty. “A Jewish earth mother . . . she definitely is not,” Brantley quipped.58
What, I wondered, was Brantley suggesting? That a Jewish mother ought
to be large-boned and unattractive? That a matchmaker must have wrinkles
and ugly clothes? Poverty-stricken, persecuted Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement must be earthy, warm, soulful . . . and boisterous? If Brantley cheers
Leveaux for avoiding stereotypes, why does he insist that they be reiterated in
casting and performance? Are these stereotypes what Rosenbaum is missing
when he complains that the show is “untrue” and not “Jewish enough”?
As Ruth Franklin points out in her discussion of Fiddler’s stage history,
there is little that is factual about the shtetl life depicted in this purportedly
quintessentially Jewish musical.59 The show was derived from the fiction of
Sholem Aleichem and was brought to the stage by Joseph Stein, who wrote
the show’s book, and by his collaborators composer Jerry Bock, lyricist Sheldon
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Harnick, and original director/choreographer Jerome Robbins.60 These men
used their imaginations in creatively adapting Aleichem’s stories into something that reflected their own sensibilities and those of the time in which the
musical was written. For example, according to Franklin, Fiddler’s creators
turned the “gruff, no-nonsense man” who was Aleichem’s matchmaker into
“Yente,” an annoying female busybody.61 Audiences, including Jewish Americans, found the original production so enjoyable that they came in recordbreaking numbers.62 Perhaps Fiddler’s reductive, timeworn images, such as
Yente the matchmaker and the caricatured schlemiel, Motel the tailor, felt
comfortable to audiences in 1964, when Jewish cultural stereotypes were popular sources for comedy among both Jews and gentiles in the United States.63
As the reviews of the 2004 Fiddler quoted above reveal, there are apparently
some today who yearn for further performances of these clichés. A postmodern critic, however, would likely read the show’s stock constructions of Jewish
religious and ethnic identities as dated and ripe for reevaluation.
Why can’t Fiddler on the Roof, a musical about the instability of life for its
self-described Jewish characters, inhabit the irony of its own titular metaphor?
Indeed, according to Brantley’s review, the roof in the 2004 Broadway production of Fiddler is detached from solid walls and floats over the set, rising,
lowering, and moving about “in mysterious ways.”64 This set design concept,
in addition to what appears to be casting against type, suggests to me that the
destabilization of expectations, including presumptions of what it takes to
make Fiddler meaningful, was part of Leveaux’s directorial vision for this
revival.
Several months after Leveaux’s Fiddler opened, journalist Keren Engelberg
joined its bashers, claiming that “there’s something to be said for tradition, and
Leveaux might’ve done well to heed the message of his own show.”65 Certainly, as the opening number in Fiddler reminds the audience, there are those
who believe that tradition offers security in an insecure world. However, as the
musical ultimately reveals, that belief is not a guarantee. Life in the United
States in the shadow of 9/11 feels uncommonly uncertain, sometimes quite
perilous, with political, social, and economic expectations overturned daily in
what might be viewed as global performances of the postmodern. Perhaps the
resulting discomfort explains some of the critical resistance to rethinking the
icon of Jewish American Broadway entertainment that is Fiddler on the Roof.
But embracing reductive images of Yentes and Goldes will not provide stability to us on our postmodern roof; retrenchment may feel safe, but it immobilizes thinking, which is rarely the way to solve problems. Instead of harking
back to limiting traditions of theater-making, why not embrace the possibilities, proposed by postmodernism, for fresh, nonrestrictive, reinvigorating theatrical constructions of Jewish American identity?
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Note s
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Wendy Wasserstein, who passed away on January 30, 2006, at the age of fifty-five. Colleagues, friends, and audiences around the world
loved Wasserstein for her talent, good humor, and generous spirit.
1. Edgon Mayer, Barry A. Kosmin, and Ariela Keysay, American Jewish Identity Survey
2001 (New York: Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 2001; reissued by the Center for Cultural Judaism, 2003).
2. Ibid., 8.
3. Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 7.
4. Hana Wirth-Nesher,“Defining the Indefinable:What is Jewish Literature?” in What
is Jewish Literature? ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994), 3.
5. Eric L. Goldstein, “ ‘Different Blood Flows in Our Veins’: Race and Jewish SelfDefinition in Late Nineteenth Century America,” American Jewish History (March
1997): 29.
6. Ibid., 29–30.
7. Ibid., 55. Contrary to Goldstein, Karen Brodkin suggests that the term “ethnicity”
did not come into common usage in the United States until after World War II.
Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 189.
8. Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi, eds., The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary
and Cultural Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 251. See also
Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986).
9. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, “General Introduction,” in Critical Theory
and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1992), 1.
10. Harley Erdman, Staging the Jew:The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860–1920
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 6.
11. Ibid., 6.
12. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1999), 178–179.
13. Erdman, Staging, 6.
14. Butler, Gender Trouble, xxvii. Butler explains how she came to view trouble as something she felt connected to because of her minority status as a feminist lesbian in a
society where heterosexuality equals agency; for Butler, trouble is also what she felt
compelled to create, in terms of her rebellion against that structure.
15. Wolf, Problem, 4.
16. Essentializing identity often leads to unfortunate and sometimes dangerous clichés
and stereotypes. Consider, for instance, the widely held belief in the 1930s and
1940s that most Jews were Communists or most Communists were Jews, both false
assumptions that fueled antisemitic sentiments in the United States and Europe
prior to, during, and after World War II.
17. Ellen Schiff, introduction to Awake and Sing: Seven Classic Plays from the American
Jewish Repertoire, ed. Ellen Schiff (New York: Mentor Books, 1995), xviii.
18. Some critics might count playwright Lillian Hellman as a Jewish American playwright of “leftist” political sympathies. While Hellman’s plays certainly reveal this
bias, she did not publicly self-identify as Jewish, seeming rather to assertively distance herself from religious or secular Jewishness.
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19. Miller continues,“If content had been the gauge of radicalism rather than certain automatic journalistic tags like ‘Catholic,’‘Jewish,’‘tragic,’ and ‘class-conscious,’ it would
have been O’Neill who was branded the anticapitalist writer first and foremost.” For
this comment and more of Miller’s thinking on O’Neill, Odets, capitalism, Marxism,
and so on, see his Timebends:A Life (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 227–240.
20. In addition, of course, there are plays in this category written by gentile Americans
who do not self-associate with minority cultures; for example, Robert Schenkkan’s
The Kentucky Cycle, a 1992 Pulitzer Prize–winning epic study of some less-thanadmirable aspects of American history, including racism and social/economic
oppression.
21. Quoted in Schiff, introduction to Awake and Sing, xxvii.
22. See, for example, two of Houston’s plays: Tea in Unbroken Thread: An Anthology of
Plays by Asian American Women, ed. Robert Uno (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 155–200; and Kokoro (True Heart) in But Still Like Air, I’ll Rise: New
Asian American Plays, ed. Velina Hasu Houston (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1997), 89–129. Houston, born to a Japanese mother and African American/
Native American father, is a frequently produced and frequently published playwright of color in the United States.
23. Stephen J. Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis
University Press, 1999), 118.
24. David Mamet, quoted in ibid., 119.
25. Arthur Miller,“Salesman at Fifty,” Performing Arts Magazine, Performing Arts Center
of Los Angeles County, October 2000, 7.
26. See for example,Wendy Wasserstein, interview with Leslie Jacobson, The Playwright’s
Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists, ed. Jackson R. Bryer (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 257–276.
27. Wendy Wasserstein, Uncommon Women and Others (New York: Avon Books, 1979).
See Wasserstein’s comment about Uncommon Women, “Basically what it’s saying is
‘I’m very confused,’ ” in Wendy Wasserstein, interview with Kathleen Betsko and
Rachel Koenig, in Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, ed. Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987), 420.William C. Boles
comments, “Wasserstein’s plays intentionally revel in their depiction of the uncertain and confusing diversity of alternatives available not only to her female characters, but to the entire American female population.” See William C. Boles, “We’ve
Come a Long Way,” Wendy Wasserstein: A Casebook, ed. Claudia Barnett (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1999), 61. However, Boles overstates the case: Wasserstein
describes options open primarily to middle- and upper-class Caucasian American
women.
28. Wasserstein told interviewer Leslie Bennetts that as “ ‘the only little brown haired girl
in the room,’ ” that is, physically identified as Jewish, she felt uncomfortably different
from most of the other young women during her four years at Mount Holyoke College. See Leslie Bennetts,“An Uncommon Dramatist Prepares Her New Work,” New
York Times, May 24, 1981: 2:1.
29. Wendy Wasserstein, Isn’t It Romantic (Garden City, N.J.: Nelson Doubleday, Inc.,
1984).
30. Ibid., 78.
31. Ibid., 50–51
32. See Gail Ciociola, Wendy Wasserstein: Dramatizing Women, Their Choices and Their
Boundaries (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1998), 84; and Carol Rosen, “An Unconventional Life: Q&A with Wendy Wasserstein,” TheaterWeek, November 2–8, 1992:
20. For the playwright’s comments on Miami, see Wendy Wasserstein, interview with
Leslie Jacobson, The Playwright’s Art, 257–276.
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33. Wendy Wasserstein, The Heidi Chronicles (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1990),
32–40.
34. Ibid., 32.
35. Ibid., 38–39.
36. Lynn Darling,“The Wendy Generation,” Fanfare, October 18, 1992: 12.
37. Ibid., 12.
38. Deborah K. Anderson, “Building the Gift,” in Wendy Wasserstein: A Casebook, ed.
Claudia Barnett (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 113.
39. Wasserstein, Sisters, 34.
40. Ibid., 81.
41. Ibid., 30.
42. Ibid., 36–38.
43. Ibid., 75.
44. Ibid., 80–81.
45. Daniel Sullivan, personal interview, July 27, 2001.
46. Wendy Wasserstein, videotape of The Sisters Rosensweig, directed by Daniel Sullivan,
Barrymore Theatre, New York City, 1993. Property of the Lincoln Center Library
for the Performing Arts, New York City.
47. Wasserstein, Sisters, 88–90.“Shah,” meaning “quiet,” might be used to comfort a crying child.
48. Ibid., 106.
49. Ibid., 105–106.
50. Ibid., 107.
51. Wendy Wasserstein, An American Daughter (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1999).
52. Ibid., 28.
53. Ibid., 10.
54. Ibid., 70.
55. Thane Rosenbaum,“A Legacy Cut Loose,” Los Angeles Times, February 15, 2004: E44.
56. Ibid., E44.
57. Ben Brantley, “A Cozy Little McShtetl,” rev. of Fiddler on the Roof, book by Joseph
Stein, music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, dir. David Leveaux, Minskoff Theatre, New York, New York Times, February 27, 2004: http://www.theater2
.nytimes.com.
58. Ibid.
59. Ruth Franklin,“Shtetl Shtick,” New York Times, February 29, 2004: http://www.nytimes.com.
60. For an illuminating description of how Fiddler was first conceived and produced, see
Hal Prince, Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the Theatre (Cornwall, N.Y.:
Cornwall Press, 1975), 104–109.
61. Franklin,“Shtetl Shtick.”
62. The original Fiddler ran an unprecedented 3,242 performances on Broadway. See
Prince, Contradictions, 109.
63. See Riv-Ellen Prell’s discussion of the Jewish American Princess stereotype, in Prell’s
Fighting to Become American: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 177–208.To a certain extent, as Prell points out in her book, Jewish Americans have often internalized and even approved of derogatory images of
themselves and their ancestors.
64. Brantley,“Cozy Little McShtetl.”
65. Keren Engelberg, “Tradition Falls Flat on Broadway,” Jewish Journal (Los Angeles),
May 21, 2004: 38.
James Fisher
Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning two-play epic, Angels in America, subtitled a “gay fantasia on national themes,” catapulted him
to theatrical fame in the early 1990s. Angels focuses on American life at the
height of the AIDS crisis, establishing Kushner’s credentials as a “gay dramatist,” although subsequently critics have been wont to label him a “political
dramatist.” Harold Bloom, acknowledging Kushner’s “authentic gift for fantasy,” adds yet another identity. For him, Kushner is a postmodern dramatic
theologian writing “his own New Kabbalah” inspired by the vast tapestry of
history, culture, religion, and literature of his faith and of human history in
general.1
Liberating himself from past cultural boundaries and the distinctions separating “high” and “low” art, Kushner creates new works and revitalizes classics by
applying postmodern theatrical devices with a goal of illuminating his “New
Kabbalah”; in short, he is crafting dramatic texts for survival as America moves
uncertainly into a fearful, complex future. Adopting the “fabulousness” of latetwentieth-century gay culture, merged with Brecht-inspired dramatic techniques and, most centrally, a deep mistrust of unchecked American capitalism
and neocon politics (as well as an acute awareness of the failures of traditional
liberalism), Kushner draws on his Jewish roots to explore the ancient texts, language, and philosophical questions of faith.As Alisa Solomon writes, through the
Jewish characters of his plays Kushner creates a “metaphorical Jew,” a dramatic
device allowing him to probe the contradictions and questions of history, culture, and faith in the postmodern world.2
To fully understand Kushner’s achievement thus far, it is necessary to understand his seemingly antithetical fascination with and ambivalence to Judaism and other traditional belief systems. It is Judaism, his own birth religion,
that supplies the richest vein of spiritual exploration in his plays.The collisions
of Jewish mysticism with the modern world (as seen most vividly in his free
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adaptation of the Yiddish theater classic, A Dybbuk [1995]) and life in postmodern America (as depicted in Angels in America and subsequent Kushner
works) reveal much about Kushner’s “New Kabbalah” and his “metaphorical Jew.”
In the Me lting Pot Wh e re Nothing Me lte d
Born in New York City in 1956, Kushner was raised in a Jewish family
transplanted to Lake Charles, Louisiana. His family’s ambivalent Judaism rubbed
up against deep-fried southern Christianity, a dynamic that potently contributes
to the passion for the cultural collisions irradiating his plays. Immersion in literature and art (his parents were professional musicians and his mother also found
a creative outlet as an amateur actress) provided relief from a somewhat isolated
childhood in the South of the 1960s (a period he revisited in his musical drama,
Caroline, or Change [2003], a partly autobiographical exploration of American life
at the height of the civil rights movement and in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s
assassination), but southern culture was the least of his problems. Confusion over
his sexual orientation kept him firmly in the closet until the mid-1970s, when he
returned to his birthplace to attend Columbia University. Studying medieval
history and literature, Kushner fell into the New York theater scene and, after
seeking a “cure” for his homosexuality, he finally embraced it and has become
an important gay rights advocate.
Richard Schechner’s 1975 production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage
and Her Children, which Kushner considers one of the greatest plays ever written, and Richard Foreman’s production of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera in
that same period, inspired his desire to direct and write socially conscious, politically driven plays utilizing an array of theatrical conventions, popular culture
devices, and the energy supplied by political activism. Brecht became Kushner’s dominant model for political theater in terms of both technique and activism. He came to believe “that theater, really good theater, had the potential
for radical intervention, for effectual analysis.The things that were exciting me
about Marx, specifically dialectics, I discovered in Brecht, in a wonderful witty
and provocative form. I became very, very excited about doing theater as a
result of reading Brecht.”3 Ultimately, Brecht led Kushner to a further exploration of a range of neo-Marxist philosophers, most particularly Walter Benjamin and Raymond Williams; these thinkers, along with his lifelong interest
in Jewish mysticism and the traditions of Judaism in general, inform Kushner’s
politics, his interpretation of the crosscurrents of history, his definition of what
can only be called neo-socialism, and the need he identifies for seeking modes
of personal and collective transcendence. Enhancing Kushner’s theories of the
stage, his encounter with Ernst Fischer’s The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach (1963) provided further foundation for his understanding of politics and
drama, and a greater sense of the mystical possibilities of the theater. Fischer
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stresses the necessity for art through which “man should be able to recognize
and challenge the world. But art is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent in it.”4 More specifically, Fischer states,“In the alienated world in which we
live, social reality must be presented in an arresting way, in a new light, through
the ‘alienation’ of the subject and the characters.The work of art must grip the
audience not through persuasive identification but through an appeal to reason
which demands action and decision.”5 Fischer seems to simultaneously describe
Brecht and Kushner, although the latter’s work had yet to be written when Fischer described it. Stressing the necessity of appealing to an audience’s reason and
desire for action and change, Fischer insists on the “magic” of theatrical creation
that Kushner would find, to an extent, in Jewish mysticism.
After reading Fischer and Brecht, Kushner came to Walter Benjamin’s Understanding Brecht and “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” For Kushner, the
history that repeats itself in his early play, A Bright Room Called Day (1985), a
dark, despairing drama set in Berlin in the year of Adolf Hitler’s rise in which
Kushner illuminates issues of political engagement and surviving a great social
evil, is related to Angels in America. Benjamin’s notion of glancing backward at
the wreckage of history informs Kushner’s depiction of American life in the
1980s: Ronald Reagan’s America (a forerunner of the George W. Bush-era of
neocon politics). Kushner uses history (and tragedy, as well as his own brand of
magic realism) to illustrate the lessons of the past for those living in the present,
in a nod to Benjamin’s plea to learn from the past. Bright Room’s historical metaphor is Nazi Germany, while Reagan-era conservatism, anti-AIDS phobia, and
the deeper roots of cultural homophobia are seen in Angels’ 1950s McCarthyera icon Roy Cohn, who embodies the oxymoron “gay homophobe” and, in his
intense anticommunism, also embodies a type of self-hating Jew.6 In both plays,
Kushner uses historical elements to create models of both the blatant and banal
evil he locates in extremist conservatism. Brecht provides Kushner with a dramatic technique and heightened political purpose; Benjamin offers the concepts
of the backward glance at history and a sense of progressive inevitability; and
Williams enhances Kushner’s idea of neo-socialism. Finally, Fischer’s notion of
theatrical “magic,” enhanced by Kushner’s study of Jewish mysticism, brings
forth a confluence that gives shape to his proposition that a radically reconstructed postmodern American society can be built on a progressive, compassionately humanist doctrine drawing strength from the hard lessons of the past.
The Kushnerian “metaphorical Jew” found its first vivid exemplars in Roy
Cohn and other characters in the Angels in America plays.
“Lou the Jew”
Late in Millennium Approaches, the first part of the two Angels plays, Louis
Ironson, a motor-mouthed, politically liberal word processor (both literally
and figuratively), is losing a verbal sparring match with Belize, an African
79
American nurse, part-time drag queen, and close friend of Prior Walter, the
lover Louis has abandoned while Prior is dying of AIDS. Belize takes offense at
what he regards as Louis’s “racist bullshit,” and the defensive Louis attempts to
regain the upper hand by reminding Belize that he once called him “Lou the
Jew.”7 “Most black people are anti-Semitic,” Louis asserts, but Belize counters
that such a statement is itself a racist remark and that Louis, only moments before, had referred to himself as “Sid the Yid.”8
This “catty” sparring is intended to be comic, but it is also a mask for the
true animus between these two characters, not resulting from ethno-racial difference but from Belize’s anger at Louis’s betrayal of Prior and, more significantly, from Louis’s own profound guilt over what he has done to his lover
(and true love). Earlier, anticipating his abandonment of Prior, Louis questions
the elderly Rabbi Chemelwitz, who has just presided over the funeral of Louis’s
grandmother, Sarah Ironson. Louis asks, “Rabbi, what does the Holy Writ say
about someone who abandons someone he loves at a time of great need?”
“The Holy Scriptures have nothing to say about such a person,” the rabbi dismissively replies, adding that if Louis has something to confess, he should find
a priest: “Catholics believe in forgiveness. Jews believe in Guilt.”9 Kushner’s
religious ambivalence, as expressed in this scene, is to some extent borne of
his sense of the rigid clarity of Judaism, which cannot forgive his moral failure or, more important, his “sin” of homosexuality. Kushner finds all “old” religions similarly rigid, including Mormonism, his example of the only wholly
American-grown religion in Angels.
Kushner himself has no difficulty condemning Louis’s faithlessness, though
his response seems couched in compassion for Louis’s demonstration of human
weakness. Even those more able than Louis may fail. How, Kushner wonders,
can we live past such failures? Has Louis committed a true moral failure? Can
he be forgiven? What is moral?
Angels’s historical character, Roy Cohn, a complex and contradictory midtwentieth century American moral puzzle, in part symbolizes the sum total of
the Reagan era. Belize points to Cohn, who is dying of AIDS, and says, “I’ll
show you America.Terminal, crazy, and mean.”10 This particular “metaphorical
Jew” is a bleak, darkly comic image of hypocrisy, corruption, and hate, an embodiment of the murky underside of America’s “traditional values.” For Kushner, the real and fictive Cohn exemplifies Reagan-era trickle-down morality: if
selfishness and bad faith exist in the ruling class, their moral failings will seep
down into the wellsprings of American society (Figure 1).
Kushner leans on Brecht, Fischer, Benjamin, and Williams for an underlying dramatic philosophy, but it is in the work of another Williams—Tennessee
Williams, also a gay southerner (albeit gentile)—that Kushner’s work finds a
parallel: in the voluptuousness of language, the focus on sexuality, and the
reevaluation of past and current moral certitudes. Other noteworthy connections
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Jam e s F i s h e r
1. Tony Kushner’s fictionalized Roy Cohn (Bryan Thomas) in the 1996 Wabash College
production of Millennium Approaches, the first play of the two-part Angels in America,
directed by James Fisher. Photo by John Zimmerman.
between the two playwrights: both feature epic passions in their memorable
characters, both depict dark and poetic images of the beautiful and the frightening aspects of existence, both create a stage language at once both naturalistic and lyrical, both ponder the space between illusion and reality, both explore
the nature of spirituality from a grounding in classical, modern, and postmodern thought, and both deal centrally and compassionately with complex issues
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of morality, sexuality, and gender. Kushner is certainly more overtly political
than Williams, and Williams’s transitioning southern world of repressed WASPs
differs mightily from the loquacious socialist Jews populating Kushner’s plays,
who are more likely descendants of the characters of Clifford Odets’s 1930s
agit-prop dramas (to which Kushner’s social conscience also owes a debt).
Odets, the New York Jew groomed by the Group Theater, presents for Kushner and other politically driven American dramatists a model for using the stage
as a leftist platform. In 1935, Odets captured the sociopolitical moment with
Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing!—two works in which the theater’s power
to inspire change was amply, if briefly, proven.
From a theological perspective, Kushner’s “metaphorical Jews” find themselves in a dramatic collision of images of Judaism, Christianity, and Mormonism. In Angels, Louis and Cohn are the play’s central “metaphorical Jews,”
while Prior is a character belonging in Tennessee Williams’s world (Kushner
even puts one of Williams’s most famous lines, “I’ve always depended on the
kindness of strangers,” from A Streetcar Named Desire, into Prior’s mouth). Prior
descends from a long line of Christians, made evident when he amusingly effuses, “Jewish curses are the worst. I personally would dissolve if anyone ever
looked me in the eye and said ‘Feh.’ Fortunately WASPs don’t say ‘Feh.’ ”11
Added to the irony of this comment by Prior is that the clerically named character is more than just another Christian—he comes from forebears who partook in the Crusades and as the current representative of this family tree, Prior
not only knows Jews, but has fallen under their romantic spell. Three other
major characters in Angels, Joe and Harper Pitt, and Joe’s mother, Hannah, are
“metaphorical Mormons.” Kushner makes use of all the play’s main characters
to probe the commonalities among their respective religions, as well as the
contradictions, doctrines, and pop culture clichés embedded in them, to challenge visions of moral certitude in a time of great moral confusion.The struggle of imperfect humans attempting to live within the strict contexts of these
belief systems is at the heart of the play. All faiths emerge as flawed responses
to human experience, despite Kushner’s recognition of the potency of the
symbols and mystical qualities inherent in them. A dominant figure of Angels
is its mysterious Angel, a guiding metaphor, who makes her first appearance at
the end of Millennium Approaches. Angels have long been accepted as symbols
of spiritual significance, residing in a realm somewhere between the Deity and
His creations.They watch over humanity as unspeakably beautiful harbingers
of both hope and death, a vision that resonates with Walter Benjamin’s description of the Angel of History, which Benjamin perceived in Paul Klee’s
painting “Angelus Novus”:
[The angel is] looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open,
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his wings are spread.This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face
is turned toward the past.Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one
single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls
it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and
make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can
no longer close them.The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to
which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.This storm is what we call progress.12
Much of this conception finds its way into Kushner’s Angel and into the
“magic” of the play. His Angel is powerless to create change because God disappeared at the time of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the abandoned angels are unable to do much beyond watching the catastrophes of the
twentieth century.They are sympathetic to the human suffering they observe
and plead with Prior to stand still; moving forward, in their reckoning, means
risking the wrenching destruction inherent in change and progress.Angels may
also be healing beings in Kushner’s depiction. In the final scene of the play’s
second part, Perestroika, some of the play’s central characters meet at Central
Park’s Bethesda Fountain. Here a statue of the biblical angel who “troubled the
waters”—not coincidentally, the subject of a short 1928 play by another American dramatist,Thornton Wilder—can be found. Kushner borrows this imagery
at the end of Perestroika, and throughout both parts of Angels, as he “troubles the
waters” of American life in ways that permit revelation to his characters, all of
whom seek a cure to their physical and/or emotional ills. In Wilder’s The Angel
That Troubled the Waters, the Angel asks the Healer,“Without your wound where
would your power be?”13 Some of the Angels characters (Prior and Harper, most
particularly) grow stronger from their wounds and their courage in moving
forward into the fearful unknown, and although they may not be completely
healed they, like the damaged souls of “The Angel That Troubled the Waters,”
survive. Prior’s conception of the Angel is undeniably Christian, but Kushner is
aware of the Jewish origins of angels and, as such, this figure exhibits aspects of
the traditions of both religions.
In Angels, Prior is first fearful of the Angel that troubles him, but once the
Angel refers to him as a “prophet,” he begins to grow in wisdom and strength
even as he continues to resist the Angel. Prior ultimately concludes that despite the worst kinds of suffering humans can experience, the desire to live on
remains paramount. In perhaps the most important speech Kushner offers in
Angels to establish this viewpoint, Prior evokes images of the most horrific
tragedies of the modern and postmodern worlds, from the Holocaust to the
genocides, pestilences, famines, and terrorism of the present day:
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I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do.
I’ve lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live
through much much worse, but. . . . You see them living anyway. When
they’re more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they’re burned
and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children, they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s
just the animal. I don’t know if it’s not braver to die. But I recognize the
habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope
anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough, so inadequate but. . . . Bless me anyway. I want more life.14
Prior, abandoned and suffering, struggles for survival (he practically demands it on his visit to heaven), as do other characters, from Harper Pitt—
who is losing her husband, Joe, the only person in the world she loves, to his
homosexual desires—to Roy Cohn, who, despite (or because of ) his racist
and homophobic bile, is losing his battle with the courts, where he faces disbarment, and his battle with life, from AIDS. All that matters in life to Roy is
the practice of law, which for him is the wielding of power. Emphasizing that
life is loss, Kushner believes that “you can’t conquer loss.You lose. To suggest
otherwise would be to suggest a fantasy. . . . Life is about losing. Things are
taken from you. People are taken from you. You just have to face it.”15 This
typically if not uniquely Jewish sentiment emerges from Jews’ historical powerlessness and resignation in the face of suffering, as well as from Kushner’s
own, which included the devastating loss of his mother to cancer while he was
in the midst of writing Perestroika.16
Other Angels characters face different losses as they reach for understanding. Louis, Rabbi Chemelwitz, and Louis’s deceased grandmother, Sarah Ironson, offer a reading of the Jewish-American experience from the rise of
early-twentieth-century modernity to millennial postmodernity. As the rabbi
speaks over Sarah’s coffin to the assembled mourners, including Louis, he
describes the experience of the metaphorical immigrant Jew that Sarah
represented:
[She is] not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed
the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and
Lithuania—and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for
the Jewish home, so that you would grow up here, in this strange place, in
the melting pot where nothing melted. Descendants of this immigrant
woman, you do not grow up in America, you and your children and their
children with the goyishe names. You do not live in America. No such
place exists.Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of
the steppes—because she carried the old world on her back across the
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ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in
Flatbush, and she worked that into your bones, and you pass it to your
children, this ancient, ancient culture and home.17
Contrary to Sarah, however, Louis is the ultimate postmodern “metaphorical
Jew,” completely cut off from his religious roots both in his faithlessness (spiritual and romantic) and in his very persona—as an unapologetic homosexual
he can only be existentially adrift without the comforts of the Old World moral
certitudes that guided the generation of his grandmother and Rabbi Chemelwitz (Figure 2).
Louis’s grandmother—based to some extent on Kushner’s own maternal
grandmother—never appears onstage in Angels (except in one brief optional
scene in Perestroika that is rarely performed), but Kushner imagines her journey in a little-known theater-dance piece, “It’s an Undoing World,” or Why
Should It Be Easy When It Can Be Hard? Notes on My Grandma for Actors, Dancers
and a Band (1995), constructed of a postmodern combination of theater and
dance, weaving together historical and fictive stands of personal and cultural
experience.
M y Yi ddi she Granny
“It’s an Undoing World” features spirits residing in teapots—
“Ooooooyyyyyyyy. . . . It’s an undoing world, I’m telling you,” wails one
spirit—daughters sleeping on the graves of their fathers so they may visit the
land of the dead, and knowledge passing between the hands of men and
women as they dance.18 Kushner, in making use of fragments of Eastern European culture, journeys through his own family’s Judaism across three generations in a theater piece that conflates time and location, blurring myth and
memory.
Written as a project for choreographer Naomi Goldberg, and accompanied by the traditional Jewish music of The Klezmatics, “It’s an Undoing
World” sprinkles elements of autobiography over fictive imaginings.As he had
with Angels’s Sarah Ironson, Kushner ruminates on the truths and myths of
the Eastern European immigrant experience through the grandmother, also
named Sarah, of “It’s an Undoing World,” a feisty, brave, tragic, and sometimes
absurdly comic traveler through twentieth-century America’s encounter with
the Jews of Eastern Europe, those who journeyed to the melting pot where
nothing melted. Sarah shares her memories with three daughters, all of whom
are suffering from various stages of breast cancer (“under their eyes are dark
rings and their heads are wrapped in brightly colored chemotherapy scarves”),
as well as a Solemn Grandchild whose serious manner and precocious intellectualism make her Kushner’s obvious surrogate despite the gender switch.19
With death hanging precariously over them, these women focus on unraveling
2. Heikki Larson (left) as Joe Pitt and Mat Boudreaux as Louis Ironson in the 1996
Wabash College production of Angels in America, directed by James Fisher. Photo by
John Zimmerman.
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the truths and fallacies of Sarah’s post-death account of her life, a fantastic rendering of the immigrant experience demonstrating the far-reaching impact of
the ideas of society, politics, and the vicissitudes of existence brought from
Eastern Europe to early modern America. For Kushner, those experiences and
ideas have become permanently fixed in the American intellectual and moral
landscape.
Here Kushner’s “metaphorical Jew” is a cantankerous, opinionated, and, at
times, confused old woman clinging to a vanishing past she is unable, or unwilling, to remember with detailed accuracy.Yet essences emerge as it becomes
clear that her confusions (imaginings?) may be more truthful than mere fact.
Sarah lives in the past and even speaks of her own death, as well as those of
her ailing daughters, just as they, at times, speak in Sarah’s voice, adopting the
grammatical errors and odd word choices of Eastern European immigrants
whose grasp on a second language is tenuous, yet evocatively and eccentrically
revealing.The aforementioned boiling teapot whistles out Sarah’s unconscious
lamentations and provides background narrative, and occasional corrections to
the crazy quilt of disparate details.The Solemn Grandchild who, Kushner indicates, “never looks happy,” raises challenging questions for Sarah, who, with
the kibitzing of her daughters, recounts her life in Poland at the dawn of the
modern era.20 Her father, she recalls, sent her out from their little village to
the city of Tarnopol to learn Jewish prayers so that one day she might chant
the Kaddish (mourner’s prayer) for him because he fears his unloving wife will
not. The old faith and the acquisition of knowledge become her mantra. A
young Russian student carries Sarah around piggyback and, from him,“she acquired his knowledge:Through his shirt, through the skin on his back it came:
It was Russian words, it was Pushkin, it was botany.”21 Similar education comes
from a wealthy countess through the woman’s kid gloves, allowing Sarah to
gain “fluency in Polish, in Hungarian, French,” as well as skill in embroidery.22
Along with these flashes from Sarah’s past are her reflections on the lonely end
of her life, complaining, “My eyes are bothering me. My daughters are such
bitches.They have left me in this hot hell,” referring to the hotel room where
she died alone.23
Back to her reveries, Sarah recalls coming to America following her father’s
death. She speaks of knowing Annie Lazarus, the daughter of Emma, whose
poem is emblazoned on the base of the Statue of Liberty, a poem emblematic
of the experiences of early modern immigrants. The boiling teapot provides
Sarah’s eccentric rendering:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses abubbadah bubbudah bubbudah
Yearning to breathe free.24
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Lazarus, Sarah claims, gave her a little tin Statue of Liberty that the Eldest
Daughter inherits following Sarah’s death, although the Middle Daughter
accuses her of stealing it while Sarah lived in the “hot hell.” The Youngest
Daughter inherits the teapot and the family bickering subsides as Sarah recounts her relationship with Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, a Sephardic Jew, who
had a distinguished career on the New York Supreme Court before replacing
Oliver Wendell Holmes on the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite a relatively short
tenure (1932–38), Cardozo participated in significant legal decisions that make
him a seminal figure in liberal judicial and academic circles. In one of the most
compelling portions of “It’s an Undoing World,” Cardozo sings:
The Court must not be a machine!
Law is Democracy’s shrine
Here in the Gold’ne Medina,
Where the legal light
Will dispel the night
And my goddess of Justice will shine!25
Kushner ties the rise of liberal democracy to yet another metaphorical Jew.
Sarah tells of acquiring “a knowledge of the Law” through a brief romantic encounter with Cardozo, who was impressed by her interest in the law.26 However, Sarah and other immigrants flee back to Europe following the 1906 San
Francisco earthquake (the same event inspiring God to disappear in Angels),
feeling that this catastrophe “augurs bad for America.”27
When Sarah arrives at her Old World home she finds that it, and the entire
village, no longer exists. Locating her father’s grave, she spends the night sleeping on it, claiming to have acquired “knowledge of the Yenne Welt,” the “other
world” or land of the dead; and years later in the nursing home where for ten
years she sat alone while two of her daughters died of breast cancer, she also
“traveled living to the Yenne Welt to seek her father.”28 Sarah sadly returns to
the United States where she sees Cardozo once again at a World War I rally,
but he does not recognize her. More important, Kushner uses this historical
encounter to underscore the significance of Cardozo’s liberal principles on
American life. America’s turn away from those values, Sarah asserts, is “bad for
the immigrants bad for the Jews.”29
“It’s an Undoing World” draws to its melancholy conclusion as the Solemn
Grandchild reports that Sarah died at the age of a hundred and three on the day
that Proposition 187 passed in California. She died “strangled in disgust no that
ain’t true she died before that under Reagan she died it was from the fucking
capitalist exploiters,” and so her spirit goes to reside in the teapot with her
warning that whichever daughter gains possession will live to be a hundred and
five:“Yah.You will live a long time. And then you’ll know suffering.”30
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“It’s an Undoing World” finds considerable humor in the rhythms of Jewish immigrant language. Sarah mixes Yiddish expressions with her distortions
of English, ignoring punctuation and proper construction.The humor of this
pidgin language subsides, however, as these eccentric constructions permit a
level of expression that, in a sense, supersedes both languages.A weird lyricism
emerges in the play’s language, not only adding dimensions to the expression
of its ideas, but also acting as an aid to Kushner in merging the various eras of
Sarah’s life. As an old woman, there is a girlishness to her way of speaking; as
the young Sarah, she has a bluntness and maturity more often associated with
older women. And, because of this odd mixing of eccentric language embellishments, Sarah’s Jewishness is always evident.
The conflict of human need, experience, and ambition set against the inhumanly immense sweep of history and social change is a Kushner constant,
whether in small-scale works such as “It’s an Undoing World” or on an epic scale
as in Angels in America. Kushner’s adaptation of the Yiddish theater classic, A
Dybbuk, first produced in 1995 at Connecticut’s Hartford Stage Company (and
with revisions, in 1997, at New York’s Public Theatre), shifts from the immigrant
experience back to the Old World itself, as that world brushes against modernity.The issues shift, too, toward darker questions of faith in a brutalizing century, though the postmodern concerns persist. The intermingling of historical
and fictional characters is a postmodernist theatrical device Kushner employs
centrally in both Angels and “It’s an Undoing World,” and he also weaves elements
of Jewish mysticism into the highly imaginative supernatural elements of both
plays, but in A Dybbuk, the mystical elements become central.
Betwe e n Two Worlds
A Dybbuk recounts the tragic romance of a young rabbinical student,
Chonen, and Leah, daughter of Sender, a prosperous merchant, who had made
a pact with Chonen’s long-dead father that their children would one day wed.
Greed leads Sender to break the pact, promising Leah in marriage to another
young man whose family can bring important financial advantages to Sender.
Chonen dies in despair over this betrayal and his spirit—a dybbuk—takes possession of Leah. Rabbi Azriel, an exorcist, is sent for in hopes that he may free
Leah from the dybbuk’s hold. He succeeds, but Leah dies in the process. Life is
lost, but the spirits of Leah and Chonen are united in death (Figure 3).
The striking parallels between the lives and dramatic styles of author and
adaptor assist in understanding Kushner’s “metaphorical Jew.” Ambivalent
about his own Jewish heritage, Kushner recognizes Solomon Ansky (Shloyme
Zanul Rappoport), author of the original work (called The Dybbuk, written in
1914), as a kindred spirit. Both are driven by skepticism about faith, but both
are also drawn to the mysticism of the spiritual realm and the on-going struggle
for a faith in the modern (Ansky) and postmodern (Kushner) worlds. Kushner
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3. Julie Dretzin, as Leah, primps in her wedding dress before the dybbuk possesses her,
in the 1995 Hartford Stage Company production of Tony Kushner’s A Dybbuk, directed
by Mark Lamos. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.
notes that Ansky’s skepticism is “definitely a product of that struggle. . . .
I think very much about a very insular, premodern shtetl world, but one that’s
already being impacted upon by modernity [ . . . ] and everything that would
come after that.”31 He stresses that Ansky “went toward Judaism by his political convictions,” and that his “sense of himself as a political revolutionary was
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very much at odds with this sort of emotional tie that he had with Judaism,”
which Ansky himself describes as the sole motif of his drama:“spiritual struggle.”32 Kushner’s view of spirituality may well be more ambivalent and troubled
than Ansky’s, but the connections are important for comprehending Kushner’s
interest in this problematic yet fascinating antique dramatic work, and are essential to appreciating his free adaptation of it. Ansky’s original is flatter, more
one-dimensional than Kushner’s adaptation; the plots and characters of both
versions are fundamentally the same, with Kushner extending certain aspects
(particularly the religious skepticism and the supernatural elements) while trimming the language and adding a level of lyricism not found in the drier original. Kushner merges the cultural and spiritual questions of this transitional
period (the decline of the rural Old World and the rise of the technological
age) with feverish dreams and flights of fantasy in grappling with his characters’
social circumstances, heritage, and individual searches for love and religious
belief. A Dybbuk, like Angels in America, is similarly stirring emotionally, rich
in an anxious and troubled humanism expressed through the postmodern theatricalism that is part and parcel of Kushner’s major works.
Working from a literal translation by Joachim Neugroschel, Kushner substantially restructures Ansky’s text, making use of the Brechtian episodic style
that he consistently employs in his wholly original plays. Kushner’s singular
brand of guarded optimism, tempered by an unblinking view of life’s darkest corners, also emerges in A Dybbuk. Hope can spring from loss, Kushner
stresses—Chonen cannot survive the loss of Leah in this world, but she becomes his in the next.Wrongs can be righted, the universe can be put in order.
The significance of the play’s subtitle, Between Two Worlds, indicates Kushner’s
desire to create this duality on all levels of the adaptation. As Alisa Solomon
writes,“Death resides in life, male in female, the spiritual in the carnal, religious
doubt in devotion, evil in goodness, social well-being in private acts, Hasidism
in modernity, the holy in the profane.And, in each instance, vice versa.”33 And,
it should be added, reality in fantasy. Kushner uses these dualities to explore
faith and secularism, reflecting on the impact of the spiritual and the natural
worlds on the individual in the harsh realities of existence. Above all, he is fascinated with the source play’s suggestion of the possibility of communing with
the dead, of on-going relationships past the grave that make loss seem bearable,
and of the ultimate but often hard justice of the universe.
Solomon identifies A Dybbuk’s “intensely homosocial world,” which “vibrates with erotic implication.”34 For example, rabbinical students indulge in
an orgiastic dance in the synagogue and Chonen delivers a passionate recitation of the Song of Songs for his beloved Leah. More potently, as the dybbuk,
Chonen penetrates Leah’s body in simultaneously mystical and sexual ways.
Kushner maintains much of Ansky’s emphasis on the central characters,
while placing greater attention on theological skepticism. He adds a speech
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permitting Rabbi Azriel, A Dybbuk’s “metaphorical Jew,” to express his own
religious doubts more pointedly than Ansky allows (Ansky’s Azriel is a onedimensional exemplar of religious orthodoxy), as when at the end of act 3,
alone with his scribe, Azriel cries out to his deceased grandfather:
You have been dead sixty-seven years; in that time I only grow weaker,
and the world grows wickeder. But you in Paradise have grown stronger,
and I ask you to accompany me now. In Lublin, in Zlotchov, pogroms.The
people talk idly of traveling and scientific marvels and don’t pray. I’m
older than my years, I don’t sleep at night. Under my robe, my knees knock
together in fear sometimes. (Softly:) And sometimes, Grandfather, I do not
entirely trust God. (To the scribe:) Don’t write that down.35
The apocalyptic anxiousness of a century is played out in Kushner/Ansky’s little Jewish shtetl—and even the most devout characters are not free of skepticism, ambivalence, and a longing for understanding.
Kushner also manages to foreshadow the horrors of the coming Holocaust,
most obviously in the onstage arrival of Azriel in a railroad boxcar, an iconic allusion to the primary means of transportation of Jews to concentration camps.
Another reference occurs in the telling line: “In a world of electric light, even
Jews can ride the trains.”36 Holocaust imagery can also be found in act 4 when
during the exorcism of the dybbuk from Leah’s body, Azriel’s scribe, recording
the harrowing procedure in a journal, is stunned that an unseen hand has filled
a blank page with a description of the horrors Jews will face in the twentieth
century:
At some not-very-distant date
the martyred dead accumulate;
books of history will contain
mountain-piles of the slain.37
Kushner’s trademark lyricism, inspired both by his Jewish background and the
traditions of American lyric realism, is found throughout the mystical elements
of A Dybbuk, as when he describes the Torah scrolls as “dark men engulfed in
shadows, draped in velvet shawls, bent over mysteries,” a bit of imagery that also
captures Kushner’s questioning spirit—the mysteries are there to be studied,
perhaps not understood as in the past, but open to a questioning, interpretive
spirit.38
While the play’s time period and ethnic specificity matter to Kushner, especially in the social, historical, and sexual connotations of the dybbuk folklore,
his postmodern sensibilities are vital, as they are in all his major works, regardless of the time and place in which each is set. He negotiates an uneasy truce
between fundamental religious faith and the secular (and real) world, focusing on the historical wreckage (as per Benjamin’s “Angel of History”) and the
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uncertainties and possibilities of the future, on the order of the universe, on
the individual human longing for atonement and spiritual redemption, and on
honoring the dead and cherishing the living. Kushner’s highly atmospheric
Orthodox Jewish world is predominantly and authoritatively male in its structure, but one that is challenged by a breaking down of expected norms and, in
fact, a postmodern feminist perspective.This can be seen in the comedy he produces from the first act’s insouciant talmudic scholars who debate women’s exclusion from the synagogue floor, and by having Leah’s comically awkward,
unwanted groom declare,“When we thank God in the morning he didn’t make
us women, no one’s more grateful than I am.”39 Sender’s avaricious use of his
daughter to better himself financially allows Kushner to emphasize the treatment of women as chattel in this strictly traditional world. As all this demonstrates, Kushner’s postmodernism is deeply bound to his ethnically informed
political engagement—a contradiction, it would seem, at least for critics who
deride postmodernism for its political relativism at best, its complicity with corporate capitalism at worst.40 Or has Kushner found a means, through his Jewish
consciousness, of imbuing postmodernity with ethical force? In any event, in
content and in style, Kushner’s Jewishness is both unmistakable and necessary.
Kushner stretches the play’s stylistic boundaries, maintaining its qualities
as a supernatural folktale of crossed worlds, hearts, and historical ages, while
also reckoning with its religious ritual and, most important, its depiction of
the sensuality of unformed and unutterable desires that may be beyond human
governance. The claims of the dead on the living, the merging of the worlds
of both (demonic possession is presented as a passion carried beyond life into
the realm of death), and the relationship of Jews to each other, and to God, shatter narrow definitions of gender and history. In the final scene of A Dybbuk,
Azriel sends The Messenger off with a pointed message for God:“Though His
love become only abrasion, derision, excoriation, tell Him, I cling. We cling.
He made us. He can never shake us off.We will always find Him out. Promise
Him that.We will always find Him, no matter how few there are, tell Him we
will find Him.To deliver our complaint.”41 The dual skepticism of both Ansky
and Kushner permits the adaptation to end with an agonized questioning
spirit as a lone, disembodied voice cries out:
Why did the soul,
Oh tell me this,
Tumble from Heaven
To the Great Abyss?
The most profound descents contain
Ascensions to the heights again . . . 42
Although the most salient examples have been emphasized, Kushner’s
postmodernist dramatic exploration of Jewish traditions permeates his body of
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work. Even Notes on Akiba (1995), a one-act two-hander he first performed
with his close friend, stage director Michael Mayer, is a lighthearted take on
the traditions of his faith. Playing serio-comic versions of themselves, “Tony”
and “Michael” debate the meanings of Passover and other Judaic traditions: instead of merely recounting the Exodus from Egypt and other aspects of Jewish history and myth, the two “characters” offer a talmudic re-imagining of the
rabbis of the past and present working out “strategies of resistance.”43 In the
play, Kushner/“Tony” explains religious belief as both “a liberation and an affliction,” pointing out that after the story involving Rabbi Akiba in the
Passover haggadah, the literal meaning of a reference to God is “the place.”44
And so in seeking God,“the place,” the metaphor of a journey “towards which
perhaps we are wandering,” one offers a possibility of arriving at knowledge,
understanding, and relief from the isolation and suffering of existence.45 In
Notes on Akiba, as in his entire dramatic journey, Kushner thus not only creates through his characters but himself becomes the “metaphorical Jew” describing existence, death, and faith not necessarily as a path toward reward, but
as a strategy of resistance, of existing, of finding meaning, of surviving.
Note s
1. Tony Kushner, A Dybbuk and Other Tales of the Supernatural, adapted and translated
by Joachim Neugroschel from S. Ansky (New York: Theatre Communications
Group, 1998), 109–110.
2. Alisa Solomon, Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theatre and Gender (London: Routledge, 1997), 122. For more on Kushner’s body of work, see James Fisher, The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope (New York: Routledge, 2002); Robert H.
Vorlicky, ed., Tony Kushner in Conversation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1997).
3. Carl Weber, “I Always Go Back to Brecht,” Brecht Yearbook/Das Brecht-Jarhrbuch 25
(1995): 58.
4. Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach, trans. Anna Bostock (New
York: Penguin, 1963), 14.
5. Ibid., 10.
6. Jews in post-World War II America would, in Cohn’s eyes, be powerless; like homosexuals, they were an ostracized, stereotyped group. As such, Cohn is a self-hating
Jew because his Jewishness could deny him power.
7. Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches (New York:Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 93.
8. Ibid., 95.
9. Ibid., 25.
10. Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika (New York:Theatre Communications Group, 1994), 95.
11. Kushner, Angels: Millennium, 20.
12. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Essays, and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 1968), 257–258.
13. Thornton Wilder, The Angel That Troubled the Water and Other Plays (New York:
Coward-McCann, 1928), 149.
14. Kushner, Angels: Perestroika, 133.
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Jam e s F i s h e r
15. Patrick Pacheco, “AIDS, Angels, Activism, and Sex in the Nineties,” Body Positive,
September 1993: 17.
16. Such “Jewish” resignation was of course sorely tested and, for many, utterly repudiated by the Holocaust—and, even in the Bible, Job protests.
17. Kushner, Angels: Millennium, 10.
18. Tony Kushner,“It’s an Undoing World,” or Why Should It Be Easy When It Can Be Hard?
in Conjunctions: 25.The New American Theatre, ed. John Guare (Annandale-on-Hudson,
N.J.: Bard College, 1995), 15.
19. Ibid., 14.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 16.
22. Ibid., 17.
23. Ibid., 18.
24. Ibid., 20.
25. Ibid., 23.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 24.
28. Ibid., 25.
29. Ibid., 31.
30. Ibid., 31–32.
31. Vorlicky, Tony Kushner, 224.
32. Ibid., 224.
33. Solomon, Re-Dressing, 121–122.
34. Ibid.
35. Kushner, A Dybbuk, 86.
36. Ibid., 66.
37. Ibid., 101.
38. Ibid., 21.
39. Ibid., 59.
40. Such critics are legion. For starters, see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991); and Jean
Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983). For an overview of the political debate around postmodernism, see the introduction to this volume.
41. Kushner, A Dybbuk, 106.
42. Ibid., 106–107.
43. Tony Kushner, Notes on Akiba, in Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities, ed.
Norman L. Kleeblatt (New York: The Jewish Museum, under the auspices of the
Jewish Theological Seminary of America; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1996), 125.
44. Ibid., 126.
45. Ibid.
⡣
Music
Music suffers from one of the most pronounced of category
crises, both across categories and within the category itself. Cross-category
confusion derives from the always tenuous boundary between musical performance and musical theater/performance art. This problematic is exemplified
in several essays in this volume: Judah Cohen’s on music begins with a detailed
description of a performance piece; Rebecca Rossen’s on dance centers on a
pair of performance artists; Jan Lewis’s on theater includes a critique of the
musical Fiddler on the Roof. Intra-category issues emerge from the ever-less
relevant distinction, in postmodern music generally, between high and low
culture—opera/art music versus Broadway/pop music—and, in Jewish music
specifically, between the sacred and the secular.
As for the high/low taxonomy, while American Jews have certainly made
their mark in more highbrow fare (George Gershwin,Aaron Copland, Leonard
Bernstein, Philip Glass, Steve Reich), their influence in popular music has been
overwhelming. From Broadway composers (Gershwin, Bernstein, Irving Berlin,
Jerome Kern, Lorenz Hart, Richard Rogers, Frederick Loewe, Stephen Sondheim) to motion-picture scorers (here the list is endless) to pop-tune writers
(the same), Jews have contributed mightily to the definition of the American
musical vernacular.1 As for Jewish material, the story has been less consistently
compelling.As with American film and television, Jewish dominance in the origin of popular music has infrequently, until quite recently, translated into explicit
Jewishness of subject matter. Jews’ “invention” of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley,
like that of Hollywood, was predicated on acculturation more than cultural
assertion—with the notable exception of the 1920s, when “ethnic” music (and
film) was quite the rage, and, exception proving the rule, Fiddler on the Roof. In
postmodern times, however, as with other cultural categories, things have taken
a more Semitic turn. When Fiddler was revived in 2004, it came hard on the
heels of the smash success of Mel Brooks’s The Producers (2001).These musicals
have been joined by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s Caroline, or Change
(2003), the show-stopping Jewish wedding scene in Avenue Q (2003), and the
non-Jewish-created but Jewish-themed The Ten Commandments (2004), itself a
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reminder of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1980s biblical extravaganza, Joseph and the
Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Judah Cohen and Marsha Bryan Edelman, however, are less concerned
with Jewish involvement in the postmodern musical mainstream than in its
tributaries, less interested in how Jews have defined American music than in
how contact with America, and more specifically with postmodernism, has redefined Jewish music. As indicated in my main introduction, neither Cohen
nor Edelman conceives of postmodernism as something alien to or imposed
upon Jewish culture or identity but as something uniquely attuned to it. Jews’
liminal position in Western history, Cohen states in his essay here, “challenges
both the chronology and the novelty of the postmodern cultural formation.”
Edelman, in “Continuity, Creativity, and Conflict: The Ongoing Search for
‘Jewish’ Music,” goes so far as to ask whether, in its radical hybridization of
genres and eclectic borrowing from surrounding cultures, Jewish music may
not always have been “postmodern.”
What most sets Cohen’s and Edelman’s essays apart from the others in this
collection is the role that Israel plays. Where Israel barely rates a mention in
the other cultural analyses, Israeli musical influences are seen by Cohen and
Edelman as inextricable to an understanding of the historical roots and ongoing development of American Jewish music, be it folk, popular, art, liturgical,
or some combination. For example, the recent reclaiming, since the 1980s, of
Mizrachi (Middle Eastern) influences has revitalized American Jewish music,
Edelman believes, while also “challenging the supremacy of (an already hybrid) Ashkenazic culture.” For Cohen, crucial identifying elements in American Jewish music trace their source to Middle Eastern strands such as those
found in the most recognizable of Israeli songs, “Hava Nagila.” And, bringing
the music “category crisis” full circle, much of the music we would consider
Jewish is currently classified in American record stores, Cohen reports, in the
World Music section “under some combination of ‘Israel’ and ‘Jewish.’ ”
Note
1. Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2004). Prominent Jewish movie composers include Max
Steiner, Ernst Toch, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman,Alfred Newman,Victor Shertzinger, Hanns Eisler, Ira Previn, Jerry Goldsmith, Lalo Schifrin, Elmer
Bernstein, Leonard Rosenman, Danny Elfman, Alan Jay Lerner, Randy Newman,
and (possibly) Dmitri Tiomkin and Hans Zimmer. Major songwriters include, besides the already mentioned Gershwin, Berlin, Loewe, Kern, Hart, Rogers, and
Sondheim,Yip Harburg, Johnny Green, Arthur Freed, Betty Comden and Adolph
Green, Oscar Hammerstein, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, Harold Arlen, Marvin Hamlisch, Sammy Kahn, Randy Newman, Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber, Bob
Dylan, and Paul Simon.
Exploring the Postmodern Landscape
of Jewish Music
Judah M. Cohen
New York City: Friday evening, May 15, 2004.Well over one
hundred people gathered at the Belt Theater in Chelsea, paid a ten-dollar admission charge, and sat in a small, bi-layered space, ready to watch the “ritual theater”
group Storahtelling present its show entitled “The Sabbath Queen.”1 With mixed
club music pumped at a conservative level from ambient loudspeakers, two
blonde “Go-Goy” dancers warmed up the audience.Then, around 9:15 the show
proper began: a Sabbath evening ritual complete with wine and challah and
“Shalom Aleichem,” yet presented as disorientingly hip performance art. Musically, the evening exhibited a broad range of styles and attitudes.The actors, covered in white prayer shawls, began the event by walking onstage to the wedding
march from Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin; incidental music included popular settings of “Shalom Aleichem,” “Lecha Dodi” (Come, beloved), and “Aishet Chayil”
(A woman of valor); the performers sang “Fernando’s Hideaway” with new
lyrics extolling sex on the Sabbath, and rewrote ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” to
celebrate the arrival of the Sabbath queen. In the middle of the ritual was an intertwined medley of Fiddler on the Roof ’s “Sabbath Prayer” and Madonna’s “Like
a Prayer,” and the dance party that spiraled out afterward began with a kitschy,
remix-style version of “Hava Nagila.” Most in the audience reacted with surprise and delight to the sounds accompanying the radically reenvisioned ritual/
performance, which tended to span (if not expand) the crowd’s cultural landscape. Brought together in a single event, these songs, indexing different times
and places (though most written in the twentieth century) but packaged and
identified as if they had been created for the show, congealed into a unified musical soundscape backing the performance.
How does postmodern theory help us understand the relationship between Jews and music? On the one hand, it can guide us through a landscape
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fraught with contradiction and fragmentation, where individuals (not just
artists and performers) repeatedly hijack sound to reinforce and/or delegitimize one or another form of Jewish authenticity. On the other hand, it tends
to obscure the larger picture: for the very concept of “Jewish music” implies
cohesiveness and exclusivity, and contributes to the construction of a selffulfilling sense of identity, a dynamic relationship with the non-Jewish world,
and a particular version of the historical Jewish narrative.
This essay explores the Jewish soundscape in its (relatively) contemporary
state, with the intention of delving further into what it means to experience the
sounds of Judaism within a postmodern framework. I embark upon this exploration by holding two simultaneous discussions. In one discussion I attempt to
establish Jewish music as an entity that has always worked along parameters
today considered “postmodern,” bringing together source material indexing different times and locations in order to express a renewing sense of authenticity.
I dialogue with this idea, however, by suggesting that Jewish music also presents
an effective critique of postmodern theory: although the music is assembled
pastiche-like from different sound sources, people hear this music by returning it
to a scaffold of tradition, thereby creating new and equally identity-constituting
categories of religious identity.
I focus on five processes by which both scholars and laypeople have attempted to study music within the context of Judaism: denominational association, identification of Jewish musical “elements,” genre mapping, geographic
differentiation, and conceptions of time and age. By illustrating how each of
these processes figures into Jewish sonic perception, I hope to show not only
how laypeople take a postmodern view of music, but also how the idea of Jewish music helps laypeople and professionals reassemble their fragmented worlds
into a cohesive and unique whole.
Delving into this area presents its own problems, in particular how to negotiate the highly variable fields of Jewish identity and postmodern theory.
Thus, a note: in regard to Jewish identity, I avoid a normative definition in favor
of self-definition, and include in this category any musical activity described as
“Jewish” by either its creators or its participants.While such a wide-angle approach to defining “Jewish music” may initially seem to obscure the issue rather
than clarify it, I hasten to assert that my intent in this essay is to understand how
musical activity is itself a form of identity discourse that simultaneously yearns
for and resists normativity.To impose any easy boundaries would be to turn a
blind eye to important questions about Jewish life and postmodern thinking.
Postmodernity, meanwhile, I see more as a state of mind than as a phenomenon relating to a particular time period. Scholars studying the concept
tend to view it within the continuum of Western history.While Jews certainly
have participated in this continuum, particularly since the eighteenth century,
their very presence as a people constantly straddling the borders of modernism
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(a view that persists today) challenges both the chronology and the novelty of
the postmodern cultural formation.2 I hope to maintain this challenge by exploring how the central ideas of the postmodern condition apply to a people
for whom such ideas may not have been intended.
Jewish Music: A Brie f History
of Assembling from Fragme nt s
For at least four hundred years, Jewish musicians in Europe have sought
creative ways to introduce new sounds into the religious sphere.Typically, their
greatest impediment was convincing religious leaders that their forms of musical expression would be viable vessels of Jewish identity, particularly since
the musicians often gained inspiration from local popular (extra-synagogal)
musical styles, identified by many as decidedly “non-Jewish.” From what we
can tell, it appears that musicians made their arguments by appealing to sensibilities we today construe as postmodern. In essence, these artists reasoned that
their music was divinely inspired (i.e., only mediated by humans), and constituted a stylistic connection to antiquity, when synagogue music was regarded
as far purer.The sounds they brought into Jewish life thus represented both a
rupture and a unity: new music that simultaneously broke with current usage,
yet aimed to instill a heightened sense of authenticity.
Mantuan composer Salamone Rossi, whose 1622/1623 publication
HaShirim Asher LiShlomo (The songs of Solomon) constituted one of the earliest known published works of Jewish religious music, provided just such an
approach.3 The frontispiece to Rossi’s collection proclaimed the composer’s
facility with “the science/knowledge of melody [nigun] and music [muziqa],”
thus rationalizing the composer’s potentially controversial use of polyphonic
writing and indexing the collection’s novelty. Inside, however, were earlier responses from Venetian rabbi Leon de Modena and others justifying the use of
harmony as not just acceptable, but entirely consistent with Jewish law. Modena, in a separate introduction, lauded Rossi’s talent, but shrewdly described
his feat as simply channeling the divine impulse into his compositions. The
music itself, Modena added, hearkened back to the Temple period, and consequently would have a purifying effect on the “corrupted” chants he claimed
were currently cluttering the synagogue soundscape.4
Such reasoning continued to serve as an important method for bringing
new musical ideas into the synagogue: from the published works of synagogue
composers Salomon Sulzer and Louis Lewandowski, to the codification of synagogue modal systems in the late nineteenth century, to the Hebrew Union
College School of Sacred Music’s 1971 decision to admit women into the cantorate.5 In all cases, supporters revised approaches to religious music by asserting
alternate historical and spiritual narratives to fashion their proposed innovations
into a continuous history of Jewish law. Although the changes modified
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contemporary practice, they nonetheless became a part of Jewish life under the
rhetoric that their inclusion did not change Jewish tradition at all, but actually
helped rescue it from irreparable loss.
Processes of rupture and recontextualization continue to operate in
twenty-first-century America, particularly as the size, distribution, diversity, and
motility of the American Jewish population have produced a broad spectrum of
answers to what it means to be Jewish. Different groups and subgroups of
American Jews, self-defined and self-bounded, have devised often elaborate
sonic and philosophical criteria for listening to, internalizing, and resonating
with “Jewish” music, both to bring them closer to their ideas of Jewish tradition, and to provide a distinguishing sound to accompany their ideology.While
I focus here on five processes of creating musical meaning, undoubtedly there
are far more ways to categorize and evaluate the music associated with Judaism.
Understanding Music by Denomination
From at least the nineteenth century, American and European Jewish life
became oriented around the concept of religious denominations: large-scale
collectives of communities professing similar faith-based values and, often, a
common group title.The mid-nineteenth century, for example, saw the emergence of a dichotomy between Reform and Orthodox factions; and often
musical “innovation”—in this case in the guise of adding organ, choir, and
women’s voices during worship—served as one of the major dividing lines.6
Though I will not dwell on this time period here, it is important to note that
just as in previous generations, those attempting to introduce the new forms
of music took their cue from contemporary popular religious and concert musical idioms in the (predominantly non-Jewish) surrounding society. These
musical innovators publicly aimed to give the religious service a more reverent and, paradoxically, a more up-to-date feel; and they justified their actions
through the use of supporting biblical imagery.Those opposed to such ideas,
who often defined themselves as “orthodox” Jews to mark their contrasting
philosophies, viewed the organ and choir (in this case) as foreign instruments
that represented Christianity and supplanted the purity of Jewish worship.7
Thus, musical difference would often serve as a symbol of denominational difference: while both sides agreed to the existence of a rupture (musical or ideological), only one side willfully attempted to recontextualize it.8
By the mid-twentieth century, denominationalism had become one of the
most common methods for organizing American Jewry. Overwhelmingly described in terms of religious “movements”—Reform, Conservative, Orthodox,
Reconstructionist, and other consortia of synagogues—each operated within its
own religious network, developing in the process specific notions of religious
“soundworthiness.” Such organizational differences retained their strength in
the twentieth century, although recent years have seen an upswing in the
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number of Jews and Jewish worship bodies across the religious spectrum claiming to reject the confines of denominationalism.These efforts themselves often
have resulted in the creation of new “post-denominational” movements, complete with revised rationales for the incorporation of “Jewish” sound.Throughout, music has been a part of the religious determination process, alongside such
concerns as belief platforms and liturgical conventions. In its attempts to craft a
coherent ideology, each denomination (and various subgroups therein) has thus
tended to hone its own sense of musical practice, its own religious musical
norms, and its own restrictions on how to introduce, use, and circulate music
among its adherents.
Perhaps the most telling use of denominationalism as an organizational
criterion for Jewish music is Mark Kligman’s 2001 essay “Contemporary Jewish Music in America.” Kligman, after wide-ranging fieldwork and interviews,
decided to center his discussion of the American Jewish music scene around a
basic schema comprising Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Renewal
movements;9 included in the essay but outside this core framework lay klezmer,
Israeli, and other nonreligious styles of music. Kligman’s choice to place this
movemental schema at the center of his essay corresponded in some part to
the discourses of his informants, who used a denominational vocabulary to
create a self-determined taxonomy of “Jewish” music’s creators, commodifiers,
and commercializers. Though Kligman later expressed reservations about the
ability of this approach to portray the state of Jewish music comprehensively,
his essay nonetheless shows the importance of denominations in determining
musical meaning in American Judaism.10
To look at this phenomenon more closely, we can take Reform Judaism
as a brief case study.The most centrally organized of the American denominational movements, Reform Judaism currently houses two highly theorized
approaches to religious music, both of which are products of the modern/
postmodern world, and both of which attempt to reference a sense of Judaism
as universal and timeless.
The movement’s cantorial school—the Hebrew Union College School of
Sacred Music—embodies one of these approaches. Founded in 1948 with a
public agenda of preserving the musical world annihilated in the Holocaust,
the school also served as a harbinger of modernity: it self-consciously recast
cantorial training into a progressive curriculum; it sought and eventually
gained the power to grant academic degrees; it scheduled courses in Western
music theory and required students to take classical voice lessons; it selected
and reprinted twenty-five books of Jewish repertoire from European sources
for students’ consumption;11 and most important, it aimed to educate cantors
to serve American Jewish congregations.The program also served as a foil for
the burgeoning synagogue art music scene, keeping prominent composers
such as Abraham Wolf Binder and Isadore Freed on its faculty, and graduating
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class after class of musically proficient, effectively trained solo singers. In this
way, the School of Sacred Music invested each cantor with what Michel Foucault terms a “heterotopia”: a conglomeration of meaningful times and places
by which an object or individual constructs a unique sense of presence.12 An
ancient vessel of song, trained to revere and produce sounds associated with
Eastern Europe, utilizing theories developed by German and Austrian intellectuals, facile in classical European vocal technique, and familiar with the American ethos of Reform Judaism, the School of Sacred Music’s graduate thus
became an eclectic yet coherent representatives of Jewish music to the congregations under the Reform movement’s umbrella.13
The second approach can be characterized by, but is certainly not limited
to, Reform Jewish “songleading.” This form of musical expression dates to
1939, with the Reform movement’s first experiments with summer camping.
Originally modeled on both German Wandervogel youth organizations and
Christian evangelical youth camps, these gatherings incorporated Israeli pioneer songs along with songs of the left-wing American folksinging movements to reinforce ideals of communal pastoral living in a Jewish context.14
The songs’ messages of brotherhood and equality resonated with messages of
social responsibility taught during text study sessions by the rabbinic leaders
of the experiences; and thus, in the campers’ minds, they combined to embody
core values of American Reform Judaism. In the following decades the musical impetus moved from the rabbis to the campers themselves; inspired young
people began to bring their guitars and incorporate songs from the burgeoning commercial folk music industries (in both America and Israel) into the
camp experience, first via paraliturgical song sessions and eventually within
daily religious services.The sounds, produced both on guitar and through idiomatic vocal “harmonies,” referenced what young people found to be “timeless” Jewish values of social justice and activism. Campers participated in song
sessions as a way to profess a democratic ideal seen as predating Western society, and in so doing, they maintained a tone resonant with that of the broader
folksinging movement. By the turn of the twenty-first century, many of the
campers who sang this music in the 1960s had become leaders in Reform Judaism, and folksinging had become their milieu for accessing the breadth and
depth of Jewish tradition.
Both individually and combined, the philosophies embodied by the cantorial and songleading approaches have come together to reference music specific to Reform Judaism. Though other movements may sponsor cantorial
programs, only in Reform Judaism is the playing of instruments a major part
of every service, and only in Reform Judaism is the cantorial curriculum split
between self-titled “Traditional” and “Reform” repertoires.While other forms
of songleading may exist, the practices of songleading born in the Reform
summer camps have their own particular style, composers, and recordings. Out
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of this joint history has come a strong sense of a separate and distinct Reform
Jewish music genre and industry. Admittedly, the movement’s musical boundaries are permeable; yet as a set of particular historical and geographical vertices, the sounds associated with Reform Judaism have nonetheless found a
way to define what it means to be a Reform Jew—and consequently, for Reform Jews, what it means to be Jewish.This kind of sonic collection and redefinition has likewise been the case with other religious movements, though
their respective organizational infrastructures have caused boundaries and musical ideologies to fall along different lines.
Identifying Jewish “Elements”
In other ways, the question of creating boundaries for Jewish music comes
not from the organizations supporting the sound, but from perceived Jewish
cues within the music itself. Such an approach characterizes Jewish music as a
form of insider communication: a series of musical encodings foregrounded by
musicians aiming to create Jewish music, and understood by individuals wishing to listen to Jewish music. These encodings may be widely varied—from a
specific interval, to a system of pitch relationships, to the use of specific tunes
or melodies, to employing a specific language—yet they each serve as gatekeepers into the world of Jewish identity. And, significantly, a lack of these elements can also serve as justification for excluding music from the Jewish ear,
regardless of how adamantly musicians might argue to the contrary.
Perhaps one of the sites where musical symbolism receives its greatest test
is in the Radical Jewish Culture series of John Zorn’s Tzadik record label. By
the time Zorn, an avant-garde jazz musician, founded the label in 1995, he had
already been experimenting with a “radical” approach to Jewish sound through
his Masada chamber collective and his 1993/95 album Kristallnacht.15 His Radical Jewish Culture series subsequently expanded upon this interest, becoming
a central site for Jewish musical exploration. As of spring 2004, the series included over eighty-five albums representing dozens of musical artists.16
While the albums in the series cover a broad range of styles, from free jazz
and punk to ska and hip-hop, as well as styles that defy genre, they nonetheless have several common components that loosely bind them together as Jewish music. Several of the works assert the ethnic identity of their sound by
extrapolating upon popular melodies already accepted within Jewish culture.
Paul Shapiro’s album Midnight Minyan, for example (Tzadik 7174), includes a
burlesque-style reworking of Bock and Harnick’s Fiddler on the Roof tune “To
Life!” as well as modal and free-jazz treatments of tunes associated with the
blessings before and after the weekly reading of the Haftarah (Prophets).17
Steven Bernstein’s Diaspora Blues includes several tracks based on compositions
by renowned cantor Moshe Koussevitzky. Most artists in the catalog with
vocal repertoire (including German punk band Kletka Red [Tzadik 7111],
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Wolf Krakowski [Tzadik 7150], Jewlia Eisenberg [Tzadik 7155], and
Sephardic Tinge [Tzadik 7128]) typically choose at least a few arrangements
of well-known Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) songs on their albums.
Their use of material already present within the Jewish soundscape serves as a
bridge of implicit communication, clarifying artistic intent and message on a
canvas of common knowledge. Listeners might accept or not accept as meaningfully Jewish how the artists have transformed the material, but either way
their reception falls undeniably into discourses on specifically Jewish sound.
Instrumental albums in the Radical Jewish Culture series tend to focus
their Jewish identity less on pre-encoded musical material than on Hebrew titles and cultural and textual narrative programs. Zorn’s own works serve as a
perfect example: his Kristallnacht consists of seven movements that together
narrate Jewish life in Eastern Europe from the shtetl to the State of Israel.While
“Shtetl” (the first movement) includes a couple of klezmer-like interludes, all
similarities to conventionally recognizable Jewish sound subsequently disappear, giving way instead to the nearly twelve-minute, ear-shattering “Kristallnacht” track, nearly two-thirds of which consists of amplified audio samples of
breaking glass.The remainder of the album deepens the historical narrative allusions through such sonic cues as quiet chords to symbolize post-Holocaust
mourning (“Gahelet” [Embers]), and punk orchestration to hint at struggles
for Israeli independence (“Barzel” [Iron Fist]).18 Although not all instrumental albums in the Tzadik series provide such direct narrative devices, most contain at least shorter character pieces describing individuals and concepts in
Jewish culture. In the case of Kristallnacht, then, the element that brings sound
into the realm of Jewish discourse is the ideological context, manifested
through a combination of textual and sonic imagery.
Methods of identifying “Jewish” musical elements apply to a smaller scale
as well. One of the most commonly recognized symbols associated with Jewish
music in twentieth-century North America, for example, is the augmented second interval. A crucial identifying element to such tunes as “Hava Nagila,” the
augmented second supplies a sense of exoticism within the Western canon,
causing the interval to dwell outside the major and minor modes pervading
much Euro-American music.At the same time, the interval has become an important symbol of stress and woe within many Jewish communities, qualities
often attributed wholesale to the Jewish historical experience. Singing or playing the augmented second thus activates an entire historical trajectory in the
mind of the informed listener, and references the depth to which music can
serve as an outcropping of the collective Jewish psyche.19
Musicologists, Jewish music professionals, composers, and interested laypeople have also looked to the augmented second as an archeological “missing
link” that connects broadly divergent groups of Jews in an unspecified common past. Citing the interval’s presence in both Eastern European and Middle
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Eastern Jewish modal systems, musicologists such as Abraham Zvi Idelsohn
and (more recently) Boaz Tarsi have tried to claim that the systems themselves
have a common sonic ancestry.20 Such claims are speculative, and definitive
proof may never be found due to the transient and temporary nature of sound;
yet the association of the augmented second with disparate Jewish cultures
does feed neatly into unified historical perceptions of the Jewish people. Music
groups such as Basya Schechter’s Pharaoh’s Daughter and Metropolitan
Klezmer/Isle of Klezbos have taken this connection to heart in their music,
employing a nearly boundary-less palette of Middle Eastern and Klezmer
styles connected in part by the augmented second.
Just as musical elements serve as agents of inclusion, however, so can they
also facilitate exclusion and border politics. At the most basic level, this process
manifests itself in individual evaluations, leading to such decisions as liking or
disliking a certain piece of “Jewish” music, fashioning a specific musical setting, or choosing a particular melody for a religious function. Taken more
broadly, the identification of Jewish musical elements sets agendas for entire
populations. All the denominational cantorial schools, for example, have long
taught students to regard highly theorized systems of pitch relations known as
the “synagogue modes” as constituting a distillation of the communal Jewish
soul.21 Such specialized knowledge, once acquired, becomes crucial to cantors
for analyzing and evaluating the vast amounts of music vying for inclusion into
their services and concerts. There are political implications as well, however:
most pointedly that viewing the Jewish musical world through the lens of the
modal system delegitimizes those repertoires that do not take the system into
account—particularly the songleading canon. In the face of songleading’s popularity in Reform Judaism, some cantors, art music composers, and other Jewish music practitioners and scholars have argued against the guitar-based style’s
ability to represent the depth of Jewish tradition, largely due to a demonstrable lack of modal considerations.Yet rather than end there, this argument only
begins the discussion, allowing those with modal training to propose acceptable hybrids of the two aesthetic systems. Some Reform cantors, for example,
have attempted to recast the songleading repertoire around the frameworks
and conventions inherent in the synagogue modes, selecting specific modally
compatible pieces and inserting them into the worship service where textually and modally appropriate. Other cantors have written their own music that
takes modal conventions into account, yet employs guitar and encourages
group participation. And still others see merit in educating both songleaders
and congregants to recognize the modes so they could create and foster their
own compositions in a modally “sensitive” manner.22 The synagogue modes thus
become an important locus for discourses about what is and is not Jewish in
music, particularly as mediated by school-trained cantors and other Jewish music
professionals.
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Within the less musically specialized Jewish population (as well as the population at large), similar though less finely detailed discourses, based on a fluid
set of criteria, help people determine which music is more or less “Jewish.”
Whether it be a short clarinet turn to make a humorous point during the theme
song to the film The Hebrew Hammer (2003), or the “wail” of a cantor in a film
such as Liberty Heights (1999),23 or the playing of “Hava Nagila” at sporting
events to whip up fans’ enthusiasm,24 there is something about the music, and not
necessarily the whole of the music itself, that causes both creator and listener
(Jewish and non-Jewish) to identify it with Jewishness. When asked to define
what that something is, moreover, people tend to respond by detailing musical
elements consistent with a distant and essentialized Jewish past and/or identity.
Thus, once again, people bring Jewish sound into its own through the simultaneous fragmentation and piecing together of the sonic world around them. As
all the above examples suggest, the fragments do more than simply indicate the
identity of the whole: they actually prove that identity. Pierre Bourdieu has noted
in regard to such choices,“Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.”25
“Jewish” as Genre Modifier
People can also process fragments and strands of Jewish music by linking
them to a musical style with broader appeal and resonance in the general society. In this approach, sound associated with Jewishness becomes both a subgenre (i.e., a “Jewish” form of the genre) and an entity separate from that
genre, parallel to it but made distinct by its specifically Jewish associations.
Such is the case with electric guitarist Yosi Piamenta; commonly called the
“the Hasidic Hendrix,” Piamenta plays primarily at events planned and sponsored by religious Jews, and he dwells in a social and religious sphere far
different from the broad-based, mass cultural world associated with Jimi Hendrix.26 Yet through comparison to the legendary rock guitarist, Piamenta gives
attendees of his concerts the benefit of listening to a Hendrix-like figure
without having to compromise their standing within the Jewish community.
Moreover, in contrast to Hendrix, Piamenta would be more likely to reinforce
the religious Jewish community’s values through his playing, thanks to his
religio-cultural knowledge of Judaism and “Jewish” musical conventions.Thus,
while the sound of an electric guitar player might be indistinguishable from
that of another rock guitarist, the cultural messages accompanying that sound are
specifically tailored for a Jewish audience.
At the same time, the linking of Jewish music with other genres requires
Jewish artists and listeners to consider and dialogue publicly with the conventions, history, and culture of the musical traditions they incorporate. Such
musical hybrids have created rich conversations, and have included the use of
country music (through such artists as Noah Budin and Kinky Friedman),
Christian pop (espoused by various Messianic Jewish artists), children’s music
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( Judy Caplan Ginsburgh and Craig Taubman, among others), bluegrass (the
Diaspora Yeshiva Band, Andy Statman, Margot Leverett and the Klezmer
Mountain Boys), and various forms of rock ’n’ roll (Yom Chadash, Rick Recht,
Blue Fringe, Mordechai Ben David).27 Yet one of the most visible dialogues has
been the conscious association between creators of Jewish music and music associated with the Black experience in America and the Caribbean.28 The complementary yet occasionally contentious relationship Blacks and Jews have had
throughout American history have led to broad, even sometimes competitive
comparisons between metanarratives, particularly in regard to issues of slavery,
oppression, and freedom. As Jeffrey Melnick and others have suggested, however, the methods by which these issues come to light speak not only to the
conversation between the two groups, but also to how Jews fashion themselves
within the other’s criteria.29
Parallels between Jewish music and Black music go back at least a century
if not further,30 and count among their more significant crossovers George
Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, Benny Goodman’s treatments of “Bei Mir Bist
Du Schoen” and “And the Angels Sing,” Harold Arlen’s work for the Cotton
Club, and 1962–63 albums of Jewish melodies put to jazz styles by veteran jazz
musicians Shelly Manne (drums) and Terry Gibbs (vibraphone).31 The folk
music scene also brought Jews and Blacks together for musical and political purposes, though often as part of a broader combination of “national” musics. By
the 1980s and 1990s, with the klezmer revival gaining attention as the new
“Jewish jazz,” a “light” jazz genre began to pervade synagogue music.Artists such
as Bruce Benson, Jose Bowen, Jeffrey Klepper, Ben Sidran, and Jon Simon
created arrangements of existing Jewish tunes or new settings of liturgical and
paraliturgical texts.32 The emerging commercial rap genre also grabbed the interest of Jewish artists, who would occasionally write their own “raps” for educational and/or novelty purposes during this time.
Around the mid-1990s, however, the tide began to change from an idea of
Jewish/“Black” music as novelty to a serious employment of Black-identified
genres to bring across personal Jewish messages and philosophies. John Zorn,
David Krakauer, Frank London, and many others in the downtown New York
alternative music scene accomplished this crossover with more “serious” forms
of jazz. Prominent reggae artist Ras Michael and Jewish musician Alan Eder
collaborated on reggae albums devoted to Jewish freedom festivals Passover and
Hanukkah; subsequently, other reggae/dancehall artists such as Hasidic ba’al tshuvah (liberal/secular Jew turned religious) Matisyahu and David Gould have explored the Jewish experience through the Afro-Caribbean musical lens. The
hip-hop scene as well has become fertile ground for Jewish expression: where
once “Jewish rap” meant parody recordings of 2 Live Jews, by the mid-late 1990s
groups such as Blood of Abraham and M.O.T. and artists such as Remedy
(of the Wu Tang Clan) were filtering their own sense of Jewish history and
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outspoken identity into the hip-hop scene.This trend has continued, especially
in New York, with the emergence of 50shekel, the Hip Hop Hoodíos, Etan G,
So Called, and hip-hop performance artist “Hebrew Mamita”Vanessa Hidary.
The reasons for these crossovers require a discussion far too involved for
inclusion here. In this brief overview, however, it is important to suggest that
the juxtaposition of Jewish and Black identities have allowed younger generations of Jews to develop their own voices using a musical language familiar to
them, yet foreign to their parents. Perceived Black musical styles serve as a particularly germane framework, since they are omnipresent within American
popular culture (which helps create a broader voice), they are rife with discourses on the dialectic of slavery and freedom (some of which take a theological bent), and they have a reputation for broadcasting themes repressed
within Jewish forums (including violence, drug use, self-applied ethnic slurs
and stereotypes, sexual bravado, and insider critique).
Participation in these Black-identified musical styles is thus in one sense
a reaction to the fragmented postmodern Jewish self—a questioning of rigid
identity constructs by those who choose to live in a poly-ethnic, multicultural
community—and in another sense a reassembling of the fractured pieces of
postmodern Jewish identity within a parallel,“other” discourse. Both artists and
listeners in this hybridized musical terrain tend to identify the genres with
which they mix Jewish sounds (or by which their music is “influenced”) and
to see such acts of association as a form of exciting and new experimentation.
Yet in doing so, they also aim consciously to create a new permutation of
Jewishness—one that gives Jewish identity the opportunity to soak in the anxieties inherent in living in and interacting with a world of others. Perhaps less
consciously, these Jewish-yet-multicultural performers also seek to reclaim an
identity of “otherness” that previous generations’ discourses of assimilation
appeared aimed to extinguish; their creations thus resituate and “re-minoritize”
Jewishness in a world increasingly defined by minorities.
Jewish Sound and Postmodern Geography
In mainstream American record stores, the majority of music recordings associated with the Jewish experience tend to appear under two rubrics: Jewishthemed compositions by Western music composers (including Ernest Bloch,
Leonard Bernstein, and Salomon Sulzer) typically are listed by the composer’s or
performer’s last name in the classical section; and sometimes historical performance groups, most of which perform “Sephardic” music (such as Voice of the
Turtle and La Rondinella), may appear in an “Early Music” subsection.33 Most
other recordings associated with Jewishness, however, appear under the World
Music classification under some combination of “Israeli” and “Jewish” (which,
regardless of alphabetical display conventions, can be situated consecutively).
This latter classification—formulated, along with the “world music” rubric, in
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the mid-1980s—may seem puzzling at first glance: how is it possible to fit a diasporic, multinational, multiethnic population into a system that maps nearly all
other entries directly onto geographic locations? Were it necessary to create
exact parallels, the “Jewish/Israeli” amalgam seems incongruous, not to say contradictory, when placed alongside, say, “Zimbabwe” or “Argentina.”Yet from a
postmodern perspective, the “Jewish/Israeli” rubric effectively showcases a cognitive map of the world specifically geared toward Jewish life, corresponding
with, yet separate from, the conventional layout of global space.The retail shelf
thus becomes a flexible container, able to absorb changes in the Jewish musical
landscape—such as a sudden interest in Moroccan Jewish music or the appearance of a new musical genre—without requiring further conceptual modification. I make no claim that mainstream recording vendors provide the only (or
even the primary) method of modeling postmodern Jewish sonic geography;
the system itself, after all, is commercially driven, incomplete, and fraught with
spurious choices and marketing patterns (Shelly Manne’s recordings mentioned
earlier, for example, would be more likely to appear in the jazz section since they
are issued through a recognized jazz label). Rather, I use this example as a particularly tangible illustration of geography’s importance both in situating sonic
Jewishness within the broader context of the world’s sounds, and in creating a
space for Jews to explore and display their own musical diversity. By mapping
out Jewish sound, both listeners and creators thus visualize and contribute to a
complex, imagined sonic landscape: one used to ponder, surmount, localize, and
even celebrate the condition of living in a self-described diaspora.
The process of mapping Jewish music is hardly a new or an exclusively
Jewish phenomenon: in many ways it parallels the projects of (non-Jewish)
folksong collectors dating back several hundred years. These collectors would
inevitably create broad, location-based classifications of their material at least in
part to chart the nationalist terrain so crucial to European identity during the
nineteenth century.Attempts to collect Jewish folksongs, meanwhile, met with
some structural difficulty due to a lack of specific land with which to tie “Jewish” music. As a result, Jewish folksong collectors appeared to acquire material
with two strategies in mind: first, they created a parallel geography of Jewish
sound using a similar geography-based approach (looking, say, at the music of
the Jews of southern Germany); second, they viewed the music they collected
as having a common ancestor in ancient Israel—a homeland the Jews could
claim even though it did not currently exist. These strategies came into focus
most ambitiously in Abraham Z. Idelsohn’s ten-volume Thesaurus of Hebrew
Oriental Melodies, published between 1914 and 1932.34 Idelsohn devoted each
volume of his Thesaurus to the music of Jews from a specific region: volume 1
covered Yemen, volume 2 Babylonia, and so on. He conducted most of his research not in these places of origin, however, but rather in pre-1948 Palestine,
where international populations of Jewish settlers were gathering at the start of
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the twentieth century.The resultant work can thus be seen as one of postmodern imagination: translating a local jumble of diasporic ethnic groups at a particular historic moment into an ordered and organized international landscape
of Jewish sound.35 Idelsohn’s detailed discussions and transcriptions of each
community’s music helped set the agenda of Jewish music research for decades
to come.Yet most important for the purpose of this essay, Idelsohn’s work illustrated the ruptures between ethnicity, nationality, and geography inherent in
describing the Jewish experience, to the point where a single convergent site
could serve as a microcosm of global diasporic activity.
Idelsohn’s Thesaurus shares many similarities with the “Israeli/Jewish”
world music category described above (and with the “world music” rubric itself ). As a collected series of recordings and/or transmitted songs, such a resource extends the boundaries of Benedict Anderson’s classic concept of
imagined community, transforming an abstract notion into a “tangible” reality
through the ability of technology to make sound a portable commodity.36 Although Jewish communities all over the world may only be able to assume one
another’s existence, having their sounds consolidated and commodified in a
single location provides the public sphere with “proof ” of the broad variety of
the Jewish experience—and of the acceptable range of variation for what a
Jewish sound can be. Jewish music from India can therefore be different from
Syrian Jewish music, Odessa Jewish music, and San Francisco Jewish music; yet
they all can lay a claim for admittance into the Jewish soundscape. The very
presence of such variation, moreover, contributes to discourses on the multivocal nature of Jewish culture while at the same time providing Jews with the
opportunity to see the “other” as part of their own selves.37
A prime example in recent years of such Jewish “global” self-identification
is the case of the Abayudaya, a small population of about four hundred Jews in
eastern Uganda. Founded in 1919, when a local political leader decided independently to convert himself and his followers to Judaism, the Abayudaya have
in recent decades looked to Western Jewish societies for resources and religious
acceptance. Throughout their attempts at outreach, music has been a prime
venue of religious and cultural exchange.Two albums of the group’s music have
been recorded via American companies: the first through Kulanu, an organization specializing in finding and supporting “lost and dispersed remnants of the
Jewish people,” and the second through venerable folk music label Smithsonian Folkways.38 These albums, combined with enthusiastic reports by Jewish
travelers to the community, have captured the imaginations of many American
Jews, and caused several to seek out the community and its music both at home
and abroad. The New York Jewish Week, for example, placed the Abayudaya’s
second recording at the top of its list of favorite Jewish music CDs for 2003; on
more than one occasion, leaders of the Abayudaya community have been invited to present their music at synagogues and Jewish events; and when one of
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the community’s leaders attended Hebrew Union College in New York City
for a semester, he willingly sang his “Ugandan Jewish” melodies for fascinated
and appreciative cantorial students. That many of these melodies had been
composed within the last twenty years, and were strongly influenced by contemporary Afro-pop styles, took little away from their Jewish authenticity for
the listeners. Rather, the music served as an indicator of the Abayudaya’s “love
of Judaism,” an acknowledgment of the group’s efforts to maintain Jewish practice in the face of perpetual struggles, and an entertaining way to understand
(and accept) a fellow community of Jews across the globe.39
The geographic mapping of sound among Jewish communities also extends into the realm of memory and nostalgia. Kay Shelemay, for example, has
illustrated how Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, New York, reference their homelands
in Aleppo and Damascus through the creation and content of paraliturgical
songs called pizmonim.40 Groups such as the Sephardic early-music ensemble
Voice of the Turtle and productions such as Fiddler on the Roof, meanwhile, actively employ sound as a way to transport listeners back to pre-Inquisition
Spain and the Russian Pale of Settlement, respectively—places that are, in their
musical conceptions at least, as much a product of the popular imagination as of
historical accuracy. Nonetheless, through these musical reminders—fortified by
theatrical, visual, and linguistic cues—Jews are able to map sound onto locations
of importance in their personal and collective lives and histories, thus creating
stronger bonds with sites they consider foundational to their identities.
By far the most symbolic of Jewish musical locations is Israel, a location
that serves as both the origin and destination of normative Judaism. In the
United States, the methods of representing Israel in sound are manifold: from
the music that backs Israeli folkdance sessions, to songs sung (or lip-synched)
by visiting troupes of Israeli Tzofim (“scouts”: in this case in the role of youth
performer/ambassadors), to melodies with Israel-oriented scriptural lyrics sung
by Shlomo Carlebach or Safam, to American performances of music from EastMediterranean School composers such as Paul Ben-Haim and Alexander
Boskovitch. Not only do the associations elicited by such sounds allow listeners
and participants to envision themselves in two places simultaneously, but, particularly in the case of Israel, they associate directly with Jews’ feelings and attitudes
toward the region/state/land as a religious symbol, historical site, and current
political entity. Thus, even as the music transcends space, it calls listeners and
creators to define the politics of that space: whether as a way to unify and help
actuate the collective journey of a people, or to highlight juxtapositions leading to potentially fractious dispute.
Jewish Sound in and out of Time
Just as sound can cause a listener to experience several different forms of
geography at once, so it can lead to many conceptions of time. Sound can
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invoke/evoke specific events or time periods; it can represent a repeated, cyclical, or ritual moment; or it can refer to a mythical or indefinite time, outside
what can be measured.41 What is important here is that sound causes these different forms of time to interact with each other, forming multilayered matrices of reference that fragment the experience of listening, yet also reinforce
narratives of Jewishness.
One of the most powerful examples of the dynamic of sound and time
within the Jewish world is the small repertoire of tunes known as Mi-Sinai
(earlier, Scarbove) melodies.42 Propagated by cantors and laypeople, and outlined in numerous articles by Jewish music scholars, this collection of melodies
is currently believed to date to no earlier than the late Middle Ages.The MiSinai rubric, however, references the tunes beyond their historically based
identity, for it suggests that the melodies came down from Mount Sinai with
Moses and the Ten Commandments. Few among Jewish music practitioners
accept such a claim as fact. However, common use of the term in professional
and communal circles continues to imply the repertoire’s prestige.Those who
know these tunes from regular service attendance, meanwhile, tend to interpret them as definitive moments in the Jewish religious year, with depth of
meaning reinforced through consistent usage. And those who attend services
infrequently if at all also might have temporal associations with a Mi-Sinai
melody, if only as a distant memory of the last time they heard it.
As can be understood from the last example, a tune’s mythical time associations often provide significant weight in encoding its significance, an assertion emphasized by the frequent use of terms such as “timeless,”“ageless,” and
“traditional” in descriptions of “Jewish” sound.Appeals to mythical time, moreover, tend to strip a sound of its status as a human creation, transporting it still
further from a specific sense of history. Israel Goldfarb’s 1920s setting of
“Shalom Aleichem,” Nurit Hirsch’s 1960s setting of “Oseh Shalom,” and several of Shlomo Carlebach’s songs, for example, have become so ubiquitous in
North American synagogues that their composers have in many cases been
forgotten. In other cases, the composers themselves might become a part of
the mythology: it may seem surprising to those familiar with Israeli songwriter
Naomi Shemer’s 1967 anthem “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” (Jerusalem of gold)
that the composer continued to write songs until her death in June 2004.Yet
the song—originally written for an Israeli song festival, and later modified to
reflect Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War—has reached such a height of
popularity in the United States that it has come to represent Israeli history in
general, as evidenced by its use during a transition from the end of the Nazi
period to modern-day Israel in Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust movie Schindler’s
List (1993).43 These examples and others show how the removal of a conventional timeframe can serve to enrich sound with increasingly resonant layers
of meaning. Rather than destroying historical valences in favor of superficiality,
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as Fredric Jameson has suggested, the postmodern vision of time here sets a
formidable canvas for recounting and reinforcing a sonic representation of the
past.44
And, significantly, such processes are not limited to musical reception
only.As Ellen Koskoff has asserted, Lubavitch Hasidim both perform and write
instrumental arrangements of their nigunim (melodies) in ways that recount
spiritual leaders, places, and sounds of old.45 Klezmer violinist Alicia Svigals,
meanwhile, has taken pains to reverse-engineer “lost” klezmer playing techniques from old recordings so as to give her music a sound more consistent
with Eastern European “traditional” styles.46 Such descriptions imply that the
perception of agelessness that accompanies much of the compositional process
often involves a multivalent time scheme from the very start; in other words,
those who craft Jewish music often do so with the intention of invoking multiple time scales, so as to fit comfortably into the multilayered perceptual
world of their intended audience.
All these forms of time employ a powerful association with the variable
concept of tradition; and it is this nexus of time and tradition, along with other
processes mentioned earlier, that inspires Jews to recognize and accept these
sounds as their own. Cantors, for example, tend to place great importance on
tonal systems called synagogue modes. Scholars (many of whom were cantors)
codified these modes no earlier than the 1880s, yet the perceived inherent
Jewishness they have inherited since then carries a sense of mythical time that
hearkens back to prehistory. Synagogue modes, in this reading, are the result of
hundreds if not thousands of years of usage by Jews all over the globe, and
serve as living reminders of Jewish heritage. Most important, by adhering to
such perceptions of Jewish musical tradition, those who abide by the modes
are able to see other aspects of Jewish life—whether cultural, religious, or
otherwise—as maintaining by association similarly conservative histories. In
this way numerous temporal layers cohere into a definitive Jewish musical narrative that serves for some as a touchstone of what Judaism has always been.
Time thus plays a particularly complex role in creating Jewish sound. At
once historical and mythical, temporal associations inspire those listening to
summon up legitimizing pasts that situate sound both in the continuum of
history and in the continuum of communal memory.
Conc lusion: Music and Po stmode rnity
in a Time of Judaism
In December 2003, a former student of mine invited me to see the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, presumably
to provide some perspective for the review he intended to write.The opera was
a postmodern festival, with minimalist sets, contemporary costumes, scantily
clothed “naked virgins,” and signs in English indicating scene changes. The
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music, composed using a series of twelve-tone techniques, ebbed and flowed according to the scene; and a Greek-style chorus of singers appeared downstage
left from time to time to provide narration. By custom, the third act—for which
Schoenberg wrote a libretto but no music—was not performed.
My student, a Modern Orthodox Jew, was enthralled.To him, the sets, costumes, and libretto all highlighted the philosophical dilemmas Schoenberg faced
as a non-practicing, apostate Jew in 1930s Vienna.47 The opera, my student surmised, represented Schoenberg’s assertion of and spiritual return to Judaism in
response to the growing antisemitic sentiment around him, what he deemed
“essentially a call to return to Sinai.”48 He identified classic “biblical” moments
in the music, such as the use of flutes to narrate Aron’s designation as Moses’
mouthpiece; and regarding Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, he felt it “actually echoe[d] the complex and seemingly arbitrary structure of the Halachic system [the code of Jewish religious law].”49 The performance thus resonated
deeply with my student’s own sense of Jewish identity.Though fragmented in a
manner meant to break the sense of narrative unity, the event became to his
mind a part of the spiritual and philosophical continuum of Judaism, posed by a
figure he perceived to be one of its most outspoken proponents.
Poised both to atomize and to unify the Jewish experience, music thus
typifies and at the same time combats postmodern perceptions.And yet, in this
regard, it has changed little over the past centuries. The Storahtelling event I
described at the start of this essay aimed specifically to renew the Friday evening ritual by importing, revising, and resetting symbols from both inside and
outside the Jewish canon in order to create, once again, a cohesive (and, ultimately, rather ideologically conservative) whole. It was, in effect, a premodern pageant with postmodern rhetoric, something that can be said of the
broad expanse of sound associated with Jewishness.To those who come to the
music from preconceived philosophies of Jewish practice and sonic appropriateness, the rush of different sounds being framed as Jewish can seem disorienting if not antithetical to Jewish life. One person’s disorientation, however,
is another one’s inspired coherence, a reenactment of the dialogues that have
come to typify the very essence of Judaism. And although most people would
lie somewhere in between these two perceptual extremes, either through a selfperceived sense of secularity or from a lack of cultural/religious/historical
knowledge, the very act of identifying with the sounds often becomes enough
for entry into the realm of discussion.
By using postmodern filters to view the ways sound and Jewishness interact, it is thus possible to gain broader insight into the role music plays in facilitating discourses of Jewish identity and activity.The processes I explore in this
essay by no means exhaust the possibilities, for there will always be another way
to break sound apart, reinterpret it, or resituate it to debate Jewish identity.50
Rather, I hope to have provided an introduction to the complex landscape
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these processes create—and re-create. At once past and present, here and elsewhere,“ours” and “others,’ ” real and metaphorical, the sound of Jewish life remains dynamic and vibrant, constantly shifting, as it always has, from dialogue
to dialogue while embodying the echoes of sounds we can only imagine.
Note s
1. The description of the event is based on the author’s field notes from that evening.
2. See, for example, Arnold Eisen, Rethinking Modern Judaism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), in which he critiques the work of several postmodern
thinkers as essentially irrelevant to Judaism.
3. The title’s allusion to the biblical Song of Songs was intentional, and followed a practice common among writers of works on Jewish themes (Don Harrán, Salomone
Rossi: Jewish Musician in Late Renaissance Italy [New York: Oxford University Press,
1999], 202).
4. Ibid., 201–212.
5. Geoffrey Goldberg, “Jewish Liturgical Music in the Wake of Nineteenth-Century
Reform,” in Sacred Sound and Social Change, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman and Janet R.
Walton (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 63–74; Josef
Singer, Die Tonarten des traditionellen Synagogalegesangs (Vienna: E. M. Wetzler, 1886);
Judah Cohen, “Splitting the Difference: Using Gender to Perform a ‘Neutral’ Jewish
Musical Tradition,” unpublished paper delivered at Harvard University,April 25, 2003.
6. See Robert Liberles, “Conflict Over Reforms: The Case of Congregation Beth
Elohim, Charleston, South Carolina,.” in The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed, ed. Jack Wertheimer (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 1995),
274–296; see also Judah M. Cohen, Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish
Community of St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University
Press, 2004), 116.
7. Orthodoxy did not exist at this time as an organized branch of Judaism; rather, it was
an adjective occasionally self-applied by people who opposed “reform” (see Hasia R.
Diner, The Jews of the United States [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004],
126–127).
8. While many of the musical “innovations” we experience as emblematic of this process (such as the introduction of organ and choir) are linked to so-called liberalizing forces, similarly significant breaks with tradition have occurred among more
observant groups: the creation of Young Israel’s musical repertoire in the 1920s, the
Carlebach shul adherents of the 1950s and 1960s, Chabad Lubavitch’s decision to
publish and record its niggunim in the 1940s through the 1960s, and the emergence
of the Orthodox popular recording industry from the 1960s to the present are just
a few examples.
9. Mark Kligman, “Contemporary Jewish Music in America,” American Jewish Yearbook
101 (2001): 104–129.
10. Personal communication. Note that Jonathan Sarna’s recent history of American
Jewry (American Judaism: A History [New Haven:Yale University Press, 2004]) similarly organizes its later chapters around the major Jewish denominations; see also
Jack Wertheimer, ed., The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (Hanover,
N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 1995), which devotes its first section to histories of
Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism as seen through their conventions of
synagogue practice.
11. Ironically, these books became known as the Out of Print Classics; the series, of
course, is still in print, and all Hebrew Union College cantorial students must purchase it in the course of their studies.
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12. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowlec, Diacritics 16 (1986):
22–27.
13. Separate cantorial schools in the Conservative and mainline Orthodox movements
opened soon after the School of Sacred Music. Interestingly, each purported to represent all of Judaism (Klal Yisrael )—a claim to be understood as each movement’s
idea of what “all Judaism” should be.
14. Eugene Sack,“We Discover the Camp Meeting—And Religion,” The Youth Leader:
A Magazine for Jewish Clubs 8, no. 3 (1940): 7–12.
15. See Seth Rogovoy, The Essential Klezmer (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books,
2000), 146–164; and Michael Cuthbert, “Free Improvisation: John Zorn and the
Construction of Jewish Identity Through Music,” in Studies in Jewish Musical Traditions, ed. Kay Kaufman Shelemay (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard College Library,
2001), 1–31; among others. The first ten volumes of Masada were published between 1994 and 1998 on the Tokyo-based DIW label, and Kristallnacht eventually
appeared in the Tzadik catalog under the Archive series (Tzadik 7301).
16. The Radical Jewish Culture has become dominant in this area to the point of attracting other “radical” Jewish musical artists to release albums in the series. Examples include reissues of albums released elsewhere by Pharaoh’s Daughter, Davka,
and Wolf Krakowski.
17. These melodies are common knowledge to large numbers of young Jews who became bar mitzvah at Conservative and Reform synagogues.
18. My descriptions here merely scratch the surface of this challenging and complex
work.The sound references I mention take place within avant-garde musical forms,
several of which are “Game Pieces”—compositions that require the musicians to
follow strict rules that change at intervals throughout.As for “Barzel” (Iron Fist), this
is Zorn’s own translation.“Barzel,” in Hebrew, means “iron.”
19. Mark Slobin, Tenement Songs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), section on
augmented second.
20. Abraham Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music: Its Historical Development (New York: Dover,
1992 [1929]), 364; Boaz Tarsi, “Tonality and Motivie Interrelationships in the Performance-Practice of Nusach,” Journal of Synagogue Music 21, no. 1 (1991): 6.
21. Judah Cohen, “Becoming a Reform Jewish Cantor: A Study in Cultural Investment” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2002): 281–312.
22. The efforts of Cantor Richard Cohn, for example, aim to arrange existing repertoire around the appropriate modes for different times in the service. Cantor Lisa
Doob, meanwhile, capped off her cantorial training by composing a setting for the
prayer “V’Shamru” (“And you shall observe [the Sabbath]”) according to the modal
conventions associated with the text, and using guitar and choir (Lisa Doob, Senior
Cantorial recital, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, February 20,
2001).
23. The importance of Jewish musical elements is particularly acute in the case of Liberty Heights, which follows the lives of members of a Jewish family in Baltimore in
1954, and begins and ends with a cantor singing on Yom Kippur. What the cantor
sings, however, is a piece by Los Angeles-based composer Michael Isaacson called
“Bayom Hahu” (“And on that day”), written in the early 1980s. Clearly, the discrepancy did not faze director Barry Levinson, who felt the piece—and the voice of
the cantor, Long Island-based Barry Black—provided a strong representation of
Jewish-sounding music ( Jodi Bodner DuBow, “From Woodbury to Hollywood,”
New York Jewish Week Online, November 23, 1999 [accessed August 10, 2004]).
24. See, for example, “Greatest Sports Rock and Jams,Vol. 2” (K-Tel 6255, 1997), disc
2, track 11.
25. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard
Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 6.
117
26. See Geoff Shandler, “Hasidic Hendrix is Hard Rockin’ in Hebrew,” Forward,
January 2, 1998 (http://www.forward.com/issues/1998/98.01.02/fastforward.html
[accessed August 10, 2004]).
27. For more on hybridity, see Nestor Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering
and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
28. The politics of “Black” music are just as knotted and complex as that of “Jewish”
music, if not more so, and have been addressed through several highly respected
scholarly works (see, for example, Ronald Radano, Lying Up a Nation [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003]; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic [Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993]; and Eileen Southern, The Music of Black
Americans, 3rd ed. [NewYork: W. W. Norton, 1997], among many others). In this
essay, I focus primarily on Jewish perceptions of Black music rather than issues of
Black music ownership and essentialism.
29. Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 12–14.
30. And this history does not even include antisemitic associations between Jews and
jazz, as asserted rabidly in, for example, Henry Ford,“Jewish Jazz Becomes our National Music,” Dearborn Independent, August 6, 1921 (http://www.noontidepress
.com/books/ford/ij47.html [accessed August 10, 2004]).
31. Shelly Manne, “My Son the Jazz Drummer” (Contemporary M3619; reissued on
CD as “Steps to the Desert,” Contemporary CCD-7609-2); Terry Gibbs, “Terry
Gibbs Plays Jewish Melodies in Jazztime” (Mercury SR 60812/MO 20812; reissued
on CD as Verve 3145896752).
32. See Bruce Benson, “Jazz Service” (with Kenny G); Jose Bowen, “A Jazz Service”
(1989; CD 2003) and “A Klezmer Service” (1996; CD 2001); Jeffrey Klepper, “Jazz
Selichot Service” (manuscript, ca. 1991); Ben Sidran, High Holidays-based “Life’s a
Lesson” (1993; Go Jazz GO-53701-CD); Jon Simon’s “Shabbatjazz” (Silver Lining
Records, 2000); among many others. Even though “light” jazz carries with it implications of Whiteness, its place as a subgenre of jazz continues to assert a sense of
Black origins.
33. For an explanation, see Kay K. Shelemay,“Toward an Ethnomusicology of the Early
Music Movement: Thoughts on Bridging Disciplines and Musical Worlds,” Ethnomusicology 45, no. 1 (Winter 2001), esp. 19–21.
34. Abraham Z. Idelsohn, Hebraische orientalische Melodienschatz (Leipzig: Breitkopf &
Haertel, 1914–32), 10 vols.
35. The last four volumes of the Thesaurus change both the research and organization
pattern somewhat in that they incorporate archival materials from another collector/organizer, Eduard Birnbaum (whose collection was housed at Hebrew Union
College in Cincinnati, where Idelsohn taught).
36. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York:Verso, 1983; rev. 1991).
37. The enthusiasm for acquiring music from “exotic” communities has in the past
been significant enough to result in fanciful attribution. While most of the erroneous authorships remain in the realm of oral transmission, occasionally one comes
into print. Case in point: a 1996 supplement to the National Federation of Temple
Youth Chordster falsely attributing a setting of Lecha Dodi to “Argentinean melody,”
when it had in fact been written by Canadian Orthodox recording artist Abie
Rotenberg.
38. Quotation cited from http://www.kulanu.org/about-kulanu/about-us.html (accessed June 18, 2004); albums: Shalom Everybody Everywhere! Introducing the Abayudaya Jews of Uganda (Kulanu KUL9701, 1997); Abayudaya: Music from the Jewish People
of Uganda (Folkways SFW CD 40504, 2003).
39. The inevitable question of whether the Abayudaya became a part of Black/Jewish
discourses in the United States is a difficult one to answer. Their music thus far,
118
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
Judah M . C oh e n
however, appears to have helped consolidate the category of “African Jews” (along
with the Lemba people of Zimbabwe/South Africa and the Ethiopian-derived Beta
Israel community, now mostly in Israel) to American Jewish listeners.
Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among Syrian
Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
For different conceptions of time, see Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the
Making of Humanity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 169–235.
Idelsohn, Jewish Music: Its Historical Development, 136.
Israeli audiences, with a much more specific historical knowledge of “Yerushalayim
Shel Zahav,” found the inclusion of the song in Schindler’s List troubling; such concerns eventually led Spielberg to change the song on the Israeli release to something
more historically compatible (“Halicha LeKesariya”; music by David Zahavi, lyrics
by Hannah Senesh).“Yerushalayim Shel Zahav,” incidentally, gained another layer of
temporal meaning in spring 2005, when Shemer, in a posthumously published letter,
“admitted” to basing her anthem on a “Basque lullaby”—another “timeless,” authorless folksong (Ofer Shelah, “Basque Twist Tarnishes Jerusalem’s ‘Gold,’ ” Forward,
May 13, 2005: 4).After a short period of crisis, however, Shemer’s work appeared to
return to its mythic status.
Fredric Jameson,“Postmodernism, or The Cultural Capital of Late Capitalism,” New
Left Review 146 (1984): 70–77.
Ellen Koskoff, Music in Lubavitcher Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001),
105–120.
See Mark Slobin, Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 105–129.
Schoenberg converted to Lutheranism in 1898 and converted back to Judaism in
1933, after he had completed what exists of Moses und Aron.
Richard McBee, “Return to Sinai: Moses und Aron by Arnold Schoenberg,” The
Jewish Press on the Web (posted January 14, 2004) (http://www.jewishpress.com/
news_article.asp?article=3288 [accessed June 2, 2004]).
Ibid.
How, for example, do we interpret Madonna’s recent adoption of Kabbalah Centreinspired Jewish symbolism and practice into her public image? (See Joseph Berger,
“A Jewish Madonna? Is That a Mystery?” New York Times, June 18, 2004: E1.)
Continuity, Creativity, and Conflict
The Ongo ing Search for “Jewish” Music
Marsha Bryan Edelman
In the early years of the twentieth century, a group of
Russian conservatory students formed the Society for Jewish Folk Music
(Gesellschaft für Yiddishe Folksmusik) to develop and promote the creation of a
new type of Jewish musical expression: Jewish art music.1 Just as the proponents
of “nationalistic” music had incorporated Russian, French, German, and even
American folk music in the creation of operatic and symphonic works for the
concert stage, the members of the Society based their activities on the premise
that one could create music of a “Jewish character” that would be used for nonliturgical purposes and that would establish the Jewish nation as one with a culture worthy of display and study. A significant rift developed between the
Moscow and St. Petersburg branches of the Society over whether Yiddish folk
melodies could serve the same authentic role as motives from synagogue liturgy
and biblical chant, but there was never any doubt that these traditional materials would provide the necessary inspiration for the young composers who
formed the group. Indeed, these musicians enlisted the help of other cultural
anthropologists, who had contributed to the creation of a canon of Jewish literature and drama as well as music in this period, and who spent a great deal of
energy collecting traditional Jewish musical materials which they anthologized
and disseminated during the heyday of the Society, from 1908 to 1917.
At about the same time, the Swiss composer Ernest Bloch (1880–1959)
became inspired by his readings of the Bible and spent a significant portion of
his early career immersed in his “Jewish cycle.” During the period between
1912 and 1934 Bloch composed ten such Jewish works, including such enduring selections as the Baal Shem Suite for violin and piano, Schelomo for violoncello and orchestra, the Israel Symphony, and the monumental Avodat
HaKodesh (Sacred service) for baritone, chorus, and orchestra. In all these
compositions (and others with so-called Jewish themes that he continued to
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M a r s h a B r ya n E d e l m a n
compose until his death), however, Bloch eschewed the use of any preexisting
Jewish musical materials.2 He felt no need to play the role of “archaeologist,”
confident that his “Jewish soul” and all the devotional intention it contained
would be self-evident in his work.3
As Bloch and some of his Russian counterparts eventually made their way
to America, the battle for the “soul” of Jewish music on the concert stage was
seemingly joined, with Bloch’s personal approach to Jewish musical expression
in a clear minority.The Russian émigré composer Joseph Achron’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 60 (1926), borrowed both distinctive motives from the traditional synagogue and two Yemenite songs, emblematic of the kinds of songs
which were gaining familiarity as part of the corpus of Palestinian folk music
then becoming increasingly popular throughout the Diaspora; Leonard Bernstein’s Jeremiah Symphony (his first, penned in 1942, and premiered two years
later) overtly drew on both liturgical song and biblical chant. Ironically, it was
only in the development of liturgical settings for the Reform temple (which
had long since abandoned any allegiance to traditional melodies along with its
compunction against using either mixed choirs or instrumental forces during
temple worship) that composers found themselves tacitly adopting Bloch’s attitudes on Jewish music, with the choice to set liturgical texts providing a clear
connection to synagogue tradition, no matter how obscure the musical references.Well before its time, then, a kind of postmodern challenge to the hegemony of historic Jewish musical materials was already being mounted.
Despite the ethnic stirrings in Jewish musical circles, compositions with
Jewish themes remained (indeed, still remain) a novelty for the American concert stage, both among the cultured classes and in the trenches of popular
music.4 Most Jewish composers famously avoided trumpeting their ethnic
heritage in favor of adapting to the mainstream American musical culture. In
the swing era of the 1920s and 1930s, Ziggy Elman transformed a well-known
Klezmer tune, “Die Shtiller Bulgar,” into a smash hit known as “And the Angels Sing.” 5 Some Yiddish theater songs, like Sholom Secunda’s “Bei Mir Bist
Du Schoen,” made a similarly strong impression on American popular tastes,
but not surprisingly, it was the Andrews Sisters’ performance of a translated
version of the song that catapulted it to international renown.
Jewish song writers like Yip Harburg, George Gershwin, and Irving Berlin
made their mark on Tin Pan Alley with odes to “White Christmas” and “Easter
Parade,” not Jewish holidays; later, Jewish light-opera composers Lorenz Hart,
Richard Rodgers, and Alan Jay Lerner (among others) transformed the Broadway musical by ignoring their Jewish roots and playing to American history
and values. However, while this assimilationist contribution of Jewish composers to American popular music has been established to the point of cliché
(similar to Jewish influence in the film and television industries), there are
those who claim that Jewish musical tradition played a more significant role in
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this phenomenon than is immediately evident.6 As evidence of the role of Jewish music in American popular culture, many point to “clear” references to
prophetic chant in Gershwin’s music, and to the composer’s aborted goal of
writing a “Jewish Romeo and Juliet” before friends convinced him that it was
unlikely to find an audience; Porgy and Bess resulted in its place. (Gershwin’s
plans to compose an opera based on the dybbuk story were defeated by his untimely death at the age of thirty-eight.) Others see the librettos of such American theater classics as Carousel and Oklahoma! as metaphors for the Jewish
experience of assimilating to an “other,” foreign (American) culture.7 Yet for all
the claims of Jewish inspiration at the root of this music, the success of these
composers was viewed as uniquely American, a sign that poor immigrants
could use their talents to achieve successful integration into American culture,
as long as they left their ethnic roots behind. Another repertoire of “backward,
Old World” customs was integrated into the American melting pot; the successful assimilation of the Jews and their music into American popular culture
marked the demise of one more tradition, and very few mourned its passing.
The rekindling of interest in all things ethnic came late to American Jews
of the twentieth century. As part of the ethnic pride movements of the 1960s
and 1970s, hyphenated communities “of color” had already mapped out their
identities as African-, Latino-, and Asian American before Jewish Americans
began to assert their own cultural roots, and the postmodern debate centered
on what those roots should be. African, Spanish-speaking, Asian, Irish, Italian,
and most other ethnic communities had always had national homelands to
which they could turn for succor and clear identification, but Jews had not
known a unified national experience for more than two thousand years. In the
United States, the one-time rift between German Jews, the majority of whom
came to the New World in the mid-nineteenth century, and their poor East
European cousins, who mainly arrived between 1880 and 1920, had been
healed by the equal opportunities afforded them in America (notwithstanding
some outposts of antisemitism that, in any case, painted all Jews with the same
brush).The World War II destruction of Europe’s Jewish communities severed
ties between two million European immigrants and their countries of origin.
While some clung to vestiges of European Jewish music and tradition as emotional and spiritual life preservers, others enthusiastically swam in the sea of
American culture without looking backward.With the emergence of the identity politics and multicultural movements, once again the battle between those
who would reclaim traditional practices and those who would be satisfied with
personal interpretations or replacements was under way.
This new-old fight between the conservators of time-honored (European)
tradition and those who would welcome any and all expressions of Jewish identification epitomizes the postmodern dilemma for Jewish music. The battle
waged at the beginning of the century on the concert hall stage was somewhat
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divorced from the majority of the community, since this new “art music” had
limited appeal and, in any case, had no real claim to historical precedent.8 The
more recent battle is a reinvigorated fight for the soul of the synagogue, the
primary institution of Jewish identification.Traditional cantors argue the importance of nusach (liturgical chant) as the continuation of the “high art” of
synagogue music, railing anew against innovations by their less traditional colleagues in the liberal movements (again, the same cries that had come in recurring waves since the birth of the Reform movement at the beginning of
the nineteenth century). Ironically, as the postmodern era comes into full
flower at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we may be seeing both a
redrawing of the battle lines, and a new reservoir of combatants, as more populist voices enter the fray.
The staggering military success of Israel in the Six Day War of 1967 set
the stage for renewed cultural conflict by forcing Jews to rethink their ethnic
identity.The war marked a turning point for many, inspiring Jews around the
world to look upon the Jewish state as a source of inspiration and as an
adopted homeland, both for those displaced by wars and other modern political movements, as well as for others heretofore comfortably ensconced in the
western lands of their birth. Pride in Israel’s accomplishments extended beyond the battlefield, as new attention focused on Jews’ reclamation of their ancient land, reinvigoration of their national language, and rejoining of disparate
brethren and their customs. Of course, these activities had been going on since
1948 (and, in fact, since the beginning of the modern pioneer era of aliyot [return to Israel], in 1881), but what had once seemed like an ill-fated experiment in a hostile desert was looking increasingly like a permanent resumption
of Jewish autonomy which could be applauded, supported, and even emulated
by co-religionists around the world.
In America, Israel’s successes, coupled with diminishing antisemitism (at
least in the public sphere) and the ethnic pride movement, meant a new affirmation of Jewish identity, even for those who felt little connection to the
young Jewish state, and an increased interest in reclaiming vestiges of ethnic
culture, even among those with no interest in traditional Jewish life and practice. Jewish jewelry (Stars of David, chai pendants, mezuzot, and even Sephardic
hamsas) began appearing on men as well as women;9 knitted and crocheted
yarmulkes replaced baseball caps among those who cover their heads, for ritual purposes, and appeared as an ethnic badge of identification among others;
T-shirts appeared, bearing everything from “Jewish princess” to “Harvard”
spelled out in Hebrew letters; and interest grew in reinstalling Jewish music as
a staple of Jewish life, beyond the obligatory hora ritual at weddings. But what
form should this Jewish music take? Where should it appear? Who should perform it? What, indeed, constitutes Jewish music?
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Even before 1967, members of the traditional Jewish community who had
never formally parted ways with the Jewish musical customs of their forebears
sought, nevertheless, to invigorate Jewish life in the time-honored tradition of
their ancestors: by adopting and adapting the music of their surroundings. From
Moses’ “Song of the Sea” to the Temple rites of the Levites to the Mi-Sinai
melodies of Ashkenaz (Eastern Europe), Jews had taken inspiration—and even
actual tunes—from the music around them. These modes and melodies were
imbued with sanctity derived not necessarily from any intrinsic holiness of
the tunes themselves, but rather from their juxtaposition with sacred texts. In
the mid-1960s, groups like the Messingers and the Rabbis’ Sons forged an alliance between the emerging folk-rock mainstream of American popular
music and the centuries-old textual traditions of the synagogue. The use of
contemporary instrumentation (guitars, flutes, saxophones, and drums) made
clear that these traditionalists were not seeking to supplant the accepted patterns of synagogue music, but to enlarge the scope of their Jewish identification
beyond the synagogue to the concert stage, and beyond Saturday morning to
Saturday night.10 Still, postmodernism could easily point to these developments as the dawn of a new era in thinking about Jewish musical expression
and the historic legitimacy of adaptation and discontinuity.
With the stage thus set by the traditionalists in the Jewish community,
voices were soon added by others who were somewhat less familiar with Jewish musical customs, but no less eager to articulate and embrace their new
consciousness of a richly bifurcated, Jewish-American identity. The Reform
movement wisely encouraged its informal educational programs in summer
camps and youth groups to nurture the musical talents of its young people, and
promoted the fruits of their labors on recordings disseminated throughout the
movement. Not surprisingly, early efforts focused on settings of well-known
prayer texts to distinctively American musical modes.11 Somewhat unexpectedly for a community that had jumped only recently on the Zionist bandwagon, the popular music of Israel now figured more prominently in the
curricula of the Reform movement and in the recordings they produced. Inevitably, to express contemporary spiritual and musical ideas, the music also
began to set new texts in an unfamiliar “Jewish” language: English.
The use of English to express Jewish ideas and values was as disjunctive a
break with Jewish cultural history as was the Society for Jewish Folk Music’s
creation of an instrumental genre in the early 1900s. In each case, a new language, with no history in the Jewish cultural continuum, challenged traditional notions of authenticity (and in some circles, rabbinic law) in an effort to
adapt to the norms of its time, to reinvigorate the canon, and to place the Jewish community on a cultural and expressive par with its neighbors.The Society
charted its new territory by setting well-known melodies with instrumental
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voices, rather than human ones.The contemporary harmonies that accompanied this music assured the intelligentsia that the Jewish nation could produce
art, but the familiarity of the original tunes also assured the traditionalists that
little had changed, or would. All was well, until Ernest Bloch challenged their
notions of what constituted Jewish musical tradition.
Following a similar trajectory, the proponents of English as a Jewish language began by setting translations of traditional texts. Debbie Friedman’s English setting of “V’ahavtah” (from Deuteronomy 6:5) in her 1972 album Sing
unto God broke new ground with her choice of language but did not stray far
from the literal roots of the original Hebrew.12
And you shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart
With all thy soul, and with all thy might,
And all these words which I command you on this day shall be
in thy heart . . . 13
Jeff Klepper’s 1974 “Shavua Tov” (Have a Good Week) painted a picture of the
havdalah transition from sacred to profane, straying from any one preexisting
text, though clearly referencing several, and conjuring traditional images:
Shavua tov, may you have a good week,
May you find the happiness you seek.
Shavua tov, may your week be fine,
May it be as sweet as the Sabbath wine.14
And all remained well again as Craig Taubman juxtaposed the Jewish credo
with English language references to several Jewish liturgical notions:
Master of all things, Ruler of Israel,
We are Your people and You are our God.
Teach us to follow, obey Your commandments,
Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad.15
Others took the bold step of departing from the liturgy, using the English vernacular to tell a story that was outside the traditional texts, yet well within the
particularist frame of reference of the Jewish community. Perhaps the most
salient example came in 1980, when Robert Solomon, of the folk-rock band
Safam, penned “World of Our Fathers,” chronicling the history of the modern
experience in America while postmodernistically combining both American
and stereotypically Eastern European musical motives:
Came to America in 1904, I was fleeing persecution and the army
of the Czar.
Reached Ellis Island alone and half insane, and I left there with a
different name.
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If it wasn’t for my people I don’t know what I’d do, and I thank the
Lord above me that I was born a Jew.
They sheltered me and fed me ’til I got on my feet, and my father’s
words came back to me:
Just don’t forget where you came from, my son, and the world
of your fathers you’ll soon leave behind,
Just keep the faith of your people, wherever you go, there a friend
you will find . . . 16
At the same time that music in English was pushing the envelope of Jewish liturgy, and ultimately breaking through into an entirely secular though
Jewish identity, the late 1970s saw another opening of a new vista on the Jewish musical scene, though with a decidedly backward orientation: the rebirth
of klezmer. Once disdained as the province of unschooled, itinerant musicians
and discarded as an unwanted vestige of a persecuted past, klezmer was reincarnated by American Jewish musicians who, after immersing themselves fully
in the American mainstream, were seeking to rediscover their own cultural
roots. Pioneer klezmerist Henry Sapoznik described himself as a child of the
Catskills Borscht Belt who consciously ran from the cantorial excesses of the
great hazzanim (cantors) and the Yiddish-inflected humor of Mickey Katz and
the classic Jewish stand-ups to embrace American bluegrass, before being
asked by an Appalachian fiddler whether Jews have a music of their own; his
search for an answer led to the formation of his klezmer ensemble, Kapelye.17
Hankus Netzky’s mother thought the fulfillment of the American dream
would arrive if her son were to succeed Marvin Hamlisch (himself a “nice
Jewish boy” who made good in Hollywood without any professional connection to his Jewish roots) as conductor of the Academy Awards broadcasts; Netzky discovered his link to the past and a unique role in the new history of
klezmer music by plumbing the sheet music and 78 rpm recordings in his
uncle’s basement, sharing them with his colleagues in Boston, and prompting
them to form the Klezmer Conservatory Band.18 Soon Kapelye and Klezmer
Conservatory Band would be joined by dozens, then hundreds of klezmer
groups across America, and ultimately Europe. Klezmer was well on its way to
becoming the most popular Jewish musical genre in history.
As the 1980s wore on, however, postmodern questions began to be raised
about what could legitimately be called klezmer, when the bands stopped simply reinventing their fathers’ music. Like the members of the Society for Jewish Folk Music who ultimately moved beyond setting preexisting melodies to
writing their own music inspired by the sounds of the tradition, klezmer musicians like Michael Alpert and Josh Waletsky wrote new tunes in Yiddish (also
brought back from the brink of oblivion by this rebirth of interest in klezmer
and the world that produced it) in the style of the “real” klezmer songs of the
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past. But Alpert and Waletsky were well schooled in the traditions and conventions of the past. A new generation of Jewish and non-Jewish musicians
came less intuitively and less organically to klezmer, without being well rooted
in its emotional past. They studied the history of klezmer and discovered the
unspoken truth about it: that, like all other Jewish musics, klezmer was a product of its environment, borrowing liberally from its surrounding culture. Not
only did you not have to be Jewish to make klezmer music, much of what
passed for “Jewish” in klezmer music in particular, and in Jewish music in general, objectively was not. If postmodernism embraced the joining of genres
and the following of an interesting tangent to its inevitable resolution (no
matter how far removed from the original it might be), then Jewish music has
always been “postmodern,” and all its forms of expression were/are legitimate.
At just the moment when traditional preconceptions of what constituted
Jewish musical identity seemed sufficiently challenged, a new, technological
element was added to the discussion in the 1980s.Advances to the technology
that had spawned the audio cassette in the West decades earlier finally also
reached Israel (which in those days tended to lag behind in the adoption of
such media). The rise in popularity of audio cassette recording among consumers led to its widespread embrace by home-based entrepreneurs, who used
cassette tape to record and disseminate all kinds of music. The simplicity and
economy of cassette recordings facilitated cross-cultural exchange and enfranchised a new community, adding a new voice to the cacophony of Jewish
musical traditions. Suddenly, the long-silenced Eastern melodies of Israel’s
Mizrachi Jewish communities were heard, challenging the supremacy of (an
already hybrid) Ashkenazic culture in the language of Jewish music.
Mizrachi, or Eastern music, comes with all the same shadings and variations as Ashkenazic (Eastern European) music. Born in the fulcrum of the Middle East, it is undoubtedly much closer in nature to what our Temple ancestors
considered authentic Jewish prayer than anything emanating from the culturally distant provinces of Ashkenaz;19 yet the music of the Middle East was unfamiliar to Western Jews before the ingathering of the exiles into the modern
Jewish state. Unfortunately, historical veracity was hardly on the minds of the
Ashkenazic leadership, who saw the new Jewish immigrants arriving from Arab
lands in the 1950s as culturally inferior to the better-educated Jews of the West.
Mizrachi children were placed in Ashkenazic schools, their family traditions rejected in favor of Western models, and their beautiful and different music ignored by all official bodies, including the programmers of government-owned
radio stations whose musical selections homogenized the disparate immigrants
into an ostensibly unified Israeli identity. Ironically, the Western-trained composers who fled European antisemitism in the 1930s and were the first to create the national schools of Palestinian (later Israeli) music focused on the music
of the East for their musical inspiration.The distinctive qualities of art music by
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Paul Ben-Haim, Alexander Uriah Boskovitch, Odeon Partos, and Marc Lavry
that left their mark on subsequent generations of Israeli composers, as well as
the uniquely Eretz Yisraeli popular songs of the same era by Matityahu Shelem,
Mordecai Zeira, and Emanuel Amiran, all bear the indelible stamp of the Eastern influence.All this was well known in scholarly circles, but popular music of
the new Israeli state bore a decidedly Western cast, shaded with more strident
strokes as modern technology shrank the global village and brought rock ’n’
roll to Israel as well as to the rest of the world.
But all this changed with the audio cassette.Would-be stars recorded their
debut tapes in their own basements, mass-produced the results on doublecassette decks, and hawked them from the trunks of their cars and from cheap
stalls at bus stations across Israel. By a fortunate coincidence, Israeli social
workers were becoming increasingly convinced that the effort to Ashkenazify
the Mizrachi immigrants was misplaced, further contributing to the new receptivity to all things Eastern. The breakout of selected artists (like Boaz
Sharabi, and especially Ofra Haza) to international acclaim brought new audiences to Mizrachi music, and challenged prior, exclusive definitions of what
constituted Jewish culture, both in Israel and beyond. Israel was admittedly less
interested in “Jewish” culture than it was in creating a unique “Israeli” one, but
cultural anthropologists and musicians remain divided about whether the stillyoung country has had the time to evolve one identifiable culture. Of course,
from a postmodernist perspective one could argue that the unique blending of
hybrid elements in Israeli music represents a quintessential manifestation of
postmodern culture. Indeed, at the same time that the Israeli mainstream was
becoming increasingly receptive to Eastern elements, those same Eastern artists
were using Western models, instruments, and especially rhythms to reach
across cultural barriers, diluting the uniqueness of their own music and blurring the lines between East and West. However, to the extent that diaspora
Jews looked to Israel as a source of Jewish cultural influence and inspiration,
the new engagement with Mizrachi music provided a rich reservoir of new
influences and possibilities.The music of Achinoam Nini (a.k.a. Noa), for example, represents the ultimate in postmodern chic: born in Israel to Yemenite
parents, she was raised in New York City, where, in addition to her cherished
ethnic heritage, she assimilated to the sounds of Joni Mitchell. Opting to return to Israel at age eighteen, Nini’s music reflects Yemenite, Israeli, and American rhythms, and she sings and records in Hebrew and English (often in the
same song) to acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.
At the end of the millennium, then, Jewish music was confronted with a
wide range of challenges. The uniquely Jewish languages of the past had been
Hebrew,Yiddish, Ladino (for the Jewish descendants of the exiles from the Iberian Peninsula), and Judeo-Arabic (for the Mizrachi Jews from Arab regions). Not
everything written, or spoken, in any of those languages was necessarily related
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to traditional Jewish life, but at least a song in Yiddish or Ladino would be inextricably linked to the Jewish community.The “real” Jewish texts were traditional excerpts from the Bible and the prayer book, or rabbinic poems called
piyyutim, which enhanced the liturgy of the synagogue, celebrated the Sabbath
and festivals, and enriched lifecycle observances. Despite the emergence of
new forms and genres, through the middle of the twentieth century Jewish
music meant, first and foremost, the music of the synagogue honored by time,
if not entirely authentic in its provenance and bearing substantial influence on
the “secular” music of the Jewish marketplace and, occasionally, of the concert
stage. The diversity of the Jewish experience had created multiple linguistic
dialects; thousands of piyyutim, few of which were universally familiar; and an
infinite number of variations on the musical traditions of the synagogue.
While you could no longer say “Jewish music” without adding another defining adjective to identify whose Jewish music you meant, there was a richness
of literature and history that seemed to preclude ever exhausting the possibilities for creative engagement with the past and continued allegiance to it.
But the openness of Jewish music to creative manipulation has, especially
in the postmodern era, brought about a crisis of identity and a real threat to the
continuity of a recognizable legacy of Jewish musical culture. Ladino was devastated by the murder of ninety percent of its native speakers during World War
II; unlike Yiddish, it has had no partisans to reclaim it, and its elderly devotees
will soon be gone.The virtually complete expulsion of Jews from their homes
in Arab lands in the last half of the twentieth century has greatly diminished the
number of native speakers of Judeo-Arabic; and despite the benefits of speaking both Hebrew and Arabic in Israel, most Israeli immigrant children eagerly
reject their parents’ dialects. In the context of the multi-ethnic state of Israel, of
course, Hebrew itself is no longer an exclusively Jewish language, and, as a
modern lexicon for the day-to-day conversations of secular as well as religious
Israelis, its texts are no longer exclusively sacred, or even necessarily tinged with
Jewish content.20
English, however, has replaced Hebrew as the mother tongue for a majority of Jews in the world. The unique internal rhythms of any language contribute organically to the music created by its speakers, even when texts are
absent, as in instrumental music; when texts are present, the confluence of their
internal rhythms with the rhythms of the music creates an unbreakable bond.
The impact of the Anglicization of Jewish music is readily evident, both in the
awkward efforts to translate Jewish value concepts like chesed and tzedakah into
Catholic terms like “grace” and “charity,” and in the unfamiliar cadences of
melodies, even in Hebrew, that carry the implied rhythms of the English language.The resulting poor accentuation of the Hebrew, and often the distortion
of the Hebrew syntax as well, betrays the composer’s lack of familiarity with
the Hebrew language.
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Perhaps the greatest challenge to the continuity of Jewish musical culture
in the postmodern era comes not from the multiplicity of authentic options
available for emulation, but from the sense that “anything goes.” It is true that
much of what is regarded as “sacred” in Jewish musical practice is merely the
adaptation—or even wholesale appropriation—of other people’s musical
styles, or even complete melodies. Contrafaction (the borrowing, consciously
or not, of preexisting musical materials for utilization in consort with new or
different texts) is an ongoing part of the human experience.There is evidence
that it was practiced in the Jerusalem Temple; it was certainly practiced in Medieval Europe, where Mi-Sinai tunes bear startling resemblance to Christian
chants; and it has been the normative practice in American Jewish communities, where Musaf kedushah texts are sung to Israeli love songs and neo-Hasidic
tunes, and piyyutim like Adon Olam are regularly sung to melodies ranging
from “Turkey in the Straw” to “When the Saints Go Marching In.” If such examples, many in questionable taste, can be brought into evidence, why would
anyone feel a need to censor or disparage other, much less sacred forms of
Jewish music? Why put any limits on what can be considered klezmer music?
If any song in Yiddish can be indelibly connected to the Jewish community,
even if, like “Tum Balalaika,” it is totally devoid of uniquely Jewish content,
then why can’t any song in the modern Jewish vernacular, English, be equally
acceptable as Jewish music? Should anyone care that “Yid’n,” a hit song by
Mordechai Ben David, and a staple of the Orthodox wedding celebration,
began its life as a German entry in the international Eurovision Festival, originally titled “Genghis Khan”?
It would be disingenuous to suggest that our contemporary sins are any
greater than the sins of the past. The best-known Ashkenazic melody for
“Ma’oz Tzur” was originally a German battle song, and later a Lutheran hymn.
Moreover, any number of “traditional” tunes that inform synagogue music can
be demonstrably proven to be simplistic at best, and often banal, not to mention demeaning to their lofty texts. Do we declare, then, that the mistakes made
in generations past have become so ingrained that they are no longer worth debating? Do we argue that we must not elevate ourselves above the levels of the
past, because the past is past and has the benefit of longevity, and for these reasons alone is worthy of respect?
In a word, yes.To a very real extent, we are now witnessing a rejoining of
the old clash between traditional Jewish cultural models and new vocabularies,
both musical and textual.The one advantage that the past holds over the present is that the past had the benefit of its own time in which to become comfortable with its choices.The modern era has moved quickly; the postmodern
era flies even faster. Yesterday’s hit tune is tomorrow’s “oldie.” We cannot allow
glibness and anarchy to substitute for the test of time, but we are not given
the time in which to take the test. In all communities, at all times, religious
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movements have moved much more slowly than others, whether due to the
fear of Divine repercussions or to the simple weight of the emotional baggage we tend to carry with us on all religious journeys.This is no less true in
the postmodern era, even if some seem especially eager to hurry the tempo of
twenty-first century life.
There is unquestionably more complexity in Jewish life today than there
was in the past. In the pre-postmodern world, Jews were Jews because they did
not have the choice to be anything else. Jewish music, in all its manifestations,
was a reflection of the synagogue, which, while genuinely beholden to the
alien “other” culture in which it functioned, was practically and legislatively
separate from it. Despite uprootings from pogroms or political realignments,
Jews held on to fundamental Jewish beliefs, and held fast to the musical traditions of the past as cultural anchors in a sea of change.
Ironically, the one time that we did not immediately adapt to the majority
culture was when taking the voyage across the Atlantic.That sea that separated
the Old World from the New was simply too broad, and the choices on the other
side were too confounding. How do we adapt to the majority culture when the
American melting pot offers multiple majorities to consider? As if the choices
were not already too ponderous, technological advances throughout the twentieth century kept us constantly dancing to keep up. Do we join the jazz era?
Too late, swing has swung open its doors.Are the big bands the wave of the future? No, here come the rock bands. It took fifty years for America’s Jews to
begin to become comfortable as Americans, and when we tried to adapt American music—ironically, much of it produced by Jews—to our liturgies, we found
we were out of step with both the mainstream and with ourselves.
In the ultimate irony, the most supremely successful synagogue of the
postmodern era is New York City’s B’nai Jeshurun, where hundreds of congregants participate fully and energetically in a supposedly contemporary service
that has inspired coast-to-coast imitators, sociological studies, and pilgrimages
by scholars and Jewish Federation leaders seeking the answer to the ills that
plague contemporary American synagogues, and by extension, contemporary
Jewish life. The service does bear evidence of its rabbis’ liberal philosophies
and postmodern musical innovation. Fully egalitarian, the congregation is
equally populated by men, women, and children of all ages, all singing, or at
least clapping and swaying, to the rhythmic conga drums and the supportive
synthesizer that accompany the cantor’s warm voice, barely audible over that
of the congregants. But what are they singing? Traditional Mi-Sinai tunes;
melodies by nineteenth-century German reformers Salomon Sulzer and Louis
Lewandowski; traditional Hasidic niggunim; and seemingly traditional tunes by
Shlomo Carlebach.Yes, they are singing new tunes, too, by Craig Taubman and
Debbie Friedman, but these settings are reverent, reflective of their texts, and
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cognizant of the traditional approaches to worship with which this contemporary congregation is in continuous contact.
Since the post-emancipation dawn of the modern era, Jews have had the
choice to volunteer their allegiance to the Jewish people. Some have chosen
to leave the fold. Some of those who have stayed have effected substantial
change from within. Some Jews have remained on the fringes of the Jewish
community, reveling in their marginality. And some have used their sporadic
encounters with the community as a stepping stone to more intense engagement with it. For many, music has provided that contact.There are Jews whose
only contact with Jewish life is to sing in a Yiddish choir. Others love to dance
the hora at Israel Day celebrations.21 Some love the enthusiasm and energy of
klezmer music, while others seek the other-worldly mystique of Mizrachi
rhythms and melodies.
One caveat: Those who have remained apart from the community, who
do not appreciate its history and its values, should not be given free reign to
alter its direction.Yes, there is an inherent postmodernist strand in most Jewish music, from synagogue nusach (of all communities) to klezmer jams and
Eastern ragas. But some music is more sacred than others. No one borrows the
High Holy Day melodies for impromptu celebrations.The music of the Holocaust holds secular reverence, and should not be fodder for just another
improvisatory jazz riff. Klezmer has, indeed, been the province of crosspollination between Jewish and non-Jewish musicians and cultures, but it was
born in a closed, insulated, and incestuous community that was not challenged
to accommodate radical changes from outside its familiar home base.There is
no reason it should accommodate them now.
At about the mid-point of the twentieth century, ethnomusicologist Curt
Sachs famously noted that Jewish music is that which is written “by Jews, for
Jews, as Jews.”22 His formulation has been studied, dissected, misunderstood, and
otherwise challenged on a wide variety of grounds ever since. More recently,
it has been suggested that Jewish music (indeed, all Jewish arts) is that which
“emerges naturally out of the experience of being Jewish.”23 The challenge to
such a definition lies in the infinite number of forms that “being Jewish” takes
in the postmodern era—not to mention the significant interest demonstrated in
things Jewish on the part of people who are not Jewish by any definition, and
have no interest in becoming part of the Jewish community. It would appear
that the century-old dilemma pitting “authentic traditional musical materials”
against the inspiration one might derive from them without quoting them will
continue to define the postmodern era.The emergence of one camp over another may well usher in the dawn of the next era in Jewish musical life, just as
the larger struggle between traditional and more liberal engagements with Judaism will most certainly shape the future of the Jewish community itself.
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Note s
1. For more on the Society, see Albert Weisser, The Modern Renaissance of Jewish Music:
Events and Figures, Eastern Europe and America (1954; reprint, New York: Da Capo
Press, 1983).
2. The final movement of the Baal Shem Suite, “Simchas Torah,” contains a brief but
blatant quotation from Mark Warshawski’s well-known “Die Mezinke,” which has
attained “folk” status through its frequent repetitions at wedding celebrations. Bloch
never acknowledged the quote, though, and inasmuch as it has no connection to the
festival of Simchat Torah that was ostensibly being celebrated in the work, it is possible that the composer’s “borrowing” of the tune was completely subconscious.
3. See Albert Weisser, “Jewish Music in Twentieth-Century United States: Four Representative Figures (Ernest Bloch, Lazare Saminsky,Aaron Copland, and Hugo Weisgall),” Ph.D. dissertation, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1988, p. 40.
4. Columbia and RCA Records were leaders of the new recording industry at the beginning of the twentieth century, and through the 1940s they produced a large catalog of Jewish instrumental and cantorial recordings in an effort to attract Jewish
customers to the new medium. Similar catalogs of Irish and Italian music were aimed
similarly at capturing those ethnic markets. In none of these cases, though, did such
recordings stem the assimilationist tides of the musicians or their audiences, and as
new immigrants became proud Americans, their interest in such ethnic fare decreased.
5. The title translates as “The Quiet Bulgar,” bulgar being a kind of folk dance, similar
to the square dance. However, the issue is less the title of “Die Shtiller Bulgar” than
its transformation into something not Yiddish at all. It should also be noted that
“Die Shtiller Bulgar” got its title only because the recording company that was putting it out needed some kind of title for it. In Europe, klezmer tunes that had no
lyrics also had no titles.
6. See especially Jack Gottlieb, Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish (Albany: SUNY Press,
2004).
7. See Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
8. There had been instances of Jewish art music produced in Sephardic communities in
Italy, France, and Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but all
these had some connection (however marginal) to Jewish religious life and so had no
direct impact on or relationship to this newly emerging genre for the concert hall.
9. Chai, as in L’chaim, is the Hebrew word for life; mezuzot are tiny receptacles containing scriptures which are generally used as door talismans; hamsas are pendants in
the shape of hands that offer protective powers as well as attractive adornment.
10. It should be noted that Shlomo Carlebach’s (1925–94) pioneering efforts in Jewish
outreach through music were part of a continuum that had used Hasidic music to express traditional Jewish texts and emotions for more than 200 years.While novel in appealing to disaffected youth in Haight-Ashbury and Greenwich Village, Carlebach’s
musical style was not new.The ruach bands were also charting familiar sociological territory, but with a new musical vocabulary. Still, the first modern expressions of Jewish
musical vitality were little more than reaffirmations of old Jewish musical practices.
11. See Joseph Levine’s discussion of the incorporation of American motives into
melodies intended for worship settings in his Synagogue Song in America (Crown
Point, Ind.:White Cliffs Media, 1989), especially 189–193.
12. The use of translated texts also opened the way for a discussion in astute scholarly
circles of the inevitable rhythmic and syntactical distinctions between music conceived in Hebrew and this new genre, conceived in English.
13. Excerpted with permission from “And You Shall Love,” by Deborah Lynn Friedman, 1972.
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14. Excerpted with permission from “Shavua Tov,” lyrics by Jeff Klepper and Susan
Nanus, 1974.
15. Excerpted with permission from “Master of All Things,” words and music by Craig
Taubman, © Sweet Louise Music BMI 1984, www.craignco.com. The last line
translates as “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
16. Excerpted with permission from “World of Our Fathers” by Robbie Solomon, ©
1980, available on Sons of Safam (1980) and Safam’s Greatest Hits, Vols. 1 & 2 at
www.safam.com.
17. See the opening essay in Henry Sapoznik, The Compleat Klezmer (Cedarhurst, N.Y.:
Tara Publications, 1987).
18. See interviews conducted with Netzky as part of Michal Goldman’s documentary
film A Jumpin’ Night in the Garden of Eden (1987).
19. That is, a well-revered oral tradition in which Levitical choristers were schooled for
five years before assuming their positions.That musical ritual remained unnotated at
the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, and was largely abandoned as the
ancient forms of Temple worship were replaced by rabbinically ordained forms of
prayer that took the place of Temple rites and sacrifices.
20. It is for this reason that many ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel speak Yiddish rather
than Hebrew: it pains them to consider filling their gas tanks, doing the laundry, or
negotiating with contractors in the “sacred tongue.”
21. Israel Day is used here instead of the more familiar Israel Independence Day because many communities arbitrarily choose a day on which to honor Israel, which
may be removed from the traditional one.
22. In his opening lecture to the First International Congress of Jewish Music in 1957,
quoted by Bathja Bayer in her entry “Music” in Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem:
Keter Publishing, 1972), 12: 555.
23. See Ed Codish, “The Arts in Jewish Day School: A Case Study,” Edah Journal 3, no.
2 (Elul 5763).
⡣
Dance
As Naomi Jackson reminds us in Converging Movements:
Modern Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y, Jews have been at the forefront, in terms of creative involvement and promotion, of both the American
modern and postmodern dance movements.1 They also have been more proactive than in most other cultural forms, and from an earlier time period, in the
incorporation of Jewish themes: Benjamin Zemach pioneered the Judaizing of
modern dance in the 1920s and 1930s; Sophie Maslow and Anna Sokolow carried the Semitic torch into the 1940s and 1950s.2 As for postmodernism, while
the term was first applied to architecture, dance (in a close race with Pop Art)
may be where a postmodern “consciousness” was born. Already in the 1960s,
early postmodern dancers (including a significant number of Jews) began not
only to question modernism’s expressionist aesthetics and universalist principles but to challenge the very idea of what makes a dance “dance.” Emphasizing context and framing in the creation of dance, these choreographers and
performers nonetheless tended to elide ethnic identity—until the multiculturalist 1980s and 1990s. By then, as Rebecca Rossen explains in her essay “The
Jewish Man and His Dancing Shtick,” static and transparent expressions of
identity were eschewed in favor of more fluid and self-critical strategies “such
as non-linearity, pastiche, autobiography, and irony to enact radically destabilized and multifaceted identities.” Jewish choreographers working in this mode
included David Dorfman, Dan Froot, David Gordon, Liz Lerman, Victoria
Marks, and Stuart Pimsler.
Rossen’s focus is on Dorfman and Froot, part of a younger generation of
American Jews “who are simultaneously ambivalent and nostalgic about their
heritage.” The two dancer/musician/performance artists have collaborated
since 1990, although they also perform separately,“exploring the dynamics of
their own relationship, as well as the constraints of American masculinity.”
Radically recombining cultural categories, mixing metaphors, and bending
genders, the pair has employed Jewish comedic forms derived from vaudeville
and stand-up to deconstruct secular and sexual identities that they regard as
inseparable from their non-religious Jewishness.An array of Jewish male stock
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136
Danc e
characters—the feminized male, the merchant, the gangster, the vaudevillian—
are refracted through the lenses of autobiography and fiction to underscore
the “performance of self and assess the meaning of Jewish identity in their
own lives and experiences.”
Note s
1. Naomi Jackson, Converging Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd
Street Y (Hanover, N.H.:Wesleyan University Press: 2000).
2. Naomi Jackson, “Searching for Moving Metaphors: Jewishness in American Modern and Postmodern Dance,” Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 20, no. 1–2 (2000):
139–149.
The Jewish Man and His
Dancing Shtick
Stock Characte rization and Jewish
Masculinity in Po stmode rn Dance
Rebecca Rossen
In the summer of 2001, I traveled to UCLA to observe
David Dorfman and Dan Froot, postmodern dance’s equivalent of the
borscht-belt comic duo, while they worked on their latest collaboration,
Shtuck, a duet inspired by Jewish vaudeville.1 That week they were also rehearsing an older piece, Job (1996), because they had the rare opportunity to
audition it for an HBO comedy show. Although Dorfman and Froot are
usually presented as dance-makers in venues such as New York City’s Dance
Theater Workshop, their humorous exploration of masculinity and insecurity,
expertly communicated through witty dialogue and absurd actions, gives
them crossover potential as physical comedians. In preparation for the big
night, I gamely volunteered to run errands and Dorfman made a request that
surprised me. Besides photocopying press packets and purchasing water and
protein bars, I was asked to find a particular type of eye shadow that he uses to
diminish the size of his nose. Dorfman later clarified that he uses stage makeup
to aid him in looking better, not less Jewish. Still, darkening the sides of his
nose with brown and lightening the top with white, he explained, creates the
illusion of a more aquiline “schnoz.”
Dorfman and Froot regularly explore Jewishness in their solos and duets,
including Job. Nevertheless, this request suggested that even Dorfman has internalized stereotypes about Jews and Jewish bodies. In The Jew’s Body, Sander
Gilman argues that physical characteristics such as the “Jewish nose” signify
the Jew’s difference, and mark him as “a member of one of the ‘ugly’ races of
mankind, rather than the ‘beautiful’ races.”2 Altering the nose through cosmetics or surgery has historically assisted Jews in passing. Whether conscious
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R e b e c c a Ro s s e n
or unconscious, Dorfman’s desire to look “better” signifies looking “better
than Jewish.”3 Thus, as Dorfman and Froot prepared to perform that night for
an audience composed of friends, fans, and the HBO talent scout who might
or might not show up, I thought about all the Jews who have made it in Hollywood: entertainers who toned down the Jewishness of their acts, had nose
jobs, or changed their names to gain mainstream appeal as they moved from
east to west, stage to screen.
Ironically, Dorfman’s solution for making his nose seem smaller is the
same method that dancer Benjamin Zemach used to accentuate Jewishness in
the 1920s and 1930s. Zemach, a Russian-Jewish immigrant and member of
the Habimah Theater, is the first choreographer I have come across to be
credited with creating “Jewish dance” in the United States.4 His hybridized
technique combined ballet, modern, and folk idioms with a method of characterization derived from non-naturalistic, avant-garde Russian theater, resulting in richly emotive, larger-than-life depictions of Jews and Jewish traditions.
The documentary The Art of Benjamin Zemach (Lou Brandt, 1969) includes
footage of the dancer preparing for the stage by applying “Jewface” makeup,
providing an ironic contrast to the scene in The Jazz Singer (1927) where Al
Jolson’s Jack Robin corks up in order to “wash himself white.”5 One watches
as Zemach carefully lines his face with dark pencil, colors in a black beard,
shades the sides of his nose, highlights its top, and places a black hat on his
head. With each stroke he increases his potential for embodying a character
and lessens his ability to be neutral. Before he even begins dancing, he transforms himself from a Jewish man into “the Jew”— comedic, tragic, potentially
sinister, somewhat ridiculous, surprisingly sympathetic, poised to entertain.
In this essay, I do not attempt to trace the lineage from Zemach’s performance of Jews in the early twentieth century to Dorfman and Froot’s take on
stock characterization in the present day. Nor can I represent the multiplicity
of ways in which Jewish choreographers have staged Jewishness in American
modern and postmodern dance. Instead, this essay focuses on how two contemporary choreographers, Dorfman and Froot, merge postmodernism and
Jewish stock characterization in order to fashion their identities as Americans,
Jews, and men.
Despite the fact that Dorfman and Froot are highly regarded dance artists
with international reputations, their work may be unfamiliar to a Jewish studies
readership.This lack of familiarity reflects the elision of dance and dance history
from Jewish cultural studies. Since the early 1990s, dance historians have turned
to a variety of disciplines and fields of thought including cultural studies, gender
studies, queer theory,African American studies, and postcolonial theory in order
to demonstrate that dance is a key site for examining the construction and expression of cultural identities. Similarly, scholars from other disciplines have
begun to recognize dance as a valid arena for the exploration of identity politics.
The Jewish Man and His Dancing Shtick
139
Jewish studies has been slow to make this leap, perhaps because the field is still
beholden to the myth that Jews are a disembodied “people of the book.” As I
have demonstrated elsewhere, Jewish choreographers have not only been vital
contributors to the history of American modern dance, but they have also
played a critical and unacknowledged role in American Jewish history.6
In addition to my own research, recent publications by Ellen Graff, Naomi
Jackson, Julia Foulkes, and Judith Brin Ingber have begun to rectify the omission of Jewish dance artists from both Jewish and dance history.7 These historians focus on the provocative commingling of Jewish culture and modernist
aesthetics from the 1930s through the 1960s, when Jewish choreographers,
many of them women, poignantly and provocatively expressed the American
Jewish experience through the medium of modern dance. Echoing the complexity of an identity that has religious, cultural, political, and national implications, Jewish choreographers such as Zemach, along with Miriam Blecher, Pearl
Lang, Dvora Lapson, Sophie Maslow, Jerome Robbins, Edith Segal, Lillian Shapero,Anna Sokolow, and Helen Tamiris, among others, re-imagined the Bible and
religious ritual, romanticized Eastern Europe, embodied Zionist and leftist
philosophies, addressed the Holocaust, and depicted the experience of exile,
immigration, and acculturation. Contemporary choreographers continue to
struggle with these themes. Nevertheless, changing aesthetics and postmodern
theories of identity have affected the ways in which they represent Jewishness.
Jewishness is not a matter of essences, but rather a repertory of tropes and
framing mechanisms. Nevertheless, Jewishness suggests a trans-historical materiality, or corporeality, that is manifested in representations of Jewish bodies
and behaviors. By investigating how Jewish choreographers engage, revise, or
subvert particular images of Jews and Jewish bodies over the course of a century, I have been able to evaluate how meanings for Jewishness evolve in relation to changing historical conditions and aesthetic practices.
Modern dance revolved around the idea that the dancing body could manifest emotions, express “universal” experiences, and elucidate the social and
political conditions of modern life. In the 1960s, a loosely connected group of
dancers rebelled against the aesthetics and expressiveness of modern dance
by dispensing with manifest content and meaning, and instead creating taskoriented, pedestrian dances. Challenging the very idea of what makes a dance
“dance,” these early postmodernists introduced the critical idea that context
and framing created dance.8 A few of these artists were Jewish (or part-Jewish),
including Simone Forti, David Gordon, Deborah Hay (born Deborah Goldensohn), Meredith Monk, and Yvonne Rainer. While the radical politics and
democratic methods of this period meshed with Jewish liberalism, the minimalism of early postmodern dance had the effect of closeting identity, including Jewishness.9 In the 1980s and 1990s, postmodern dance again transitioned
by abandoning abstraction and instead focusing on the expression of identity.
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Rather than presenting a static and transparent notion of identity, however,
postmodern choreographers deployed a number of strategies such as nonlinearity, pastiche, autobiography, and irony to enact radically destabilized and
multifaceted identities. Jewish choreographers working in this mode—including
Dorfman, Froot, Margaret Jenkins, Liz Lerman, and Stuart Pimsler—have utilized such methods to, in the words of Naomi Jackson, “metaphorically illustrate the state of contemporary Jewish identity, helping to present it as a
multiplicitous entity that to some choreographers seems hopelessly fragmented
and to others, a healthy reflection of contemporary life.”10
My purpose here is to examine how two particular choreographers—
David Dorfman and Dan Froot—represent Jewishness in postmodern dance.
Previous generations of Jewish dancers sought to mitigate stereotypes and stabilize the conflicting pulls of Jewish particularity and integration in order to
choreograph a place for themselves in American modern dance and society. In
contrast, Dorfman and Froot represent a younger generation of American Jews
who are simultaneously ambivalent and nostalgic about their heritage. Raised
as cultural rather than religious Jews, they have turned to Jewish comedic forms
as a means to construct secular identities and contend with their manhood,
which, to them, is inseparable from their Jewishness. Purposefully conflating
autobiography and fiction, Dorfman and Froot enact and destabilize a variety
of Jewish male stock characters—the feminized male, the merchant, the gangster, and the vaudevillian—in order to underscore their performance of self and
assess the meaning of Jewish identity in their own lives and experiences.
Representations of Jews are often gender-specific. Sander Gilman has argued that the male Jew is the most pervasive symbol of Jewish difference, particularly the “feminized male Jew”—scholarly, passive, physically weak. He has
written that Jews may accept or resist stereotypes, but they cannot help but respond.11 In Staging the Jew, Harley Erdman built on Gilman’s thesis through his
investigation of Jewish stage representations. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Erdman recounts, “Hebrew comics,” with their big noses, overthe-top Yiddish accents, and exaggerated gestures, became common figures in
vaudeville.12 But when Jews performed Jews, they both propagated and lampooned stereotypes. In the 1920s, during a climate of increased antisemitism,
Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League demanded that Jewish comics temper their routines. Performers like Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson
began to replace Jewface with blackface, enabling them to mask their otherness and ironically setting them on a course to Whiteness.13
Even though American Jews have transitioned from being racially marked
to unmarked, and have prospered both socially and economically, the Jew’s body
is still perceived as different. For example, one critic recently summed up Dorfman’s and Froot’s common traits:“Mr. Froot, 39, and Mr. Dorfman, 43, are Jewish, heterosexual, and 5 feet 7, although Mr. Dorfman is stockier.”14 While
141
benign, these remarks suggest that ethnicity and sexuality are as legible as age,
height, and weight. Critics and scholars more frequently analyze the duo’s exploration of masculinity than they discern the undercurrent of Jewishness that
infuses their work.Actually, the majority of Dorfman and Froot’s solos and duets
capitalize on the corporeal and behavioral signs of Jewish difference. As Froot
explained,“[I deal with] markers of Jewishness—even if these are clichéd. Questioning, complaining, sing-songy speech, feminized men, money grubbing.
These images have resonance at every stage of history and cultural context for
Jews.” By delving into such stereotypes, Froot confronts essentialism:“Somehow
a refusal of essentialism seems essential. I can be as Jewish as I want to be. I can
make it hip, or un-cool. I can be a Jewish gangster, a jazz cat, an old-world rabbi.
I can construct it however I want.”15
Dorfman and Froot have been collaborators since 1990, although Dorfman
also runs his own dance company and Froot maintains a career as a soloist. Over
the past fifteen years, they have created works, both together and apart, that
feature athletic movement, high-voltage dialogue, and saxophone playing. Frequently exploring the dynamics of their own relationship, as well as the constraints of American masculinity, their pieces often push the boundaries between
tenderness and violence. This dynamic is especially clear in Job, one of three
duets that comprise the triptych Live Sax Acts.16 Funny and edgy, Job foregrounds connections between men, the need to dominate, and the struggle for
intimacy. Still, Jewishness functions as a subtext that they highlight or diminish,
depending on the audience.Thus, some audiences may not recognize it, while
others may respond to it as an in-joke. For example, American producers and
critics have never commented on Job’s Jewishness, but producers in Denmark ultimately decided not to present the duet because they felt it was too “New York
Jewish” and would not appeal to their audience.17 Performing versions of themselves in Job, as they do in all of their works together, “David Dorfman” and
“Dan Froot” become (Jewish) salesmen dressed in suits, seated around a card
table stocked with four phones that they fight to control, and literally bartering
over everything while tethered together by a steel cord that prohibits one from
abandoning the other (see Figure 1). The duet’s title refers both to the absurd
buying and selling they engage in, as well as to their actual “job” that night—to
perform for the audience (whom they frequently acknowledge). Job also alludes
to the biblical Job, although Dorfman and Froot’s struggles are more narcissistic
than catastrophic.18
Dorfman and Froot do not hide their Jewishness, mentioning it in passing
as part of a repeating sketch in which they continually reinvent the moment
when they first met. The scenarios range from a chance meeting at Dance
Theater Workshop, when they had to negotiate the use of a dancer who was
performing with both men, to a schoolyard in the early 1970s when the two
young entrepreneurs tried to hawk oversized glasses and super balls to their
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1. Dan Froot (left) and David Dorfman in Job. Photo © Beatriz Schiller.
classmates. In one of these narratives, Froot claims that they first crossed paths
when Dorfman saved him from drowning in the JCC pool. If he senses that
the audience cannot read the code, he will elaborate by saying “JCC, the Jewish Community Center.”19
Certainly their shtick critiques norms for masculinity that prohibit men
from being intimate. But their notion of masculinity is inexorably tied to Jewishness, a point even more pronounced in their depiction of wheeling and
dealing salesmen. In the opening, for instance, the two men face off from either side of the table and bargain over the distribution of particular relationship qualities. Froot points at Dorfman and demands love: “I need a lot of it
and I need it quick.” Dorfman promises to provide love, the “unconditional
kind,” if Froot can offer “respect” and a little “admiration” in return. Accepting the deal, Froot tries to unload some “friendship,” which is clogging his
warehouse, and the two agree that “trust without betrayal” is something they
do not need but secretly crave.
Because their fathers worked in sales, both artists consider business savvy
part of the Jewish culture in which they were raised.“I think that both Dan and
I look at our Jewish culture as an almost secular Jewishness,” Dorfman explains.
“And I think that this comes through really strongly in [Job]. . . . On one level,
it’s almost so natural to me I am not thinking of . . . [being the] Jewish
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salesman. . . . But it is my character. . . . There is a historical precedence with
Jews selling, selling themselves in the world, selling their legitimacy, selling
goods, and sometimes, not by their own choice, relegated to selling.”20 Dorfman
and Froot’s performance of hagglers trying to out-earn, out-do, or out-Jew the
other illuminates the antisemitic verb “to Jew” someone. Simultaneously criticizing and displaying a nostalgic reverence for the world of the artists’ fathers, Job
attempts to assess the benefits and limits of this model for Jewish masculinity.
Dorfman’s choreography for his own company, David Dorfman Dance,
focuses more on pure movement and less on dramatic characterization. However, his ensemble work Subverse (1999) opens with a solo about a Jewish
tradesman that evokes Eddie Cantor’s iconic “Moe the Tailor” sketch. This
routine, which appeared in the 1929 film Glorifying the American Girl, depicted
a Lower East Side tailor who swindles a naïve customer.21 Playing both tailor
and dupe—the aggressive and passive Jewish male—Dorfman alternates offcenter, out-of control movement with eccentric gestures like a marionette
pulling his own strings. In this sequence, he performs a quirky vaudevilleesque dance phrase in front of the curtain, eventually maneuvers his body into
a courtly position, and begins to tell a Jewish joke with a showy voice.22
“I was walking down Delancey Street,” he declaims, continuing to move
through his fluid and disjointed articulations,“when I noticed a sign for a tailor’s
shop.The sign said,‘My Name is Fink.And what do you think—I make my suits
for nothing!’ ” Dorfman recounts that he went into the shop, ordered a suit, and
returned a week later to pick it up, only to be presented with the bill.“Mr. Fink,”
he says,“I thought the suit was free!” Speaking as Fink, he assumes a coarse Yiddish accent: “It depends on the vay you read the sign, my friend! To me, it says,
‘My name is Fink.And vhat do you think? I make my suits for nothink?’ ”23 Dorfman does not alter his complex gestural vocabulary as Fink, but his vocal transformation into a Yiddish money-grubber colors his actions with a sinister tint.
His puppet-like movements are out of sync with the aggressive bravado of his
vocal delivery, suggesting that the “Jew” is both victim and victimizer.At the end
of the solo, he collapses under the weight of his own ethnic joke. He shouts back
and forth to himself, “That’s not funny!” “Everything’s funny, some of it’s just
real!”“You’re cruel, aren’t you?”“Maybe I’m just funny!”“That’s not funny!”—
until, like a broken record, he gets stuck on “real” and “funny.”The final argument
ultimately divulges Dorfman’s ambivalence about ethnic humor. Is it funny or
cruel? Are stereotypes real? Or just real funny? Is he the instigator, the butt of the
joke, or both?
These issues also permeate Dan Froot’s most recent ensemble piece, Shlammer: A Gangster Vaudeville, which premiered at the Los Angeles Theater Center
in 2001 (see Figure 2).24 Shlammer’s set consists of a miniature proscenium stage
decorated with a Jewish star on one side and a cut-out on the other that reads
“Paste Star Here.” The Yiddish phrase “genug sheyn” (“enough already”),
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2. Dan Froot in Shlammer. Photo © Joanne Stone.
which is painted across the proscenium arch, seems to provide an ironic response to Dorfman’s question in Subverse—when is ethnic humor too much?
Behind a red-velvet curtain sit the DeLuxe Vaudeville Trio, who pepper the
show with raucous klezmer music.Throughout, Froot attempts to override his
own identity—which he characterizes as a neurotic, boyish, assimilated Jew—
by taking on the persona of Yiddish gangster Daddy (pronounced “DEH-dee”)
Kleinman, who represents the ultimate symbol of Jewish butch masculinity.
Rich Cohen, writing on Jewish gangsterism in the 1920s, argues that the Jewish mafia functioned as an underworld bar mitzvah, a means for secondgeneration American Jews to overturn stereotypes of physical weakness and
counter the victim mentality of the immigrant generation.25 In contrast to
Daddy Kleinman, who was “bar mitzvahed” at nine, the father of over a dozen
children by twelve, and the city’s toughest shlammer, or thug, by thirteen, Froot
states that his bar mitzvah (which he calls his “B.M.”) failed to transform him
into a man. Channeling Daddy, he restages the rite of passage as a musical spectacle, a song and dance routine in which he systematically humiliates or dominates friends and family. For instance, he tells us that one guest, Mr. Fleishman
(meaning “meat man” or “butcher” in German), presented him with a motherof-pearl penknife, proclaiming ‘Happy Bar Mitzvah! Now you are a man!’ ”
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Singing “Yai dai dai” along with the klezmer band, Froot performs a little
dance around himself, then mimes stabbing Fleishman, singing “Now I am a
man!” With masculinity equating violence, the bar mitzvah becomes a vicious
ritual.
The image of the Jewish father is a repeating theme for Froot. He explains:
Father figures appear in my work as the means by which Jewish culture is
passed to sons. My own father was largely absent for the first fourteen
years of my life, and largely dead for the next thirty. I did have a few raw
materials from him: storses about his wild Bronx adolescence, rumbles
with other Yiddish-speaking gangs, illicit sex at a tender age, crude rituals
of male bonding, knives and chains and daredevil antics atop tenement
parapets.As I imagined his formative years, Jewishness and manliness were
one and the same, and they weren’t pretty. But to me they seemed somehow authentic.26
For Froot, Jewish manhood is a flawed but unavoidable identity, socially constructed but “somehow authentic.”
Froot’s efforts to play the tough Jew are in vain, but the failure itself highlights the way in which masculinity and Jewishness are codified. In one of the
piece’s funniest sections, he uses an actual book on foreign dialects for actors,
published in the mid-1940s, to help him learn to speak (and act) like a real
Yid.27 “What makes a Yiddish man a Yiddish man?” he reads.“Many factors. He
is argumentative. He answers questions with questions. But for an actor, the dialect is the key.” Froot begins a labored and comedic reading of “typical” Yiddish phrases, exposing one of the mainstays of Jewish stock characterization: the
Jewish voice. Reproduced phonetically, these phrases include “Saw eef yoo
deed’n keh-eh, saw vy be meht?” (So if you didn’t care, so why be mad?) and
“Vahts saw FAH-nee?” (What’s so funny?).28 By following the directions of a
racist phrase book in which Jewish and non-Jewish actors can learn to sound
Jewish (or Italian, Chinese, or Black), he reveals the ruse of authentic ethnicity.
Froot also toys with the physical performance of Jewishness in a vaudevillian dance number in which he awkwardly and hilariously shifts between
clichéd movement and gangsterish marauding. He plods across the stage glaring
at the audience. He stops, juts out his chin, and defiantly raises his arms, his
palms flat and fingers spread wide into “jazz hands,” before dropping them, one
by one. Stomping offstage, he begins again. This time, he demonstrates his
prowess, diving to the floor in a series of athletic body rolls. Starting to almost
enjoy himself, he covers ground with jazzy strides and shifts from side to side
like a Jewish Gene Kelly, before it all deteriorates into adolescent air-punching.
He ends the sequence with a nod to minstrelsy: a cartwheel, vibrating hands, the
Charleston, and a sycophantic bow.The performer’s satirical juxtaposition of the
gangster and the showman casts both figures as utterly ridiculous. Alternating
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between hostility, sarcasm, and desperation, he makes fun of the routine but still
seems dependent on it and the audience’s approval. His act pointedly comments
on Jewish participation in blackface. However, his cartoonish movements and
strained facial expressions highlight the artificiality of racial caricatures. Ann
Cooper Albright has written that “autobiography, like dance, is situated at the
intersection of bodily experience and cultural representation.”29 In Shlammer,
Froot struggles with the limitations of his own body and his desire to recapture
an “authentic” Jewish masculinity, while simultaneously undermining essentialist notions of identity through his characterization of Jewishness as a vaudevillian act and his dramatic inability to play the part.
Dorfman and Froot’s most recent collaboration, Shtuck, a title that fuses
“shtick” with “schmuck” and “stuck,” premiered in January 2002 at the Joyce
Theater in New York City, and is also based on the history of Jewish vaudeville
(see Figure 3).30 As Dorfman stated in a recent interview, Shtuck “is so intertwined with who we are as Jews. . . . We identify with this Jewish element of
self-deprecation. Call it a Woody Allen complex, not that I want to be Woody
Allen, but I do identify with the need to make people laugh.”31 Shtuck’s premise
is that “David” and “Dan” are showmen who conduct their lives as one continual performance and do not understand life offstage. “The David and Dan
Show” begins with the pair decked out in clownish Zoot suits and fedoras,
marching toward center stage and enthusiastically greeting each other. Noticing
that they are standing on a large white “X,” Froot asks Dorfman:“What is this?”
“Center Center!” answers Dorfman. “And what is Center Center?” asks Froot.
“That’s where you go when you need attention!” answers Dorfman.“And why
do you need attention?” asks Froot.“So people will like you!” answers Dorfman.
“And why do you need people to like you?” asks Froot.“So you can construct
your identity!” answers Dorfman.
Later on, “Center Center” begins to move on its own, throwing off the
pair’s choreography and causing them to be persistently off-center. Eventually,
Dorfman chases the roving center mark offstage, sending Froot into hysterics.
Without Dorfman he is unable to carry on the endless repetition of material
that constitutes their act. Meanwhile, Dorfman reappears in the audience,
where he happily converses with those seated next to him. Although he has
left the stage, broken the fourth wall, and entered the “real” space of the theater, his interaction with the audience is projected on a large screen at the
back of the stage.
The borders of the stage (and screen) demarcate the frames that both define
and confine the pair, providing them with set roles to play and a repertory of actions and words that they continually perform and re-perform. On the one
hand, the work comments on the dynamics of their relationship and their need
to entertain as the key to their fragile identities. On the other, Shtuck suggests
that there is no “self ” outside of performance. Like “David” and “Dan,” who are
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3. Dan Froot (left) and David Dorfman in Shtuck. Photo © Joe Mineau.
shtuck in their shtick, we all follow self- and culturally imposed scripts that we
repeat endlessly.32
For example, the work employs a vaudevillian organization, but continually
sabotages it by repeating material or placing scenarios in the wrong order. Near
the top of the show, the duo sits at the front of the stage for “post-show Q & A,”
in which they ask and answer all the questions themselves. This brazen nonlinearity, a postmodern theatrical strategy, destabilizes theatrical norms, while also
calling attention to the narcissism of the performers and the self-reflective nature of performance itself. Similarly, in another sequence, they try to retrace
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their steps in order to shed light on nostalgia and the construction of identity.
Dorfman, playing the accordion, and Froot, the soprano saxophone, start progressing downstage as they perform a moody, klezmery song.When they arrive
centerstage, Froot stops playing and indicates that he would like to go backward
and begin again, while Dorfman demands that they go forward so that they can
complete their remaining sketches and restart the show.When Froot yells “retrograde,” Dorfman explains to the audience in a showman’s voice that “retrograde” is both a concept attributed to task-based dance performance that
permits you to reverse a pattern, and a nostalgic tool that enables you to retrace
and relive significant moments in the past. The pair recommence their song,
moving backward toward the starting point. Ironically, both Froot’s and Dorfman’s solutions (one to retrograde, the other to go forward) get them to the
exact same place.This section demonstrates that while patterns provide comfort,
they also confine, dooming us to endlessly repeat ourselves. By comparing a
postmodern compositional strategy such as retrograde to nostalgia, Dorfman situates the latter as a performative process. In other words, nostalgia, or collective
memory, is not the recollection of past events but rather the physical act of recreating those events in the present.33 Going backward is the same as going forward, because both history and the future retrace the same old paths.
Although the absurdity and meaninglessness of their repetitive routines
are reminiscent of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Dorfman and Froot’s shtick has
a particular resonance when combined with Jewishness.34 Over the course of
the evening, Dorfman and Froot execute a number of ironically mundane and
ridiculous feats, which they characterize as original, skillful, and funny. For instance, they announce that Dorfman will name all the members of the audience. Holding his fingers to his head like a psychic, he begins to call out
various names.35 When the task becomes too hard, he instead points into the
audience and yells out various characteristics such as “underpaid,” “alone,”
“Christian,” or “Jewish,” which Froot follows by admitting that they are Jewish too. Here, the indicators of class, religion, and ethnicity are not necessarily
visible—it takes a mind reader to expose them—but the act of naming illuminates the need to label people as well as the randomness of categorization.
Midway through the show, Dorfman and Froot state that their bowties are
actually battery-operated shock collars that enable them to keep each other in
line. Flinching as if they are being shocked, they announce that two lucky audience members have remotes under their seats that will permit them to shock the
performers if they are “going too fast,” or are being “too loud,” “too soft,” “too
intellectual,” “too bleeding-heart liberal,”“too fat,” or “too funny”—all traits that
have been associated with Jews.36 In fact, the men directly address the Jewishness
of their stage personas when Dorfman instructs the audience to shock them if
they are acting “too Jewish” or “not Jewish enough.” Froot adds that it is important to find the “right balance” and to be somewhere in the “middle.” This
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editorial comment refers not only to American Jewish comedians, whose success
has hinged on finding that balance, but also more broadly to the American Jewish struggle to maintain particularity while also fitting into the mainstream.
The dance routine that follows further elucidates the difficulty of finding
equanimity by playing with the tension between center and periphery. Dorfman
moves so fully that he threatens to dance into the wings. His off-centered actions continually exceed the boundaries of the stage and undermine the rigidity of the campy choreography. He is “too” something, if not “too Jewish.”As if
to emphasize this point, Dorfman feigns being “shocked” while struggling to
finish the dance, and reminds the audience that the shock collar segment of the
show is now over.
The pair pushes the limits of characterization even further in a choreographed argument that develops dangerously into a display of Jewish selfhatred. By the evening’s end, they become frustrated with each other and begin
to exchange insults.The performance at the Joyce Theater that I attended did
not include any ethnic slurs. However, in rehearsal the argument included a
lengthy battery of invectives in which Froot passed judgment on Dorfman’s
big,“shvitzing” body and balding pate, and Dorfman criticized Froot’s diminutive height and big nose. The section ended with the duo screaming at each
other, and then at themselves,“dirty Jew.”37
This rehearsal segment demonstrates the power of particular frames to impact how we are seen by others and how we judge ourselves. By editing out internalized antisemitism in the public performance, however, the choreographers
mask Shtuck’s basis in Jewish stock characterization, and end up with a safer
piece that is not “too Jewish,” contradicting their earlier contention in the piece
and ironically replicating the tactics used by entertainers who tempered ethnic
specificity to appeal to broad audiences. Significantly, the only publication to
mention Shtuck’s Jewishness was New York Jewish Week.38 This oversight indicates
that frames for Jewishness may not be recognizable to certain viewers, or that
Dorfman, Froot, and the Joyce Theater’s marketing team emphasized or deemphasized Jewishness depending on the audience they wished to attract. On the
other hand, the omission may also show that although Jewishness has become
(to some) unremarkable or synonymous with Whiteness, to others, Jewishness is
still an uncomfortable subject to bring up in polite society.
Nonetheless, in their works apart, as well as together, Dorfman and Froot
interact with a stockpile of representations that is intricately entangled with
their Jewishness. Rather than perpetuating stereotypes, however, they present
Jewishness as “shtick”—a codified series of images and routines. Judith Butler
has famously argued that gender is a stylized repetition of corporeal actions
within a regulated context that produces the illusion of substance.There is no
essence that is revealed through these “performative” acts, but rather one’s identity is created through the performance itself.39 Similarly, stock characterization
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is fundamentally a framing mechanism, a theatrical strategy for evoking a repertory of behaviors, actions, and images that are continually recycled.
By reproducing and inhabiting stock characters, Dorfman and Froot unveil
the means through which both Jewishness and gender are delineated and enacted. Because they strategically fail to fit themselves into pre-existing molds for
being Jews, for being men, and for being funny, they are ultimately able to
demonstrate that identity is not a matter of essences, but rather a byproduct of
performance. As third-generation American Jews who feel more at home onstage than in a synagogue, they take ownership of the stage “Jew” and hold
onto him, however flawed, as a heritage that resonates with their identities as
performers.
Note s
1. Dorfman and his company are based on the East Coast, while Froot lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA. I attended rehearsals at UCLA on August 23–27, 2001.
2. Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 173–174. Also see
Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).
3. I thank Dan Froot for pushing me further on this point.
4. It is beyond the scope of this essay to provide a historiography of the term “Jewish
dance” in relation to “modern dance.” In my opinion,“Jewish dance,” like “Jewish art,”
is a problematic construct because it implies a genre or a particular aesthetic approach. Meanings for “Jewish dance” are fluid, complex, and historically contingent.
I believe that the heterogeneity of dances that reference Jewishness or have been
classified as “Jewish” actually disputes the idea that Jews make “Jewish dance,” and
instead demands that we ask how dance constructs Jewishness.When I use the term,
therefore, I do not intend to reify it, but rather to use it with reference to a particular historical context.
5. Michael Rogin, Blackface,White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 102; The Art of Benjamin Zemach,
produced by Miriam Rochlin, directed by Lou Brandt, 30 min., University of Judaism, 1969 (videocassette) (available at the New York Public Library, Jerome Robbins Dance Division).
6. See Rebecca Rossen, “Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and
Postmodern Dance,” Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2005.
7. Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); Naomi Jackson, Converging Movements: Modern
Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University
Press, 2000); Julia Foulkes, “Angels ‘Rewolt’: Jewish Women in Modern Dance in
the 1930s,” American Jewish History 88: 2 (2000): 233–252; Judith Brin Ingber, ed.,
“Jewish Dance Issue,” Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 20: 1–2 (2000). Joshua
Perelman is another emerging scholar working on intersections between modern
dance and American Jewish history.
8. For more on the transition from modern to postmodern dance see Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University
Press, 1987).
9. Anna Halprin, a dancer and activist based in San Francisco, is also Jewish. Halprin’s
improvisational methodologies and radical politics deeply influenced many of these
early postmodernists. The presence and absence of Jewishness in early postmodern
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
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dance begs further consideration. Meredith Monk and David Gordon are the exceptions. Monk’s Education of a Girlchild (1971) featured some Jewish imagery, and
Quarry (1976) was an abstracted response to the Holocaust. I have argued elsewhere
that Gordon’s absurdist humor is based in Jewish comedic traditions. For more on
Gordon and Jewishness, see Rossen,“Dancing Jewish.”
Naomi Jackson, “Searching for Moving Metaphors: Jewishness in American Modern Dance and Postmodern Dance,” Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 20: 1–2
(2000): 144. For more on identity in postmodern dance see Ann Cooper Albright,
Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (Hanover,
N.H.:Wesleyan University Press, 1997).Albright only addresses Jewishness briefly in
her discussion of Dorfman.
Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 6.
Harley Erdman, Staging the Jew:The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860–1920
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 102. For more on the performance of ethnicity in early American film, see Charles Musser,“Ethnicity, RolePlaying, and American Film Comedy: From Chinese Laundry Scene to Whoopee
(1894–1930),” in Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema, ed. Lester D.
Friedman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 39–81.
Rogin, Blackface. Henry Jenkins has shown how Hollywood further de-Semitized
Cantor to accommodate mainstream audiences during the transition to sound in
the late 1920s. See Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the
Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Also see Jeffrey
Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and the American Popular
Song (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
William Harris, “Two Iconoclasts Who Have Fun Making Fun of Maleness,” New
York Times, August 22, 1999, 2:32.
Author’s interview with Froot, May 22, 2001.
The other two duets in the series are Horn (1990) and Bull (1994).
Author’s interview with Dorfman, September 4, 2003.
In the subsequent passages on Dorfman and Froot, I “read dance” by providing close
interpretive analyses of physical actions and interactions. Although dance may involve spoken language, its physical nature distinguishes it from word-based art forms
like literature, theater, and film that leave behind textual traces. Movement analysis
is a methodology that allows dance historians to reconstruct the dance and aid the
reader in envisioning it. These descriptive passages are not simply plot summaries,
but rather are akin to Clifford Geertz’s notion of “thick description.” Unlike “thin
description,” or raw observations, “thick description” is the act of making meaning
out of a complex web of social, symbolic, and physical actions. The evocative descriptions that dance historians write function as evidence, or in other words, as
critical analysis that constructs and shapes meaning. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” The Interpretation of Cultures
(New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–32. Also see Susan Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies
and Subjects in Contemporary Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
My reading of Job stems from both live and videotaped performances (David Dorfman and Dan Froot, Job, 1995, videocassette).
Author’s interview with Dorfman, September 4, 2003.
J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, eds., Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (New York and Princeton, N.J.:The Jewish Museum and Princeton University Press, 2003), 156.
My reading of Subverse is based on both a live and videotaped performance (David
Dorfman Dance, 1999, videocassette).
Charles Reinhart, who is the director of the American Dance Festival (and a Jew),
told this joke to Dorfman just before Subverse’s premiere. Dorfman immediately
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24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
worked the joke into the piece. Dorfman, conversation with author, June 18, 2004,
Durham, N.C..
Shlammer was written and choreographed by Dan Froot, and performed by Froot
and a small supporting cast, including the DeLuxe Vaudeville Trio. Dan Hurlin directed and designed the set.Victoria Marks acted as a choreographic consultant. My
reading is based on a videotaped performance (Shlammer, 2001, videocassette), as
well as on Froot’s script. Shlammer had its New York City premiere at Dance Theater Workshop in March 2005.
Rich Cohen, Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams, 2nd ed. (New York:
Vintage Books, 1999).
Dan Froot, talk delivered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, March 25, 2004.
Father figures are also the subject of Seven Kilos of Garlic (1991), an ensemble work,
and Blow Molding (1996), a solo.
Lewis Herman and Marguerite Shalett Herman, Foreign Dialects:A Manual for Actors,
Directors, and Writers (New York:Theatre Arts Books, 1958), first published as Manual
of Foreign Dialects for Radio, Stage, Screen (Chicago and New York: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1943).The pair also published American Dialects:A Manual For Actors, Directors, and Writers (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1959), first published as
Manual of American Dialects: For Radio, Stage, and Screen (Chicago and New York:
Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1947).The title shift from “Foreign Dialects” in the
1943 version to “American Dialects” in the 1947 edition underscores the fluidity of
racial, ethnic, and national identities. For more on Yiddish dialect see J. Hoberman
and Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America, 104 –112. Also see Gilman on the “Jewish
voice” in The Jew’s Body, 10–37.
Froot writes out the phrases on large cards and places them on an easel so the audience can read them while he attempts to pronounce them.
Albright, Choreographing Difference, 119.
Shtuck, January 12, 2002, performance at the Joyce Theater, New York, and on
videocassette.
Quoted in Susan Josephs,“ ‘Shtuck’ on Shtick: Choreographer David Dorfman and
performance artist Dan Froot team up to give vaudeville a postmodern twist and revisit their Jewish roots,” New York Jewish Week, January 4, 2002.“Live Sax Acts” press
packet.
I had been toying with the phrase “Shtuck in shtick” ever since rehearsals for Shtuck
in August, 2001. However, Susan Joseph (see note 31) published her article
“ ‘Shtuck’ on Shtick” before I published my own use of the phrase.Thus I acknowledge Joseph for first using the phrase, although I use “Shtuck in shtick” to convey a
deeper sense of addiction to the routine.
For more on this idea, see Richard Schechner’s chapter,“Restoration of Behavior,”
in Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1985), and Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s concept of “heritage” in her book Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998), 149.
I thank historian Daniel Greene for this insight.
In the work’s pre-show, the performers stood on either side of the stage and greeted
each audience member by asking his or her name. Sometimes they would exclaim,
“Jeffrey, that’s my mother’s name,” or ask the attendee’s seat number, which they always described as the “best seat” in the house.
Gilman, The Jew’s Body.
They cannot remember why they left “dirty Jew” out of the particular performance I
attended at the Joyce, although Froot recalls that the bit may have seemed “too harsh,”
and that “one of those Joyce performances went over like a lead balloon, and if it was
that one, we might have been playing it safe.” Froot, email to author, June 14, 2004.
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38. Maura Nguyen Donahue, “Triple-D Threat: Stories and Schtick from (D) Gordon,
(D) Dorfman, and (D) Froot,” Dance Insider, January 16, 2002; Deborah Jowitt,
“Dances in a Groove: Pretty Different, Too Soon Gone,” Village Voice Online, January 23–29, 2002, accessed July 7, 2005 (http://www.villagevoice.com/dance/
0204,jowitt,31676,14.html).
39. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminisms and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990). Also see Butler,“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An
Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist
Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1999), 270–282.
⡣
Painting and Photography
A useful date from which to mark the onset of postmodern American Jewish art is 1989. The year that saw the Tiananmen Square
massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the premiere of Seinfeld was also the
year Archie Rand exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York a series of
fifty-four paintings inspired by the yearly cycle of Torah readings. Jewish artists
were by then no strangers to the upper echelons of the American art world,
but baldly Jewish iconography was; and so Norman Kleeblatt, the curator of
the museum, mounted the exhibit in the spirit of multiculturalism but not
without trepidation over its “too Jewishness”—a euphemism, in this instance,
for material sure to be considered sacrilegious by many.1 Trepidation turned to
temerity in 1996, as Kleeblatt put on the watershed show “Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities,” whose question mark in the title and radically
eclectic artwork loudly proclaimed its postmodern pedigree.Yet even with the
tummel (agitation) over “Too Jewish?” and the geshrei (outcry) over Kleeblatt’s
next big show,“Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art” (2002), Jewish collectors, who compose a significant portion of the field, have not fully
embraced—some would say, steadfastly spurned—Jewish art.2 “People are terrified of identifying to themselves as Jews, not just to the outside world,” as
Rand explained the marketing dilemma.3 Even the venerable Jewish figurative
painter R. B. Kitaj complains that his having “Jew on the brain . . . gets me into
trouble with the half-Jewish art world, but they don’t want to talk about it.”4
Ruth Weisberg is concerned not merely with the art world stigma but also
with the criteria behind the labeling of Jewish art. Postmodernism has lowered
the aesthetic and ethical bar for Jewish art and art in general, she explains in
“Between Exile and Irony,” and has established a double standard for exhibitions. “If the work is Jewish, they think it should be in Jewish museums,” she
elaborated in an interview. “They would not say to an African American artist
that their work should be in African American museums. There’s discomfort
among mainstream Jewish curators and they need to get over it.”5 In the meantime, Weisberg helped organize a Jewish exhibit in Los Angeles in September
2004 of twenty-three Southern California Jewish artists, all members of a Jewish
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Pa i n t i n g a n d P h o t o g r a p h y
Artists Initiative that Weisberg helped found.As an ironic rejoinder to Kleeblatt
as well as an acknowledgment of Jewish artists’ increasing capacity for embracing their ethnic ambivalence, the show was called “Too Jewish—Not Jewish
Enough.”6
Deborah Dash Moore and MacDonald Moore frame recent American
Jewish photography in relation to the New York School, tracing its development from the Depression-era New York Photo League to its intersection with
popular magazines such as Life and Harper’s Bazaar to its increasingly selfconscious incarnations. In theoretical dialogue with Max Kozloff ’s notion of a
“Jewish sensibility” in photography and Walter Benjamin’s concept of the
breakdown of “aura” in mechanically reproduced art, the Moores chart the
legacy and transmutations of the New York School from the foundational work
of Lisette Model, Lou Stoumen, and Diane Arbus to that of contemporary
artists Nan Goldin, Lauren Greenfield, and Larry Sultan. In exploring the varieties and vagaries of Jewishness in American photography, the Moores tease out
the multiple strategies Jewish photographers have employed to interrogate
representations of identity—strategies that evidence both the benefit and the
cost to U.S. Jews of “being at home away from home.”
Note s
1. Amy Stone, “Artists Framed! ‘Too Jewish’ or ‘Not Jewish Enough,’ ” Jewish Culture
News (Fall 2004): 3–5.
2. Ibid., 3.
3. Ibid., 4.
4. R. B. Kitaj,“How to Reach 71 in Jewish Art,” Jerome Nemer Lecture sponsored by
the University of Southern California and the Casden Institute for the Study of the
Jewish Role in American Life, Los Angeles, October 20, 2004.
5. Quoted in Stone,“Artists Framed!,” 5.
6. Ibid. See also Gaby Wening, “How Jewish is ‘Too Jewish?’ ” Jewish Journal, October
22, 2004: 32–33.
Between Exile and Irony
Mode rnism, Po stmode rnism,
and Jewish Mode s of Thought
Ruth Weisberg
This inquiry into the complex relationship between modernism, postmodernism, and Jewish modes of thought is not just of academic
interest. As an artist and a Jew, I need to understand and grapple with certain
pervasive attitudes in the art world and, more broadly, in Western culture.
There are historical roots to the dynamic tension between exile and irony, and
between identity and assimilation in Jewish life, and these dichotomies play
out in the cultural realm as well. I believe an interrogation of the relationship
between the great twentieth-century art movements and certain formative
Jewish intellectual and spiritual tendencies will provide a key to many recurring themes in both arenas. The questions that arise from this inquiry vary
from the philosophical—Is there something specifically Jewish in the nature
of the successive late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century art movements, or even in the tensions among them?—to the crucial aspects of acculturation and assimilation—What is the origin and the meaning of the
ambivalence that Jews have about their work appearing “too Jewish”? More
specifically, how has a desire for full participation and acceptance created a
privileging of the broadly based American art world over the claims of Jewish
cultural activities? Lastly, I will discuss the implications for Jewish life and
American culture of the potential and partially realized Jewish Renaissance of
the past several decades.The late twentieth century and early twenty-first century in the United States has been a golden age of opportunity for American
Jews. How this overall opportunity has affected the flowering of Jewish culture is one of the overarching themes of this anthology. My account will be
written to some extent as a first-person narrative, since I have been actively
engaged as an educator, as an academic, and as a practicing artist in shaping the
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Ru t h We i s b e r g
current lively debate around the contributions of American Jews to the art and
ideas of our times.
The Emancipation of the Jews
Powerful forces prevented Jews from participating in the general cultural
life of Europe in the Middle Ages and beyond.The overwhelmingly ecclesiastical and Christian nature of art until the dawn of a more modern and secular
age needs to be understood. Major external and internal forces conditioned
Jewish isolation. The Christian church aimed at the total exclusion of Jews
from society. Also, the Jewish community, as it turned in on itself, emphasized
the study and strict observance of Torah, thereby reinforcing anti-visual, iconoclastic attitudes embedded in the Scriptures.1
The gradual emancipation of the Jews began in the early French Revolutionary period and expanded in the Napoleonic era. An edict of 1791 that declared Jews, for the first time, free citizens of France had positive effects on their
previous systemic exclusion and status as outsiders. Still, the long centuries of
antisemitism in Europe left an imprint, altering what might have been a more
beneficial outcome. For one thing, ideas that enter a country under the banner
of universal equality and brotherhood can backfire, causing some nationalistic
movements to protect what they consider the sanctity of their “blood and soil.”
As Ian Buruma has observed in relation to Napoleon’s armed intervention in
German-speaking areas of Europe:“Some nativist reactions were relatively benign: romantic poetry celebrating the native soul, or a taste of folkloric roots.
But in other cases the native soul, especially in Germany, turned sour and became anti-liberal, anti-cosmopolitan, and antisemitic.As soon as Napoleon was
defeated at Waterloo, the liberal laws he instituted in Prussia were annulled.And
a century later, the resentments planted by Napoleon’s armed liberation sprouted
their most bitter fruits in Nazi Germany.”2
In any case, the emancipation of the Jews in Europe proceeded slowly
and with significant differences from country to country. France and the Netherlands were among the earliest to extend full rights and privileges to Jews,
while Great Britain abolished all restrictions in 1846. In Germany, although
the process began in the late eighteenth century, it was not completed until
the Weimar Republic.The European uprisings of 1848, for example, included
among their objectives the full emancipation of the Jews, and, in both Vienna
and Berlin, Jews died in street battles fighting for their and others’ freedom.
By the late nineteenth century, Jews were integrated into German society,
primarily through their economic success rather than through participation in
official civic life.3 With acceptance came acculturation and assimilation, as well
as fear of assimilation, among Jews and non-Jews.We are all aware of the colossal paradox that Germany, which was the seedbed of such virulent antisemitism, was also the center of enormous Jewish intellectual and cultural
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achievement.Vienna presents a similar picture. Emily Bilski’s description of life
in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helps explain
the contradiction:
Despite the many opportunities available to Jews during this period, there
were still important areas of German public life from which they were excluded, such as the court, the military, the state bureaucracy, and, to a large
degree, the universities. Thus Jews tended to gravitate to the free professions. Denied access to the official public spheres, they turned to the less
organized alternative public spheres that characterize urban life, such as
the newspaper, the journal, the art gallery, the café, the theater, and the
political group. At this juncture in German history, Jews were fully Germans, yet still outsiders.”4
These intellectual and artistic aspirations produced an exceptional flowering at the turn of the century, when German and Austrian Jews were no longer
isolated in traditional Jewish enclaves but were still not totally accepted. This
sense of partial but persistent marginality was of course psychological as well as
sociological, compounded by the collective memory of close to two millennia’s
worth of persecution. Paradoxically, the “very precariousness of the Jewish position astride the two cultures gave them an extraordinary vantage point from
which to survey the European cultural landscape.”5 Similar external and internal forces were at work from London to Torino and from Budapest to Vilna.
Whether pursuing culture was an avenue for acceptance or a challenge to the
status quo, there was a virtual explosion of artistic interest and creativity among
Jews.
The privileged but still marginal status of European Jews led to further intense engagements with a succession of avant-garde and modernist movements.
Among the major art movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries one could list Impressionism (1870–90), Jugendstil (1880–1914),
Symbolism (1890–1900), Fauvism (1903–08), German Expressionism (1905–24),
and Cubism (1908–12). Some of these movements involved artists of Jewish
ancestry such as Camille Pissarro in France, Lesser Ury and Max Liebermann
in Germany, and the Russian expatriate Marc Chagall. In the related world of
art collectors and gallery dealers, there was a lively and disproportionate Jewish presence, because of the already noted attraction to the alternative public
spheres that characterized urban cultural life and of the historical tendency for
Jews to be involved, by default, in “middlemen” positions such as agents and
brokers.
Mode rni sm
Modernism, in its many variations, had a powerful attraction for Jews, for
a number of reasons. Historically, modernism was based on the optimistic and
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progressive ideas of the Enlightenment.This philosophical and political movement of the late eighteenth century believed that the principles of truth and
freedom, and that the processes of reason and scientific inquiry, would cleanse
and reform religious and political ideologies and make the world a better
place. Indeed, both the Reform movement in Judaism and the American Revolution were profoundly affected by the Enlightenment’s belief in the perfectibility of humankind.
In the visual arts, the emphasis on the new and the progressive appealed
deeply to Jews who wanted a point of entry into the larger cultural arena,
who were inclined to challenge the status quo, and who at the same time
could strongly identify with the moral emphasis on truth and reason. The
modernist challenge to conventional forms of representation also gave Jews, as
inheritors of a more abstract and disembodied God, certain advantages, or at
least fewer obstacles to overcome. Finally, Jewish writers, artists, and critics
were attracted to universalist tenets which allowed them to transcend differences with other groups while placing greater emphasis on the intrinsic qualities of the work rather than issues of identity. Waldemar George, a
Polish-Jewish critic writing in Paris in the 1920s, suggested that in the era of
the International Style, with its emphasis on universal principals of form, it
was advantageous to be without a nationality. “The art of the Jews is international, even supranational. . . . It communicates to the world its dynamic
principle, . . . its ‘nervousness’ [nervosisme], its anxious character, its instability and
its exaltation.”6
Margaret Olin, in her groundbreaking book The Nation Without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art ( 2001), comments, “The stereotype of
the nervous, excitable Jew, in Waldemar George’s hands, became a valued emblem of universality.”7 However, by the late 1930s George came under the spell
of Italian fascism and other nationalist movements and criticized the aspects of
Jewish art that he had previously praised.8 Reflecting the general sentiment
after World War II, George underwent another reversal and, in Cecil Roth’s
great compendium Jewish Art (1961), accused nationalism of causing art historians “to narrow their horizon and lose sight of the unity of Western art.”9 In
contrast, the “rare quality of universality” became for George once more the
primary contribution of Jewish artists.
While Waldemar George seems emblematic of the ambivalent Jew and particularly susceptible to changing intellectual fashions, European Jewish intellectuals tended to be consistently modernist, anti-authoritarian, and even
utopian in their thinking.There was a rebellion against orthodoxies of all kinds.
For example, the great European theoretical movements, such as the Frankfurt
School that flourished in Germany in the 1920s, included such Jewish figures
as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse. Other Jewish
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thinkers of considerable influence on the visual arts included the Viennese
Ludwig Wittgenstein and, of course, Sigmund Freud.
Ame rican Mode rnism
What all the varied avant-garde movements had in common, whether in
Europe or America, was the embrace of whatever was perceived as suppressed
or novel. Early-twentieth-century modernist movements such as Expressionism, Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism were marked by a great disdain for the
general public and a conscious differentiation between the art world and the
bourgeoisie. Being in opposition to, or in advance of, middle-class values became a validating claim.Tradition was seen not only as a barrier to originality
and invention but also as morally exhausted and bankrupt.
While the Jewish population in the United States during this period was
often working class with middle-class aspirations, other liberal, progressive, or
radicalizing factors were at work. Jewish liberalism, while partially derived from
traditional Jewish texts such as the Talmud and Torah (especially the Prophets
and their sense of Messianism), and by empathy for other marginalized peoples,
was also deeply affected by the activism of the Jewish Workers Bund and other
socialist movements in Eastern Europe, movements which themselves had been
influenced by nineteenth-century German theorists (a significant number of
whom were Jewish). This legacy is the main reason Jews have tended to be
more progressive than other Americans in the same socioeconomic class.
The anti-bourgeoisie and anti-materialist ideals of the immigrants predisposed these Jews and succeeding generations to be interested in modernist art
that exemplified similar values. In any event, one of the undeniable and remarkable social truths of the American modernist art world has been the
unprecedented participation of Jewish people. In every category—artist, critic,
collector, and curator—Jews have been present in vastly disproportionate numbers to their representation in the general U.S. population, which never numbered more than 5 percent and, as of 2000, stood at around 2 percent.
The forms that American modernism took were conditioned by a combination of history, ideology, and aesthetics.This was particularly true for Jewish
artists. Jewish photographer Alfred Stieglitz was instrumental in advancing the
modernist cause in the United States through his Gallery 291 exhibitions of
the latest European art, mounted in the 1910s.The hugely influential Armory
Show of 1914 further reinforced the European influence, so that American
modernist art from that point through the late 1930s tended to emulate the
European avant-garde. Another great influence was Social Realism. In the late
1940s, however, many American artists and critics began to reject styles related
to Social Realism, based on its perceived affinity with and use by dictatorships
of the Left and of the Right. Although Jewish artists such as Ben Shahn and
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Jack Levine retained elements of Social Realism in their expressive and political artwork, Jewish abstract artists such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and
Adolph Gottlieb were attracted to Surrealism, which had been grounded in
Freud, and by the writings of Nietzsche and Jung, among others.10 Matthew
Baigell astutely observes that these new preoccupations “were motivated by
what was happening to European Jewry more than anything else. . . . For example, prompted by their readings, Newman, Rothko, and Gottlieb wrote
about tragedy, terror, and brutality much more often and in ways that Christian artists such as Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock did not.”11
However, most Jewish American artists of this era expressed their Judaism
only in their private life if at all, and were very cautious about identifying themselves as “Jewish artists.” In this regard they followed the lead of the most influential art critics and writers of the time who were also Jewish, such as Harold
Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. For example, as Olin points out, “Even
when . . . Barnett Newman used explicitly Jewish subject matter, Rosenberg
took pains to disassociate him from it, carefully distinguishing Newman’s interest in the Kabbalah and his design for a synagogue from an identification with
Judaism, even though elsewhere Rosenberg espoused an ethnic definition of
Jewish identity by referring to the Jews as Newman’s ‘tribe.’ ”12
Greenberg and other prominent and influential critics such as French
writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre also seem to have been in what I would
call “formalist denial.” An almost morbid concern for antisemitism led these
men to take refuge in formalism’s denial or suppression of subject matter in the
name of purity of means and the ideal of universal humanity. Olin states,“Unlike international Marxism, which Sartre thought would remedy anti-Semitism
by changing the social structures that led to it, the formalist internationale offered
a comfortable refuge, making art appear a pure realm of visuality, free from specific racial, ethnic, or political agendas—and religious ones.”13
Greenberg’s writing on art tends to be the most ambivalent in regard to issues of Jewish identity. For Greenberg, artists like Barnett Newman and Adolph
Gottlieb are first and foremost Americans, not Jewish Americans. Still, writing
about Peggy Guggenheim’s autobiographical book Out of This Century, he signs
himself “C. Hardesh,” Hebrew for “Green Mountain”14 (“berg” being “mountain” in German), and he reveals an affinity for the more morally rigorous aspects of traditional Jewish life: “As a Jew I am disturbed in a particular way by
this account of the life of another Jew [Guggenheim]. Is this how naked and
helpless we Jews become once we abandon our ‘system’ completely and surrender ourselves to a world so utterly Gentile in its lack of prescriptions and
prohibitions as bohemia really is?”15
By the early 1960s, the identification of American modernism with various abstract movements such as Abstract Expressionism, color-field painting,
and Minimalism was very persuasive. The cycle of avant-garde rebellion to
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avant-garde establishment made the American art world ripe for another wave
of rupture and rebellion. The Pop artists (Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein,
et al.), by both critiquing and embracing the commercialization of the avantgarde, managed not only to both offend and intrigue the art world and the
general public, but also to set the stage for the next radical artistic break.
Po stmode rni sm
I am of the generation of American artists that came of age in the late
1960s and early 1970s as modernism was faltering and postmodernism was
emerging as an alternative. Late modernism seemed to many of us a far more
dogmatic version of the heroic high modernism of Jackson Pollock and Franz
Kline. In our eyes, Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd’s 1970 quote of Barnett
Newman’s “The Sublime Is Now” manifesto of 1948 recontextualized it, transforming it from an impassioned high modernist plea to a proscriptive formula:
“We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life,’ we are
making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.The image we produce is
the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by
anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.”16 This attack on the hegemony of Western art’s foundations became in turn a defense of
hegemonic late modernism.
In the United States, postmodernism was initially governed by its own inversions of modernism’s shibboleths. Barnett Newman’s list of impediments
became its list of desiderata.17 However, postmodernism did not necessarily
evolve in the way we, its first generation of practitioners, had anticipated. On
one hand, the postmodernist encouragement to tell one’s own personal story
collided with deconstructionists “death of the author,” while multiculturalists’
valuing of difference and diversity turned into an imperative that was often
exclusionary in its own right.
The term postmodernism also has come to embrace a bewildering range of
definitions, especially in relation to the numerous disciplines that employ it: literature and theater, film and television, music and dance, social and political theory, architecture and the visual arts, among others. Initially, architecture was the
dominant postmodernist discourse in the United States, while social and theoretical formulations were the French domain.18 Postmodern architecture has its
own fascinating history, which I will not try to evaluate here. As for the theorists, I tend to agree with Marshall Berman’s 2001 critique of their radical skepticism:“French postmodernism today is marked by a ferocious contempt for the
Enlightenment, for the revolution, for humanism, for the idea of human rights,
for what sometimes seems to be the whole of modern life and thought. Its
emotional violence, lack of intellectual balance, and learned ignorance of the
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traditions it condemns suggest echoes of the Action Française, or the pre-1933
German ‘politics of cultural despair.’ ”19
In the United States, categories such as allegory, which had been totally
marginalized by modernism, were now praised as the “model of all commentary, all critique, in as far as these are involved in rewriting a primary text in
terms of its figural meaning,” in the words of Craig Owens.20 Less sympathetically, he goes on to say:“The first link between an allegory and contemporary
art may now be made: with the appropriation of images that occurs in the
works of Troy Brauntuch, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and others—artists
who generate images through the reproduction of other images.The appropriated image may be a film still, a photograph, a drawing; it is often itself already
a reproduction. However, the manipulations to which these artists subject such
images work to empty them of their resonance, their significance, and their authoritative claim to meaning.”21
In this hall of mirrors we lose sight of the original object or idea. The
writings of the major postmodern art theorists like Owens, Rosalind Krauss,
and Hal Foster all focus on a critique of originality.The privileging of “originality,” so central to the value system of modernism, is now rejected on the
basis that the interpretation of meaning is subjective and conditioned by context.The postmodern artist is imagined as ironically and playfully making art
out of pre-existing and multiple texts. In other words, the roles of the artist
and the critic/commentator have merged, and in both cases the results are derivative or appropriated.The ghost of the great German-Jewish thinker Walter
Benjamin seems to preside over all this, and indeed his writing has enjoyed a
huge revival in this period.
I do not believe that the huge emphasis on the centrality of texts and the
heightened importance given to the work of commentators and redactors is
accidental. I see the influence of Jewish modes of inquiry and study on the
postmodern critique of originality. In Judaism, while there are rules for behavior and practice, there is no absolute intellectual authority and Jews must wrestle with the texts in direct dialogue with other commentators, even if they are
long dead like Rabbi Akiba and Rashi, or—in a secular vein—more recently
and tragically departed like Walter Benjamin.22 This manner of inquiry has
been absorbed as a part of postmodern methodology but has not necessarily
become its value system. Judaism, in contrast, for all its intellectual ambiguities,
is a grappling with Torah, with a sacred text, and therefore always seems to provide the commentator with a moral compass, whatever the differences in interpretation. Postmodernism, on the other hand, sometimes loses its way in the
endless and ironic play of multiple significations.The moral relativism and distancing mechanism of irony combined with the anti-bourgeois impulse of the
avant-garde have often led the postmodern artist, critic, or curator to value
transgression for its own sake. A dramatic example of this tendency, in direct
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confrontation with the Jewish world, was the exhibition “Mirroring Evil: Nazi
Imagery/Recent Art,” held at the Jewish Museum of New York in 2002 and
curated by Norman Kleeblatt.The catalog and wall text defended the exhibition in sophisticated terms; for example, in Lisa Saltzman’s words from the exhibition catalog:
Steeped in the codes and immersed in the strategies of a media-saturated,
commerce-driven world, the work in Mirroring Evil mobilizes billboards
and bar codes, LEGO sets and Prada purses, television and movies to
achieve its artistic ends.Through media and method, the work forthrightly
locates itself in aesthetic terms as coming after. It locates itself as coming not
only after Pop, but also after a subsequent generation of appropriation
artists, among them Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger,
Robert Longo, and Cindy Sherman. Indebted to the assimilative strategies
of the photographic activity of postmodernism, the work in Mirroring Evil,
photographic and otherwise, recapitulates and refines its techniques of
repackaging and recycling, consuming and critiquing the culture it takes as
its relentless subject.23
However, many members of the Jewish community, including myself, found
the emotional flatness and the exhibition’s lack of moral condemnation to be
problematic, if not downright offensive. For us the art failed to “critique the
culture it took as its relentless subject.” Art which mirrors evil in the end may
simply reiterate evil in all its banality and nihilism.
Another problematic triumph of ironic distance was the “Too Jewish?
Challenging Traditional Identities” exhibition in 1996, which also was curated
for the Jewish Museum of New York by Kleeblatt. The work here, with the
notable exceptions of Ken Aptekar, Helene Aylon, and Archie Rand, was particularly engaged with the stereotypes of popular culture and Hollywood and,
in that sense, was similar to other exhibitions at the time that concentrated on
issues of ethnicity, such as the Whitney Museum’s controversial 1995 exhibition “Black Male.” As Donald Kuspit says of the 1996 “Too Jewish?” exhibition, “The artists no doubt believe they are asserting Jewish individuality and
authenticity, but, however unwittingly, they show the American Jew to be as
much of an inauthentic stereotype—taking his or her identity from the collective representation of it—as any other American.There is no questioning of
the cultural cliché of Jewishness, but implicit acceptance of it, suggesting the
meaninglessness of Jewish individuality.”24
If one believes, as many do, that the condition of the Jewish artist is to be
unconsciously alienated or self-alienated, then one would expect an art of
either emotional flatness or anxious expression. For example, as Kuspit notes,
“[Harold] Rosenberg argued that anxiety about identity is ‘the most serious
theme’—indeed, the ultimate ‘metaphysical theme’—in both Jewish life and
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modern art. Such anxiety was at its height after World War II, which is why
many Jews became artists then. Art allowed them to work through their ambivalence about being Jews. They experienced Jewish identity as increasingly
problematic in the modern world. But it is modern to be alienated from one’s
received identity, which made the modern Jewish artist exemplary.”25 Extrapolating Rosenberg’s assessment to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the result is a postmodern Jewish-American art that is polarized between
alienation expressed as self-mocking irony or, alternatively, expression of the
self as an abject and exilic figure, what Richard I. Cohen calls the “images of
Jewish fate” or Judenschmerz (Jewish suffering).26
This polarity between the exilic and the ironic constitutes the extremes of
a continuum that encompasses the artist’s response to Jewish identity and history. In the shtetl, the master of ceremonies, or badkhn, was most prized because he could make his audience laugh and then cry and then laugh again. In
a sense, we are still laughing and crying as we identify either with an ironic
and transgressive postmodernism or with an enduring artistic tradition of Jewish expressive angst. Of course, there is much in the middle as well as at the
poles of this spectrum of attitudes. One also has to ask what kind of art results
from not being alienated from one’s Jewish identity, which seems true of many
artists of my generation as well as of younger generations. What does Jewish
art look like when it is affirmative, not assimilationist? And will it still be
haunted by pre- and post-Holocaust images of loss and exile?
The E xi l i c Fi g ure
The archetypal exilic figure of the Wandering Jew has been reclaimed by
Jewish artists as an allegory of the Diaspora only over the past century. A central tenet concerning Jewish identity in the modern and postmodern world is
that Jews continue to be shaped by the Diaspora and have a fundamentally exilic outlook.This outlook can be viewed positively as a condition that enhances
Jews’ adaptability and empathy for others, or it can have a negative connotation, as in the recurring trope of the rootless cosmopolitan or the victim. In
centuries past this mythic figure has been a bellwether of the attitudes of nonJews toward Jews. For Christianity from the thirteenth century onward, the
Wandering Jew represented a cursed figure representative of a perpetual Fall.
According to the Christian apocrypha, this personage was a porter in Pilate’s
service who struck or taunted Jesus as he was carrying the cross to Golgotha.
Jesus tells the porter to wait for his return, in other words, to wait for the “second coming” and for Judgment Day, thereby condemning the Wandering Jew
to earthly exile and eternal damnation.
There are many Christian versions of the tale. In some, the Wandering Jew
repents and is baptized a Catholic. In all, he is condemned to live forever,
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growing old and then, at 100 years of age, returning to the form of a young
man to repeat the cycle. In the Middle Ages, there were sightings of the Wandering Jew all over Europe. He was described as pathetic and destitute, and as
telling his story in exchange for humble food and lodging. In the nineteenth
century, Romanticism tended to transform the Wandering Jew into a more
tragic and nuanced figure.This new view of him was the inspiration for work
by several important artists, among them the French novelist Eugène Sue and
the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. Sue, who was sympathetic to the
emerging Socialist movement, in particular identified the Wandering Jew with
the working poor. In 1856, French artist Gustave Doré created a defining but
very demeaning set of woodcuts, “The Legend of the Wandering Jew.” At the
turn of the century, Jewish artists working in Poland such as Samuel Hirszenberg and Alfred Nossig produced their own versions of the figure. In that era
of rising political turmoil and increased antisemitism, Nossig recast the image
into that of the “Eternal Jew,” in a 1901 sculpture that contrasts markedly to
Doré’s. As Richard Cohen describes the work: “Nossig’s virile figure stands
erect and proud, his left foot somewhat raised to give the sense of motion. His
countenance is one of intensity and firmness. But what has given this Wandering Jew his strength to wander through lands and centuries is not the sign
of Cain but the Torah scroll he holds close to his heart—the essence of Nossig’s ideological outlook on the source of Jewish survival.”27
The exhibition “The Wandering Jew:Witness to History” (Le Juif Errant:
Un Temoin du Temps), held in 2001–02 at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris, with its extensive survey of images over several centuries, makes
it clear that each depiction of the mythic figure encapsulates the meaning of
the image from the cultural or individual perspective of the maker. In reference to Sue’s romantic image, Eunice Lipton observes:
The positive turn in the Wanderer’s status did not last long. In J. M. Charcot’s famous hospital for mental diseases in Paris . . . Charcot’s student
Henri Meige writes a book called Le Juif errant à La Salpetrière. Etude sur
certains nevropathes voyageurs (The Wandering Jew: A Study of Some Neurotic
Roamers; Paris 1893). As the exhibition flyer has it,“Jews were considered
antisocial, people of pathological instability, incapable of rooting themselves in the societies which welcomed them.”The anti-Dreyfusards produced image after image of the Wanderer seen again as malevolent
traveler, a man with no affiliation and no loyalty, a danger to society.The
Nazis did the same.28
But the exhibition, as well as other works of art, also demonstrates that
twentieth-century Jewish artists like Chagall and R. B. Kitaj have tried to take
this archetypal exilic figure and reclaim it. It is this recuperative ability of art
168
that gives it its power to transform the meaning of an image.29 This contrasts
interestingly with postmodernist appropriation that tends to drain meaning
from the work of art rather than amplify it. Again according to Lipton:
Only one painting in the exhibition troubles the cliché, and that is R. B.
Kitaj’s [ Jewish Rider], a large work (5′ × 5′) painted around 1985. A dapper man of middle age, vividly dressed in red trousers and shirt, yellow
pull-over, white jacket and shoes, sprawls confidently, hand on hip, in a
train compartment. . . . Out of the window is a smoke-stack.A cross rises
behind it.The Holocaust is here, out the window, and the man is melancholy, but the painting is not. It is exuberant and sensual. Color, texture,
brushstroke erupt with desire and mischief. . . . And the Jew as pitiful
victim vanishes.30 (Figure 1)
So the polarity between victim and jokester is bridged, even reintegrated,
in this painting by Kitaj.This is not an accident, as Kitaj has been preoccupied
with this issue for a long time and has written very eloquently about what he
calls “Diasporism”:
For the moment, Diasporism is my own School, neither particularly unhappy practice nor proud persuasion. I would simply say it is an unsettled
mode of art-life, performed by a painter who feels out of place much of
the time, even when he is lucky enough to stay at work in his room, unmolested through most of his days. His Diasporism, to the extent that it
marks his painting, relies on a mind-set which is often occupied with vagaries of history, kin, homelands, the scattering of his people. . . . It is not
for me to spell out the quite various Diasporic conditions proliferating
everywhere now, except to say that Jews do not own Diaspora; they are
not the only Diasporists by a long shot.They are merely mine.31
We Jews in postmodern America are the inheritors of a Diasporic tradition. It comes to us in myriad ways: the stories of our immigrant parents or
grandparents, the slight or greater tension between Jewish and non-Jewish contexts, or even a sometimes troubling sense of difference between Israelis and
ourselves. American Jews’ relationship to antisemitism is conditioned by their
particular generation.When Senator Joseph Lieberman was first discussed as a
vice presidential candidate, Jews in the United States over sixty-five were concerned and worried. If the Democrats did not win, “we” would be blamed.
People of my generation had some anxiety but were mostly excited and proud.
Younger Jews did not always understand what a landmark this nomination
constituted, but in general their outlook was without second thoughts (although their reactions might be distinctly different now, post–9/11 and
post–Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ).
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1. R. B. Kitaj, Jewish Rider, 1984–85. Copyright © R. B. Kitaj. Courtesy Marlborough
Gallery, New York.
Most important, the exilic figure is a soulful and deeply familiar connection to a collective past, be it inflected by Yiddish, Ladino, or some other cultural overlay. However, the exilic figure always had another possible aspect, a
skeptical, humorous, or ironic edge, all of which related to Jewish survival.
Jewish humor and creativity is tonic and gives us resilience and flexibility in
difficult or desperate situations.This is the positive side to irony, which, as already noted, at its extreme has a distancing and alienating effect that can lead
to emotional futility and disillusionment. Kuspit has commented in relation to
postmodernism, and what he regards as the pseudo-avant-garde, that it confirms “the decadence of criticality and the ‘redesign’ of the already known by
ironic appropriation of it. It has become increasingly difficult to imagine
questions that would truly threaten the bourgeois status quo. Irony is no
longer really critical, or rather it is a comfortable form of criticality, a criticality that causes no self-questioning.”32 In other words, the art world in general
has become quite comfortable with, if not dependent on, a patina of irony or
criticality that confers postmodern cachet upon the art work’s style, while it
tends to negate or undermine the artist’s content.
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Which brings us to what for me is the most difficult and troubling question:Why all the warnings over the years, continuing to the present, from wellmeaning Jewish gallery dealers, fellow artists, and curators, usually couched as
something like,“For your own good, it would be better if your work were a little less Jewish”? Interestingly, I was never told this by a non-Jew, although some
may have thought the same thing and not been able to express it as freely as my
Jewish colleagues. Wendy Wasserstein commented bitterly, “One thing that is
scary is that with Jewish culture . . . you get categorized and somehow diminished and it’s always by other Jews.‘Now it’s a little too Jewish,’‘It doesn’t have
big themes.’You could never say that about a southern play, an Irish play, an
African-American play. But a Jewish play? Yes.”33 But is it really true that I and
others would benefit from making art that is less Jewish, or if Jewish, then more
ironically so? And if this is the case, why? The historical roots of this tension
over expressing one’s Jewish identity, beliefs, or inspiration should now be clear.
In America, we have been rewarded for the suppression of our difference by
our inclusion and even predominance in the wider national cultural arena.
Even while remaining Jews in our private lives, the principal strategy during
both the modernist and postmodernist periods has been acculturation, and in
some cases assimilation, but in almost all instances a certain emotional distance.
In contrast to other minorities, however, there has been no appreciable “Jewish
is beautiful” campaign, and when we concentrated on difference it was more
likely to involve gender or sexual orientation or invoke other racial or ethnic
minorities. In the “Too Jewish?” exhibition, varying degrees of irony and humor
were the permissible modes, but not affirmation and celebration. Perhaps the
fear remains that if Jews engage sentiment we will become sentimental, but
every direction has its dangers. Tapping deep feelings does not automatically
condemn one to nostalgia.
American Jews seem to live in that place between an uneasy embrace of
Judaism or Jewish identity and a fear of erasure and disappearance through assimilation or annihilation.The pervasiveness of this tension may explain why
the art world tends to punish those who are focused on the expression of their
Judaism in an unambiguous and relatively un-ironic way. Unambiguously embracing one’s Judaism gives one some opportunities but it excludes many
others. In any case, the art world is full of prejudices and irrational exclusions.
It is difficult, for example, for an artist from “fly-over America” (anywhere but
the coasts and Chicago) to gain acceptance, and people will admit to an East
Coast bias in terms that they would be ashamed to use if they were talking
about race or gender.
This leads to a Catch-22 situation: large mainstream museums, among
whose boards of directors and curators Jews are well represented, tend not to
show exhibitions with Jewish content because that is considered the province
of Jewish museums, while Jewish institutions look for the primary validation
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of the artists from secular institutions. It is true that whatever part of an artist’s
identity is most culturally distinctive tends to dominate people’s perception of
that artist. (Ask people who are half-African American and half-Caucasian
how they are categorized, for example.) So even if only a small portion of
one’s work draws on Jewish themes, this is the part that is remembered.
Interestingly, the tensions between the exilic and the ironic and between
identity and assimilation tend to unfold somewhat differently depending on
the context. Judging from a conference on “Visions of Jewish Meaning: A Visual Artist’s Retreat,” organized by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture (NFJC) in late October 2001, the majority of New Yorkers still were far
more at ease with irony than spirituality, although Tobi Kahn would certainly
be the exception that proved the rule. (Kahn has created a set of ritual objects
without any of the usual Jewish symbols, such as the Lion of Judah or the
Magen David. Instead, it is their ancient forms and surface that suggest a timeless religion [Figure 2].)
A real dialogue between different points of view did not take place at the
retreat, but ideally it will happen at another time and place.34 In comparison,
the Los Angeles Jewish Artist’s Initiative (JAI), a partnership program of the
Jewish Community Foundation and the University of Southern California
(USC) Casden Institute and the USC School of Fine Arts, has been very accepting of diverse attitudes among its participants toward Judaism.These attitudes have varied from disinterest to total embrace. For example, Channa
Horowitz has been working for many years in a minimalist genre, and her attitude toward identity is strictly modernist. In other words, she feels that her
artwork should not reflect her Jewish identity in any way. Occupying the middle ground, Victor Raphael has incorporated his background as a Sephardic
Jew and his interest in the kabbalah as an underpinning for his multimedia
work, though not as its primary focus. On the other hand, an observant Jew
like photographer Bill Aron uses Jewish ritual, identity, and practice as the
main subject of his work. All this variety, together with more tolerant attitudes, makes the Los Angeles dialogue very rich and diverse.
What seems clear in my many encounters with Jewish artists from across
the country is that the artistic impulse of Judaism has moved away from a
focus on hiddur mitzvah (a mitzvah, or blessed act, which should be performed
in the most aesthetic way possible). In other words, there is an expansion from
the making of art as a way of celebrating and adorning the liturgy to making
art that is also a way of knowing, a way of creating meaning. This paradigm
shift in Jewish art to an affirmation of knowledge involves a more critical dialogue with the art’s distinctive cultural origins. Like Jewish study, the most
profound experience of art can combine and integrate the ethical, emotional,
spiritual, historical, aesthetic, and intellectual aspects of ourselves. In a very
Jewish way it can provide an avenue for commentary and interpretation. Jews
172
R u t h We i s b e r g
2. Toby Kahn, Saphyr, 2002. Photo © Tobi Kahn 2002, courtesy the Jewish Museum,
New York.
are, after all, the “people of the book”; we understand the power of the word,
but visual art can also create midrash. It, too, can shade, extend, question, and
renew our history and meaning in the world we live in now.
Without apology, my own work as an artist embraces sources as diverse as
biblical story, Dante, Roman and Renaissance fresco cycles, and Jewish
history—most recently the clandestine immigration of the remnants of European Jewry to Palestine in the mid-1940s (Figure 3). Jewish modes of thought
about the nature of time and memory influence my depictions of subject matter that is not ostensibly Jewish.When my source was Canto V of Dante’s Inferno,
I was not interested in its Christian attitudes toward “sin,” but it did provide
173
3. Ruth Weisberg, The Floating World, 2004. Courtesy Jack Ruthberg Fine Arts.
me an opportunity to explore Jewish ideas concerning eternity.The audience
that experiences the work, as with the original Dante, can project onto it their
own thoughts and preoccupations.
Jewish life in the United States seems poised between a great Renaissance
of culture and scholarship, a new vibrancy in our observance, and the creation
of institutions and community on one side; and on the other, the risk of the
homogenization of Jewish identity and culture into the great stew of American life. In the greatest of all ironies, the very tolerance and permissiveness that
permits us to flourish also allows us to disappear. Irving Greenberg, founder of
174
the National Jewish Center for Leadership and Learning, has written in regard
to the question of a Jewish Renaissance or decline:
Literally both are correct, meaning that the down curve is the bleeding
away of marginal, less rooted Jews. I think that’s probably the dominant
trend, percentage-wise. But the counter trend, which wasn’t so visible
until the last few years, is this renewal and rebuilding, this renaissance from
within. To me the big question has been, at least for the last twenty or
thirty years, at what point do the curves intersect? It’s a race. I see all
around these signs of renewal and renaissance, but I also think it’s overwhelmingly clear that there’s substantial erosion.35
I personally believe that while at risk, Jewish art and culture could enter a
golden age in the United States in this new century. Even given all the attractions and distractions of our postmodern times, we still have this incredibly
fertile source of story and metaphor, history and image, which we are free to
explore as never before, especially as visual artists. By overcoming the reticence to incorporate our Jewish identity, we could benefit greatly from the
variety of ways in which Jewish history, religion, and culture can be tapped as
rich and meaningful sources for artistic work. I have to hope that postpostmodernism will bring with it a pendulum swing toward the purposefulness of acquiring knowledge and creating culture, and that the quest for what
is human and what is sacred will be renewed by our exploration of the rich
possibilities inherent in a Jewish cultural spectrum that encompasses both the
exilic and the ironic.
Note s
1. Cecil Roth, “Jewish Art and Artists Before Emancipation,” in Jewish Art: An Illustrated History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 498.
2. Ian Buruma, “Killing Iraq with Kindness,” New York Times, March 17, 2004: A25.
3. Emily Bilski, “Introduction,” Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture 1890–1918
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 4–5.
4. Ibid., 5.
5. Frederic V. Grunfeld, Prophets without Honor: A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein
and Their World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), 5.
6. Margaret Olin, The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 160.
7. Ibid., 160.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. What a terrible irony that both Nietzsche and Jung themselves have been
associated—Nietzsche in his posthumous appropriations, and Jung through his own
actions—with the Nazis.
11. Matthew Baigell, Jewish Artists in New York: The Holocaust Years (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
12. Olin, The Nation, 161.
13. Ibid., 163.
175
14. This is Greenberg’s translation. “Desh” actually means grass or ground cover of
some type.
15. Olin, The Nation, 172, 173.
16. Donald Judd,“Barnett Newman,” in Modern Art and Modernism:A Critical Anthology,
ed. F. Frascina and C. Harrison (New York: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1982), 131.
17. Ruth Weisberg, “Twentieth Century Rhetoric: Enforcing Originality and Distancing the Past,” in The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity, ed. Elaine K. Gazda (Ann Arbor: American
Academy in Rome, University of Michigan Press, 2002), 33.
18. Among the most prominent architects were Robert Venturi, Louis Kahn, Michael
Graves, Frank Gehry, and Charles Moore. The leading French intellectuals included
Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Roland
Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Jean Baudrillard (as well as the American Fredric Jameson).
19. Marshall Berman,“Postmodernism,” in The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World,
ed. Joel Krieger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 686.
20. Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards A Theory of Postmodernism,” in
Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and
Paul Wood (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 1992, 2003), 1026.
21. Ibid., 1027.
22. See Susan Handelman, The Slayers of Moses:The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in
Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), for a very
thorough and detailed exploration of this topic.
23. Lisa Saltzman, “Avant-garde and Kitsch Revisited: On the Ethics of Representation,” in Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Jewish Museum, Rutgers University Press, 2001), 54–55.
24. Donald Kuspit, The Rebirth of Painting in the Late Twentieth Century. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 203–204.
25. Ibid., 209.
26. Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
27. Ibid., 229.
28. Eunice Lipton, “The Wandering Jew,” Tikkun 17, no. 3 (May/June 2002): 71–72.
29. The term recuperative is being used here in its “therapeutic” sense of healing or
making better, rather than in its pejorative postmodern sense of preserving or reinforcing the status quo.
30. Lipton,“The Wandering Jew.”
31. R. B. Kitaj, “First Diasporist Manifesto,” in Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing
Africans and Jews, ed. Nicolas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2000), 34–35.
32. Donald Kuspit, The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1993), 102.
33. Richard A. Siegel, ed., Commission Report on the Future of Jewish Culture in America:
Preliminary Findings and Observations (New York: National Foundation for Jewish
Culture, 2002), 102. This is a fascinating and valuable summary of the attitudes of
thirty-two distinguished artists, writers, and leaders of Jewish cultural institutions,
such as Allegra Goodman, Tony Kushner, Joan Rosenbaum, and Michael Walzer.
I would note, however, that thirty of the thirty-two hail from an area bounded by
Boston to the north and Princeton to the south.
34. According to the NFJC’s participant list, of the thirty individuals at the Conference
for the Visual Arts, two were from Canada, one from Vienna, Austria, four from the
Midwest, and four from the West Coast.The rest were from the East Coast with fifteen New Yorkers composing the largest group.
35. Siegel, Commission, 57.
Observant Jews and the
Photographic Arena of Looks
MacDonald Moore and Deborah Dash Moore
Since the Depression, Jews have filled the ranks of professional photographers in the United States. Recently several scholars have suggested that work by these American Jews constitutes a discourse or school.
Our contribution to this conversation examines photographic engagements
with passing, the stage business of getting by.We focus on three matters: everyday dynamics of the look as given and taken; photography as a series of nominations and promotions that begin even as the shutter is being pressed; and
the harnessing of that privileged stare with which people view photos.1 While
exploring implications of these issues, we have navigated uneven grounds of
comparison. Our preliminary observations were tested by the awareness among
younger photographers that they faced new challenges; they experienced
major demographic shifts in American Jewish life as personal, generational
events.Yet Jews with cameras have continued to be caught up with the subject(ivity) of hiding and seeking and showing off. Their work has helped to
renew photography as an endeavor requiring shared risk.
Photo scholar Jane Livingston named the “New York School” of photography and located it between 1936 and 1963.2 Around 1936, photographic
horizons broadened dramatically in the United States.The Roosevelt Administration’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) publicity project extended the
reach of advocacy photography; the left-wing New York Photo League was
formed; Henry Luce launched Life magazine; and Harper’s Bazaar underwent
a fundamental graphic and strategic makeover. For thirty years Life was the big
show for photojournalists. Unsurprisingly, various photographers known for
their street photography, including Lisette Model, Robert Frank, and William
Klein, failed to catch on at the magazine.3 More surprisingly, some of them found
an audience in fashion periodicals,“our art magazines,” said Klein. Only at publications like Harper’s could “you see pictures of Brassai or Cartier Bresson.”4
176
The Photographic Arena of Looks
177
Early on, the New York School included redemptive projects that enlisted
photographers as witnesses and reformers.They made exhilarating, unsettling
contributions to street photography, reframing the routine improvisations of
being among other people in the city. After World War II, their work became
increasingly alive to the speed and noise of New York.The New York School
began to draw scrutiny commensurate with its growing influence on photography across the United States. Both museums and upper-class periodicals
made space for this new sort of urban imagery, widely considered ironic and
tough and yet not altogether unromantic. By the 1960s photographers were
also opening their eyes to gendered class anxieties, particularly to family disarticulations associated with urban sprawl. Pictures show people trying not to
look ill at ease around their homes, in and out of their clothes, on the town.
We follow these overlapping urban and suburban stories into the 1990s. Influenced by traditions of the New York School, photography continues to cultivate its potential to intensify the self-consciousness of “seeing and being
seen.”5 The work, including our effort as viewers, shows itself, reawakening us
to our involvements as mediated beings.This essay examines an extended era
in American photography, and tries to understand how these kinds of creative
provocations may have been historically more than nominally Jewish.
Most New York School photographers were Jewish. A relatively large
percentage of women advanced through the ranks. These were generally
working-class people; but some, born wealthy, as adults hustled assignments to
get by. Many were born and raised in New York City. Others moved into the
city from elsewhere in the Northeast, or from mid-Atlantic or midwestern
states. Immigrants made up an important contingent. Increasingly American
Jewish photographers who came of age after World War II grew up middle
class, many in West Coast urban or suburban homes. Most went to college.
From the New York School we examine photos by Lisette Model, Lou
Stoumen, and Diane Arbus.Then we discuss contemporary photography in the
United States, focusing on work by Nan Goldin, Lauren Greenfield, and Larry
Sultan. Following leads by scholars Max Kozloff and Alan Trachtenberg, we
outline ongoing implications of this generationally complex photographic efflorescence among American Jews. We do not posit among photographers an
ideal Jew or Judaic standard.We remain unconvinced that any photo can be essentially Jewish with regard to subject or subjectivity.6 Emphatically, however,
our story does involve wise, irreverent, shy, and clueless Jewish photographers.
As an ad for the video release of Larry David’s sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm says:
“Make Yourself Uncomfortable.”
People give off looks like scents and deploy looks like masks. And they
look: sniffing, prying, but also imagining. Photography can restage such layered, fraught interactions for each viewer’s privileged gaze. And occasionally
photos pull spectators out of the stands and onto the playing field.“I want the
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M ac D onal d M oore and D e borah Dash M oore
people in my pictures to stare back,” writes Nan Goldin.7 Or as Peter Schjeldahl observes of Diane Arbus, “She didn’t gaze at her subjects; she induced
them to gaze at her.”8 When photos themselves seem to stare back, photography can be strengthened as an enterprise of collective engagements.
Max Kozloff has suggested that the photo may be a site of representational
contest.“In a photograph, what can be known, felt, and seen exists in characteristically
unstable and surprising relationships. On that level, photographs keep us offbalance, a condition which, oddly enough, renews their narrative interest, almost as experience itself charges our personal consciousness.”9 “Photography,”
writes art scholar John Berger, “is the process of rendering observation selfconscious.”10 A photo records the decision to preserve a record of an event as
important; “it uses the given event to explain its recording.”11 But Kozloff and
Berger have analyzed photography as it can be, not as it is when we take photographs at face value. In practice, notes Berger,“the simplicity with which we
usually treat the experience is wasteful and confusing.”12 This lost opportunity
is part of a wider problem; in a mediated society the presumption of representational transparency can be narcotic. Kozloff now suggests that we reexamine
an important class of photographic practices that sometimes heighten perceptual self-consciousness through constructive destabilization.Works by American Jewish photographers continue to keep us off balance.
P rov i si onal Ci ty, C onti ng e nt S i g h ts
For reasons aesthetic and sociological we begin in New York; the “provisional city,” Henry James called it.13 In February 2002 the exhibit “New York:
Capital of Photography” opened at the Jewish Museum. Location, location,
location, as space and place mavens might say. Curated by Kozloff, the exhibit
and its accompanying catalog argued for the centrality of New York City to
the history of American photography. Kozloff examined photography that effectively staked a claim for the city’s significance not only based on quantity
(his catalog opens: “New York has probably drawn more attention from the
camera than any other city in the world”) but also on the exceptional quality
of its legions of “foot” photographers: men and women who saw the city from
its streets and appreciated the often abrasive character of urban encounters.
Among those legions were many Jews, because the city was the largest Jewish
city in the world and because Jews were entranced by the camera’s (and the
city’s) possibilities. Drawn initially to witness the city in its multiplicity, Jewish
photographers engaged in a fierce dialogue with New York. They “set the
terms of discourse, blending into it a tone of activism and melancholy that was
recognizable, yet ambivalent and skittish.”14
Kozloff devotes the final chapter of his long catalog essay to what he calls
a “Jewish sensibility” as expressed in New York photography. Jewish photogra-
179
phers, he suggests, understand the city “not so much as a place to be described
as a setting that poses a question: what is the relatedness of seer and seen, as influenced by the social orders represented by the city?” Kozloff suggests that
efforts to answer this question produce a Jewish style of photography. Characteristically these photographs participate in an ongoing search for solidarity,
understood not as a fact “to be taken for granted,” but rather as “a created and
always liquid condition, reversible as a tide.”15
There is no kit of essential ethnic attributes, though Kozloff does point to
Jewish engagements with modernity and, accordingly, to modes of diasporic
consciousness. We use the concept of ethnicity as an umbrella under which
people who refer to one another as “Jew” can be usefully discussed together.
An ethnic collectivity is known from within through cultural patterns of association: for example, religious, linguistic, national, historical, and artistic. Class
variables also shape these relationships. Ethnicity should no longer be used as
a euphemism for race, the mask of blood.16
Kozloff quotes the photographer William Klein, native New Yorker and
expatriate living in Paris, who jokingly told Anthony Lane for a New Yorker interview: “I think that there are two kinds of photography—Jewish photography and goyish photography. If you look at modern photography, you find, on
the one hand, the Weegees, the Diane Arbuses, the Robert Franks—funky
photographs. And then you have the people who go out in the woods. Ansel
Adams, Weston. It’s like black and white jazz.”17 Klein’s ethnic binary resembles Lenny Bruce’s division of America into Jewish and goyish.“To me, if you
live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish,” the stand-up comedian
assured his listeners. “It doesn’t matter even if you’re Catholic. If you live in
Butte, Montana, you’re going to be goyish even if you’re Jewish.”18 Klein and
Bruce use Jewishness as an encomium to describe a non-exclusive composite
sensibility of New Yorkish Jews. Such riffs on Jewishness don’t assert ideas or
attitudes abstractly considered; they’re about style.
Klein’s analogy to “black and white jazz” references the fitness of manner
through which expression can be characterized and graded.19 In conversation we
weigh gestures and judge the gait of music in the voice. Otherwise, beyond what
someone says, how would we know what she means, where she’s coming from?
We may not be altogether ingenuous or clear as we negotiate life face-to-face,
but faith in the transparency of representations, including photographs, is almost
always misplaced. New York School photos, even those conventionally seen as
windows, act also like sentient mirrors.They complicate perspective by engaging
the dynamics of looking as their subject. Style in such work subverts customary
conceits of photographic representation: synecdoche as trophy, human experience skinned and framed.20 In these “funky” photos viewers may feel exposed,
opened up to the risks of seeing and being seen. Even Jewish photographers
180
without social agendas often involve us in the friction of passing, in the frisson
of triggered sightlines, in our failure to imagine responsibly one another.
A picture in which we perceive our own gazing opens out the rules of visual interaction. The relational matrix of looks active in these photographs
sometimes extends palpably outward, unsettling our ability to respond routinely to social spaces now contingently represented. Many viewers associate an
emotional untidiness with such images, perceiving them variously as aggressive,
anarchic, or liberating. Jews may also feel a curious sense of confirmation, not
worth mentioning in mixed company, that even when things are going well
one should keep track of exit signs. Kozloff refers to this as “carrying on, normatively, in a mode of displacement.”21
These displacements are not essentially Jewish; they apply to the condition of modernity itself. Nevertheless, Jews experience them a bit differently
because every Jew is tethered to a spectral identity not his own: “the Jew.”
There are many ways to be a Jew or Christian or Calabrian. The Jew, on the
other hand, is a special sort of problem-solving entity, even absent actual
Jews.22 “The Jewish Question” is a misnomer of convenience; it refers to “The
Jewish Answer,” which requires that the Jew stand by to be cast out or offered
up. Accordingly, Jews of many persuasions, even unpersuaded Jews, learn as
Jews to read looks addressed to the Jew.This shadow play may be a footnote to
Baudelaire’s defining commentary on “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent” in modern life and its representations; but it is our own footnote.23
Before Baudelaire, yet much later than Plato and the Torah, and two hundred years before the simulacrum, alterity, and the gaze, Rousseau suggested that
in realms from politics to the arts, representation would promise transparent relationships even as it made them increasingly difficult.24 Devotees of democracy
and photography alike want to believe otherwise. Photography is a striptease
that never delivers but keeps us interested—interested, like art perhaps, in a formally disinterested sort of way. Look, but don’t touch.Therefore, as the photographer Robert Capa advised, “If your photograph isn’t good enough, you
weren’t close enough.”25 Which brings us from Rousseau, via Kant, to Walter
Benjamin, who suggested that photography threatened the power of art to enforce distance even in intimacy.26 As inherited from nineteenth-century usage,
the aura, or quality of presence of an artwork, constitutes perceptual authority;
it embodies authenticity as an untouchable uniqueness. Like a monotheistic
God, the aura can tolerate neither the ambitions of the copy nor its failures. It
seemed inevitable to Benjamin that reproductive media would diminish the sacred distance of aura, ending its reign.27
A Lice nse to Stare
Actually, both art and media technology continue to maintain their authority by pulling us closer while holding us away.We cannot reach through a
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flat image, nor expand its frame, nor restore duration to a snapshot. By way of
compensation the photo conventionally grants each viewer a license to stare.
Yet the stare that would dominate nevertheless binds viewer to image.Within
this cleaving photography structures the negotiation of sense through tropes
of its own genesis: for example, as gift, evidence, appropriation, or construction. Such reflexive acts of choosing are embodied as style, in a process guided
by the photographer but never wholly settled.
These tropes have phenomenological, aesthetic, and ethical implications.
Perhaps a camera is “The Pencil of Nature,” as photo pioneers liked to say. 28
Photographic self-portraits by Nature are gifts to us. How better to explain the
uncanny “tiny spark of accident” for which photography (and then cinematography) became famous: the leaf-in-the-wind effect.A photo often reveals facts,
including truths of agency, unfiltered by the agendas of human perception;
hence Benjamin’s notion of an “optical unconscious.”29 These ideas are usually
associated with a media specificity (technological exceptionalism) commonly
thought to distinguish photography from painting. Or a photograph may be
documentary, a form of evidence like a fingerprint. Clues left are found, saved,
and developed. Or a photograph can be thought of as taken, the act of an
ethnographer, hunter, voyeur, or thief.Viewers of either forensic or appropriated artifacts may feel implicated, responsible.30 Or possibly the real photographer makes photographs. This idea has been used to emphasize continuities
between photography and painting, thereby underlining the photographer’s responsibility as agent or author. Nature photographer Ansel Adams insisted that
he created photographs; his Olympian landscapes were neither gifts nor thefts.
Yet Lisette Model, a street photographer whose “snapshots” were both gifts and
lifted goods, also made pictures. Complex printing manipulations helped
Model create the cockeyed buzz and heft of her New York images.
The institutional process by which only relatively few photographs survive
is also the story of photographs being made.We are unlikely to imagine that the
authority of a photograph rests on its distance from us. And yet photographs
that achieve recognition often maintain their aura because they are stand-offish
and, though reproduced many times, rare.Typically, exposures from a roll-film
camera are killed on the contact sheet; they never become photographs. The
skill behind the shutter’s click and the luck that admits unnoticed facts: these
are important players in an even larger enterprise of promotion. This tough
game, with some pictures selectively pushed forward and extracted for advancement, constitutes a contingent structure of photographic representation.
Necessarily many thousands of shutter clicks get represented by several dozen
prints in a gallery or museum show; likewise, one photograph reproduced millions of times often represents hundreds of unused negatives and a lifetime of
seeing. The aura of each image, its value and authority, is created by this process.31 There are many possible responses to a photograph in a gallery or a
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magazine, but they are influenced by the authority of chosenness associated
with each image. Photos are both chosen and choosy. A photo records its own
selectivity relative to what it includes and excludes; a photograph published or
on exhibit refines its virtues relative to other pictures whose company it does
and does not keep. Such nested rounds of selection competitively reshape photographic style, teaching us to see with new eyes. And whose eyes are these?
The question isn’t so much whether people are acculturated to differential temporal and spatial grammars (recall Thoreau on the space required to
discuss lofty ideas) nor even whether the textures of relationship can be pictured (as in photos of Jews).The representational issues here also require that
we ask how photographers’ processes may unsettle our perceptions of social
space in time (in photos by Jews, for example). Ideally, one might sketch out a
Boolean map of overlapping photographic discourses. It is not easy to interrogate artifacts left us by people who imagine that with a little light they can
materialize the rippling ether of our passing.
Alan Trachtenberg, a scholar of American culture and photography, contemplates the issue of a “Jewish sensibility” by asking if there might be such a
thing as a “Jewish eye” in photography.32 The question “both intrigues and
amuses,” and perhaps offends; it invites further consideration of whether people—
including Jews—come to see the world differently. Trachtenberg knows the
danger of this terrain. For centuries, “a Jew’s eye” could refer to the alleged
power of Jews to enter into the pied richness of the world and reduce it to one
denominator. “Among Gentiles, Jews were thought to know better the ‘worth’
of things.”33 “On the Jewish Question” by Marx exploited this stereotype as
journalistic fodder; his analysis of exchange valuation cultivated extant beliefs
about representation as a universal solvent.34 Through a kind of alchemy, Svengali’s “penetrating look” was deemed to alter what it gazed upon, much the way
photography changes an object “or person into a fixed image, turns it into
something it was not.”35 Trachtenberg wonders whether Jews in the diaspora
may have developed their own way of seeing,“Jew-haters aside.” Perhaps “documentary or street or reportage photography as a vocation” may serve as “a way
of focusing your attention.”36 The need for “connecting and disconnecting at
the same time” seems to be as important to the Jewish photographers of the last
several decades as it was for Jewish photographers of the New York School.37
P hoto L eag ue to Fash i on S c e ne
An activist, collectivist photo club, the New York Photo League got its start
during the Great Depression in 1936 and succumbed during the anticommunist investigations of the Cold War in 1951.38 In the words of a 1942 FBI report, league members made “documentary pictures of social significance.”39
Most of its members came from the working class; many were children of Jewish immigrants.Their method often involved groups of photographers working
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together. The commitment of Photo League members to street photography
and the documentary mode of presentation grew out of their desire to effect
social change and stimulate communal self-awareness.They wanted collectively
to be a community’s mirror.40 Street documentary involved a new relationship
between photographers and subjects.The availability of smaller roll-film cameras with faster lenses and film emulsions liberated photographers from the tripod. “A new style began to emerge,” writes Kozloff, “grabbed, notational, and
intrusive.”41 These photographers documented the lives of those they considered most vulnerable to the riptides of capitalism in a multiethnic metropolis.
Few were interested in trying to represent Jews as such, though they photographed many street corner Jews. Indeed, up until the 1980s photos by Jews
of Jews as Jews were typically portraits, with ritual objects included as Judaic
signs. Such photographers as Lisette Model, Robert Frank, William Klein,
Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz, and Mary Ellen Mark
combined elements of street, portrait, and sometimes landscape genres to
develop characteristically fluid, expressive styles. Changing editorial and advertising needs in magazine markets supported the rise of this documentary
portraiture.
The disappearance of the Photo League in 1951 coincided with the belated entry of Jews into a rapidly expanding advertising industry and with the
accelerating emergence of photography as the medium through which the
fashion industry promoted its high-end products. Jews have long worked in all
branches of clothing manufacture; but their “rag trades” were mostly separate
from the non-Jewish industries of high fashion design and promotion. These
barriers began to break down after World War II. During the 1960s a new
group of fashion designers, led by Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Donna
Karen, emerged from the growing leisurewear sector of the ready-to-wear
garment industry to accelerate the development of fashion beyond “the aspirations of the haute bourgeoisie.”42 It didn’t hurt job prospects in photography
that Jews were increasingly employable as art directors in ad agencies after
World War II. And as it happened, Jewish photographers, notably Man Ray,
Leon Levinstein, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, and William Klein, often grew
up in families involved with the apparel trades. Nevertheless, the transformation of American fashion photography was not a straightforward story of
American Jewish clothing designers emerging from a Jewish manufacturing
industry and then pulling market representations in their wake.
By 1935 pressures for ongoing innovation already drove magazine publishing; editors would have continually to reinvent visual strategies to refresh
the courtship between editorial and advertising content. In the growing field
of fashion photography, passive tableaux were giving way to encounters. Models and cameras started to move; even rules of looking came unmoored. The
look stared back at us, checking us out, making us uncomfortable about our
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own looks, needy for new clothes. Early on, movies were an important part of
this story. Fashion photographs are shot in the “directorial mode,” to use A. D.
Coleman’s filmic phrase.43 And until the Korean War, Hollywood provided a
common vocabulary of glamour associated with movie stars and, increasingly,
with cycles of film genres.
Curators of a 2004 New York Museum of Modern Art show on fashion
photography argue that “glamour and melodrama, the chief sources of cinema’s mass appeal, became a kind of visual short-hand that fashion photography could easily appropriate to amplify the impact of its own narratives.”
While fashion photography appropriated cinematic conventions, apparently
the fashion industry set agendas.“Fashion photography has followed the move
of the fashion industry from the salon to the street.”44 In any case, early policy
changes at fashion periodicals courted commerce with the enemy. Under the
sign of commodity glamour, couture and mass culture diddled one another,
feigning horror all the while. In the larger picture,American fashion, film, and
photography have ridden waves of mimetic longing that course back and
forth across perceived class, ethnic, gender, and generational differences.
Editors and art directors of fashion periodicals wanted to ply their audience
with new experiences and moods presented with graphic theatricality. Not all
photographs in such magazines depicted couture; more generally cutting-edge
art photos were used to help set the tone of a publication, its range of reference.
American fashion magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and American Vogue found
themselves looking for photographers whose work would, through contrast,
complement fashion conceits and, through a modishly wide range of cultural
reference, compliment the egos of readers.45 The goal from a publishing perspective was to stir people, make them feel sophisticated, tune their mood.The
photos should seem cinematic, contemporary, street smart, or all at once.Among
photographers whom editors associated with these qualities, many were more or
less Jewish: Man Ray (Philadelphia, born Emmanuel Radnitsky), Martin
Munkacsi (Hungary, born Martin Marmostein),Weegee (Austrian/Polish, born
Usher Felig), Lisette Model (Vienna, born Elise Amelie Felice Stern), Robert
Frank (Zurich), William Klein (New York), Richard Avedon (New York), and
Diane Arbus (New York, born Diane Nemerov).46 Jewish photographers were
treated as a resource for the industry in part because their pictures were perceived as intensely yet irreverently engaged with the sensation of American
diversity.
Arm’s Le ng th
Lisette Model (born 1901) came essentially unknown to the United States.
Her mother was French and Catholic, her father was Viennese Italian and Jewish. Anxious about the Nazis, Model and her husband, Evsa (a painter and
graphic artist, and a Russian-born Jew), came to visit New York in 1938 and
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1. Lisette Model, Coney Island Bather. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
stayed.47 Searching for darkroom work, Model showed her portfolio to Alexey
Brodovitch, art director at Harper’s Bazaar. He and editor Carmel Snow
thought that her photographs could be useful in their campaign to enlarge the
domain of fashion by playfully exploring the terrain beyond the scene, as it
would later be called.48 Model’s photographs often reexamined glamour itself.
Her first work appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1941. Coney Island
Bather (Figure 1) shows a frame-filling husky woman in a bathing suit, standing hands on knees in the surf. She is relaxed, smiling, and appears to be looking straight at someone. Model’s camera peers in at an angle; the viewpoint is
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nonconfrontational and gives a good feel for the kinetics of the woman’s pose.
The framing is apparently unambiguous, but odd. Bending forward, the woman
presents a low subject. Even though the camera angles a bit upward at her, the
horizon line of the ocean is high in the picture because the beach slopes. We
have the sense of looking slightly upward and not upward. Furthermore, given
the extreme tightness of Model’s framing, we ought to feel closer to the
woman: her feet are planted wide, right at the edges of the frame, and her head
nearly bumps the top of the frame. Nevertheless, there is little sense that we are
intruding into this woman’s space. Unlike many images by Weegee or William
Klein, Model’s photographs seldom portray her subjects as under assault.This is
a matter of the photographer’s interpersonal manner but also of her technique.
Model’s work procedures often emphasize a sense of distance even in intimacy;
her pictures engage us with a characteristically photographic “aura.”
She was not a documentary photographer, despite her involvement with
the New York Photo League. Model’s fashion, street, and nightlife photography
is personal and expressionist, formal and modernist. The twin-lens Rolleiflex
camera she favored early in her career is held above the waist, which put her
camera lens little more than a meter off the ground. It is a child’s point of view,
in the hands of a grown woman alert to the drama of the everyday. She liked to
think of her pictures as snapshots, images she valued for their “apparent disorder and imperfection.”49 She often treated her “snapshots” as source material to
be transformed through extensive darkroom manipulation. By cropping, rotating, and tilting her images while printing, Model suggests paradoxical perspectives. She seems to pull her subjects closer, focusing our attention; at the same
time she holds them at a distance that is both emotional, as reflected in their
demeanors, and optical, due to the slight perceptual foreshortening of space
that can occur during cropping. Model effectively allows her subjects emotional
breathing room even as she concentrates and energizes the space around their
images.
Certainly it was odd that a photo of a woman in the surf at Coney Island,
though no Venus, could be featured in Harper’s Bazaar. Campaigns to appropriate “reality” at class bastions like Harper’s exemplified attempts to co-opt life
out there, over there, down there.“Promenade des Anglais,” the portfolio Model
showed to Brodovitch, portrayed rich people at their leisure in Nice. It had
been published in a left-wing French journal as social criticism. Brodovitch
and Snow liked Model’s edgy, candid street photography; but they needed her
to work different streets on behalf of different interests.
For a newcomer to New York like Model, photography offered a way to
imagine herself into the city’s own dislocations. New York was redolent of religious, racial, gender, and occupational distinctions, of performances, masking
and unmasking, disdain, fascination, and accommodation. Model herself came
to understand American glamour less in terms of beauty, sexuality, or wealth
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than of representational strategy itself.“One day I was sitting in a kind of bar,
and I saw a politician projecting his image, and I said to myself: ‘Glamour, the
image of our image—that is my project.’ ”50 Photographically, through displacement and projection, Model and New York made use of each other.
“If there is such a thing as being at home with displacement,” Kozloff
writes,“the Jews were experts in it.”51 Kozloff presses his case for an American
Jewish photographic tradition adventitiously rooted in New York, comparing
Walker Evans’s 1930 photograph Girl in Fulton Street and Lou Stoumen’s Sitting in Front of the Strand, Times Square, 1940. Although both feature a single
figure amid onlookers, Kozloff sees in the image by Evans a concern “with a
perception of apparent chaos that is contained by his discovered structure,”
while Stoumen constructs “a dramatic narrative about being by oneself in the
city.”52 In Stoumen’s photograph (Figure 2), the young man with hands
clasped sits on a ledge in front of the Strand Theater. He gazes soulfully upward, a look perhaps of disquiet on his face. Referencing Rousseau’s image of
man in a state of nature, Kozloff calls him “a solitary in Times Square, the
world’s busiest crossroads.”53 Behind this “wistful stranger” a large sign flashes
on the Strand; it advertises the movie City for Conquest, a tough Warner Brothers romance in which Jewish boxers, dancers, gangsters, and composers are
coded as another ethnicity.
The wistful stranger may be in his own world, but he is hardly alone.
Stoumen’s photograph records its own intrusiveness, modest as it seems, for
within an image apparently focused on a sweet-faced dreamer, another figure
has been caught looking, or rather has been induced to look. His presence is
subtly disruptive, for his sight-lines call attention to those of the photographer.
He is part of our show, as the photographer (fronting for us?) is part of his.
What is going on, his glance seems to ask.Why is this photographer taking this
guy’s picture? Is he famous? Should I recognize him? Is he posing, part of a
fashion shoot? Stoumen’s 1940 photograph plays with the play-within-a-play
of New York City. The young man, whom we might imagine as our prey or
friend or savior, is oblivious. Here we have a proper story: the plot of our image
has thickened, because as our eyes traverse the surface of the picture, it ceases to
cooperate with the convention that we notice things in photographs transparently, innocently.The picture becomes evidence of encounters in which we have
implicated ourselves.
Such allusiveness can be an unnerving adventure, as when Julio Cortazar’s
1963 short story “Blow-Up” imagines untoward consequences of the “optical
unconscious” unpacking itself. In the photograph, an “almost-furtive trembling
of the leaves on the tree” did not seem alarming, but then there was “the man
in the grey hat, carefully eliminated from the photo but present in the boy’s
eyes (how doubt that now) in the words of the woman, in the woman’s hands,
in the vicarious presence of the woman.”54 Cortazar’s phantasmagoria comes
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2. Lou Stoumen, Sitting in Front of the Strand. Courtesy Barry Singer Gallery,
Petaluma, Calif.
up like an image in a darkroom tray. Just so, narratives of emerging awareness
seem to boil up from the paper surfaces of Stoumen’s Times Square, and Diane
Arbus’s unsettling portraits.
Family Albums
The past several decades have seen an intimate and coded engagement with
cultural assimilation by Jewish photographers oriented toward the intersection
of gender and class. Diane Arbus was a student of Lisette Model. Like her
teacher, Arbus investigated aspects of class and gender. Unlike Model, she often
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did so by focusing on family. Both Model and Arbus grew up in and were then
cut off from worlds of wealth and privilege. Arbus’s family was in the clothing
industry; she entered the business of photography through fashion and display.
Arbus moved away from the orbit of family connections after her divorce, and
never could afford to abandon commercial work. For her 1962 photograph of
Petal Pink For Little Parties,White-Over-Pale For Parties, taken as part of a children’s
fashion assignment for Harper’s Bazaar, Arbus chose a nonprofessional child to
model the clothes, situating her outdoors, perhaps in an attempt to portray her
as “real.”55 The child stands a bit awkwardly, her hands crossed, her right leg bent
in imitation of a standard female pose. She stares seriously at the camera; the hint
of a cloud crosses her expression. Lush flowers bloom around her.The girl seems
as undistracted as if standing in front of a studio screen; her composure is impressive.Arbus was developing a form of portraiture that paid closer attention to
personal details of her subjects as part of her growing interest in narrative and in
what she would later call her “family album” project.Viewers are often uncomfortable confronting pictures by Arbus that can seem at once “artless and innocent as a snapshot” yet “factual and unequivocal as an X-ray.”56
In 1968, for a series in the London Sunday Times Magazine on “Two
American Families,” Arbus juxtaposed a working-class Italian American family, Richard and Marylin Dauria, who lived in the Bronx, with an “upper middle class” Jewish family, Nat and June Tarnapol, who had moved to the suburbs
of Westchester, New York. Arbus’s choice of the two families, each with children, references the perquisites of class: the Bronx versus Westchester.57 Richard
is a garage mechanic; Nat is an agent and publisher in the popular music business.Yet gender nearly upstages class in the photographs. The gendered division in the Jewish family is emphasized by the decision to place the magazine’s
gutter down the middle of the photograph, thus separating Nat from his wife
and young son.We look first at June, who looks imperiously at the photographer, while Nat shades his eyes.58
Arbus seems fascinated with the influence of movies in shaping these
women’s aspirations, especially their decision to dye their hair. Marylin has colored her hair black,Arbus tells us in the magazine text, because people told her
she looked like Elizabeth Taylor. June has dyed her hair blond. Perhaps Shirley
Polykoff ’s slogan written for the fledgling Clairol company, “Does she or
doesn’t she?” swayed her.59 Her posture on the chaise lounge and her two-piece
bathing suit mimic poses adopted by movie stars in magazines. According to
Anthony Lee,“June Tarnapol’s unmistakable and entirely deliberate likeness to
Marilyn Monroe” stimulated Arbus to confront June and Marylin’s effort, albeit
incomplete, to merge “public and private identities.” Lee considers the families’
“fetishistic identification with Hollywood stars” an unconvincing mimicry
that “revealed their sad striving.”60 But the story is yet more complicated. In
Clairol’s incredibly successful campaign to popularize hair coloring, Polykoff
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employed a mother-and-child photograph, “in order to nullify any connotations of cheapness or promiscuity that might be associated with the product.”61
At the same time, the whole appeal of “going blond” or “going dark” rode on
the allure of difference, whether to capture “shiksa” appeal or raven-haired romanticism. Polykoff ’s campaign succeeded by simultaneously riding contrasting associations: Hollywood and domesticity. Hence a slogan of suggestive
subtexts:“Does she or doesn’t she?”
The attractions across ethnic and class lines ran every which way. Consider the conversions to Judaism of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe
upon their marriages to Jews. Marylin Dauria’s movie idol, Elizabeth Taylor,
married singer-actor Eddie Fisher in 1959. June Tarnapol longed to look like
Marilyn Monroe, who married playwright Arthur Miller in 1956.Trapped in
her role as blond bombshell, Monroe fell in love with an intellectual. She was
attracted to Miller as a dark, down-to-earth, talented man, but also to warmth
she associated with his parents’ home life. Modern Screen magazine told the
story in “Marilyn Enters a Jewish Family.” Its closing words announced:“Marilyn had come home.”62 Jewish families had achieved a measure of popularity
during “Yiddishe momme” Molly Goldberg’s television and radio heyday that
suggested not just restraint, but also security.63
Arbus reflects in the magazine text upon the Jewish family she sees in her
photograph, adding another dimension. First she considers the photograph
odd, referencing the Jewish playwright Harold Pinter, known for his cutting
dramas about dysfunctional families, but rejects that as “not quite” appropriate.
Then she writes more gently:“The parents seem to be dreaming the child and
the child seems to be inventing them.”64 Another suggestive perspective can be
found in poet Delmore Schwartz’s effort to imagine, in a time before his birth,
that somehow he is watching a movie of his parents’ courtship; they are having
a portrait photograph taken. Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”
describes a silent movie of the narrator’s parents filmed on a Sunday afternoon
in New York around 1909. His parents enter a photographer’s studio off the
boardwalk at Coney Island.The photographer instructs them in how to pose.
His father drapes his arm over his mother’s shoulder.They both smile.The photographer brings a bouquet of flowers to his mother. But something is wrong.
The photographer isn’t satisfied. Over and over he tries to change this, adjust
that, until his father loses his temper. The picture is taken “with my father’s
smile turned to a grimace and my mother’s bright and false.”65 Are these Jewish dreams? And if they are, what role does the photograph play?
After World War II many young American Jewish families moved into
single-family homes. Throughout their adult lives they would find themselves
renegotiating public identities in and around the suburbanized metropolis.After
settling into new bedroom neighborhoods, variously observant Jews often
sought to be known as Jews initially through their denominational affiliations, a
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normatively American practice. Secular Zionists and leftists stood by their political affiliations as best they could. Beginning in the 1960s a tide of enthusiasm
for Israel fed philanthropic and political support.American Jews engaged a welter of challenges; these additionally included the Cold War, civil rights, women’s
liberation, Vietnam, the plight of Soviet Jews. Then too, as Americans and as
Jews, many of them felt impelled to build a public relationship with Holocaust
suffering and shtetl culture. Every front demanded ongoing reconstruction and
reaffirmation.“Was she so wrong,” muses Eli Peck about his wife’s commitment
to the carefully hedged pleasantness of their suburban community. “Let the
world bat its brains out—in Woodenton there should be peace.” Yet author
Philip Roth cannot protect Eli Peck from his metamorphosis into Eli the Fanatic.66 Jews sometimes found suburban life bewilderingly stressful.The nuclear
family was ground zero.
American Jewishness continued to be rooted in the family, but also in alternative versions of the family. The configuration of these related trends
emerged largely through the suburbanization of Jewish life. Americans came
to see family as the bulwark of “our way of life,” which for urban second- and
third-generation American Jews meant a sense of American freedoms they associated with a private home, greenery, a car, and some modified arrangements
for school, work, leisure, and synagogue affiliation. However well suburbia
fulfilled dreams of independence for its pioneer settlers, suburbia could not
but fail the impossible burden it acquired as guardian of and then surrogate for
an American community spirit.The suburban family could neither salvage the
ideal of small town community nor protect its members from centrifugal
forces. Although the suburban dream of freedom was itself child-centered,
many young Jews felt a need to re-imagine family life yet again.67
Dreams of memory and aspiration were particularly daunting for the photographer Nan Goldin.To invent an alternative family she first had to flee expectations that suburban middle-class parochialism could inflict on Jewish
daughters.At fourteen she ran away from home.At eighteen she started to photograph.At some point she decided:“I don’t ever want to be susceptible to anyone else’s version of my history.”68 Photography gave her tools both to make
history and invent family.The photograph documents and triggers “real memory.”The photograph produces as well as reproduces her relationships.
In her afterword to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin writes that
“the people who carried my history, the people I grew up with and I was
planning to grow old with are gone. Our history got cut off at an early age.
There is a sense of loss of self also, because of the loss of community. But
there’s also a feeling that the tribe still goes on.”69 Goldin is not a Holocaust
survivor writing about her family or about the Jewish people; nor does she
mention the trauma of her older sister’s suicide. She is referring instead to
friends who have died from AIDS. The language of loss and hope, the dream
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of continuity amidst death, of self embedded in community, sounds all too familiarly Jewish, too close both to classic Jewish texts of despair and renewal as
well as of intimate consolations. Goldin’s lament and affirmation bear witness
to the possibilities for self and “family” at a tumultuous moment in New York
City’s history.70
I’ll Be Your Mirror, the title of both Nan Goldin’s 1996 retrospective show
and a separate film, extends an invitation to document her extended “family
of friends” and by doing so to save them and thereby herself. Goldin has invested herself in photography as a “redemptive” project: “I still believe that
pictures can preserve life rather than kill life.”71 If Goldin was her subjects’
mirror in their early relationship, once drawn into the institutional world of
art exhibitions and books, she also became a window for an audience of outsiders. The ambiguity of photographic revision calls attention to the issue of
agency in the photographic process.
As Goldin’s exhibition practices evolved, she developed a complex, layered
relationship to the rounds of editing that create photographic value by promoting individual pictures into existence, even though she was most interested in
connections among multiple portraits across time. The British scholar Chris
Townsend describes how originally she shared photos of her friends from bags
of drugstore prints. To save money after shifting to color work, Goldin shot
slides. She showed photos within her “family of friends” by projecting many
hundreds of them, essentially unedited. Goldin became interested in the interaction of the slides with music and began to adjust their arrangement. In its
“performative mode,” The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was a frequently reedited
assortment of 700 slides.The book, published in 1985, contains 125 of these images.72 But Goldin has not abandoned her slide-show format. Her redemptive
project of mirroring continues through an ongoing process of winnowing and
arranging. Many of her gallery exhibits still devote spaces both to luscious large
Cibachrome prints and to slide shows with music. She likes the slide-show presentation format because it keeps her editorial options open.Townsend underlines Goldin’s struggles to reconcile the ideal announced in her title, to be a
mirror for her alternative family, with her actual working processes of selection
and elimination.
Consider the image chosen for the cover of her Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
Nan and Brian in bed, New York City 1983 (Figure 3) portrays a couple, with a
portrait of Brian in the background pinned to the wall above Nan’s head.
There is no need for a gutter to divide woman from man, because the image
is split by light and shadow. At the prospect of being appraised twice, or perhaps thousands of times, Brian, like Nat Tarnapol, seems determined to block
us all out. It is left to us, studying the fear, desire, confusion, or anger on this
image of Nan’s face, to decide whether she should be glancing or glaring.
Nan and Brian is one of several stage-managed pictures that bracket the body
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3. Nan Goldin, Nan and Brian in bed, New York City 1983. Courtesy Nan Goldin
Studio.
of Goldin’s work, girding it against casual, uncaring eyes.Though she made her
own expression and triggered the shot in her own time, Goldin was surprised
by what it revealed, of course. For her, too, engaging this charged image was to
be maneuvered out of habitual spectatorship.73
Despite Goldin’s efforts to reconstitute a radically different sort of family,
there are curious affective similarities between her picture and the Tarnapols
photo by Arbus. Intimate space traps Nan and Brian much as a useless expanse
of manicured lawn isolates June and Nat. Nan’s body language owes less to
Marilyn Monroe, pinup gal or movie star, than to female novels of sin and lust
popular in the 1950s. But the poses of both June and Nan reflect the influence
of media images on women’s imagination.What Anthony Lee writes of Arbus
also applies to Goldin:“To organize her people as pictures, to reconstitute them
as a family in a simulated world of the photographic archive, and to see them
safely to the other side of change—in the late 1960s, when forms of belonging
everywhere mattered but were nowhere secured, ‘Family Album’ made much
more sense” than counting people as members of a family in any conventional
sense.74 Like Goldin, Arbus had in mind to save photo portraits into a “Noah’s
Ark,” a life raft for some other kind of family.
House Docume nts
By the 1990s, growing up in a house and around shopping malls of suburbia (often overrun by metropolitan sprawl) and attending college had become
a normative feature of American Jewish life, much as urban, apartment-oriented
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4. Lauren Greenfield, Ashleigh in her bedroom, Santa Monica. ©2004 Lauren Greenfield/VII.
childhoods and high school graduation had been for previous generations of
Jews. Jewishness relocated to the gendered space of private homes. As members of “conventional families” assumed photographic attributes dictated by
gender and class, Hollywood and fashion, distinctions between public and private blurred.The “gap” that had intrigued Arbus no longer existed, at least not
in the wealthy Jewish world of Los Angeles, dominated by the movie industry.
Lauren Greenfield grew up in that world. She left home in 1983 to attend
Harvard University, returning after graduation to revisit her old private high
school, the place where, as Greenfield explained, she “formed many of my ideas
about myself and the world.” Her exploration of her own culture revealed an
“early loss of innocence.” She discovered, too, that fashion magazines proffered
“the images of beauty to which children aspire.”75 Material concerns, money
and lots of it, assumed a prominence she had not remembered. Greenfield considers herself a documentary photographer, not a portraitist, though her pictures can be seen as examples of documentary portraiture. Ashleigh in her
bedroom, Santa Monica (Figure 4) conveys very well an absence of innocence.
Her gesture and unfocused stare as she speaks on the phone suggest tension and
anxiety. She is dressed in white and is bejeweled with rings, necklace, and
bracelets. Her room reflects some of the disorder of adolescence, pictures
tacked to a pin-board, straw hat on the wall, backpack slouched on an upholstered chair; but she seems ill at ease in her own space.Ashleigh is a portrait that
documents, not clothing designed to appear “real,” but a “real” world that
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appears as unreal as a fashion advertisement. Greenfield’s narrative has collapsed
boundaries between public and private identities, in effect dissolving the gap
between intention and effect that had drawn Arbus to photograph American
family life.
Larry Sultan also grew up in Los Angeles, arriving in the San Fernando
Valley from Brooklyn at the age of three.When he returned to reexamine his
own family, he discovered how integral photographic images were to his
childhood.“Sitting in the living room,” he wrote,“we watched thirty years of
folktales—epic celebrations of the family.” The home movies, he confessed,
“were remarkable, more like a record of hope and fantasies than of natural
events. It was as if my parents had projected their dreams onto film emulsion.”
Astonished, Sultan describes his parents as if they were remaking Schwartz’s
imagined silent movie. They do not need the photographer to suggest their
dreaming about their children, nor do they need their children to invent them
as parents. Sultan was nonplussed. “I was in my mid-thirties and longing for
the intimacy, security, and comfort that I associated with home,” he admitted.
“But whose home? Which version of the family?”76
What does a son do when his parents rewrite the script, closing the gap between intention and effect? Sultan ultimately narrowed his vision. Pictures from
Home became a book about his father.“Photographing my father became a way
of confronting confusion about what it is to be a man in this culture.”77 Sultan’s
questions stemmed in part from changing meanings attached to families since
World War II. Conservative rhetoric about an idealized American family served,
in part, to mask damage inflicted on actual families by increasingly ruthless corporate policies of downsizing, outsourcing, and “excessing” old employees. As
Sultan watched, frustration and powerlessness invaded his parents’ home in the
wake of his father’s unemployment, despite his mother’s successful turn to selling real estate. It was hardly unique to be laid off after the company one had
helped to make a success underwent a merger. In the end, Sultan admitted that
he chose to be “a subject in the drama rather than a witness.” He gave up on the
redemptive possibilities of photography although he, too, like Goldin, wanted
“to stop time.” He wanted to take photography literally. He wanted his parents
to live forever.78
Sultan’s photograph of his parents, Mom posing by green wall and Dad watching TV (Figure 5), pictures them only partly as they might have desired. His
mother is well dressed, her hair and makeup neatly in place. She looks at her
son boldly, eager to cooperate with his project. She stands erect, with her
hands out of sight behind her back.We sense her pride in her good looks and
shapely figure. Sultan observes that she is posed like a model, “the weight of
her poised leg . . . awkwardly balanced on the ball of her pointed foot. It is a
pose meant to be graceful and alluring,” one that she habitually adopted before her marriage whenever she stood in front of a camera.79 His father sits
196
5. Larry Sultan, Mom posing by green wall and Dad watching TV. Courtesy Larry
Sultan.
with his back to his son the photographer. He, too, is well groomed, wearing
a patterned shirt. A baseball game flickers on the television screen, absorbing
his attention. As in photographs of couples by Goldin and Arbus, Sultan’s picture draws us into geometries of looks tellingly or suggestively given, taken,
and withheld.The juxtaposition of sitting and standing provides an apt metaphor for the financial reversal of roles wrought by corporate downsizing. Sultan’s father is still an enigma, still nursing his own private “lover’s quarrel” with
America.80
Pictures from Home blends re-photographed snapshots and stills from
8-millimeter movies with Sultan’s richly colored photographs, none of which
explicitly comment on his family’s Jewish identity. Rather Jewishness is inscribed in their aspirations and tensions, their dreams in which their responsibilities began, much as it was inscribed in Arbus’s photograph of Nat and June
Tarnapol. Sultan has produced a “family album,” a collective endeavor involving both editorial and directorial roles. The book and exhibit include interviews conducted with his mother, Jean, and father, Irving, and give them space
to tell aspects of their story.That story is a Jewish one, involving Irving’s bitter experiences of antisemitism and of living in the Hebrew Sheltering and Guardian
Society’s home for “orphaned” Jewish children.81 Sultan’s “documentary
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history” is an elaborate, self-conscious fiction, as contingent as any of Goldin’s
slide shows.
When the scholar Laura Levitt saw these photographs, she immediately
identified with them. As a young woman looking at Jean, Levitt recognized
“some of my grandmother’s ambivalences in her body.” Levitt perceives a
“frail, tired,” woman, one who is “bored” but who also shared her grandmother’s taste in clothes, circa 1979. Although she reads the details of the interiors of their home “as Jewish, I do not doubt that they are also familiar to
other upwardly mobile ethnic Americans. But,” she emphasizes,“this does not
mean that they cannot be viewed as Jewish. Gestures need not be repeated
as exclusively Jewish to be viewed as such.”82 Levitt decodes the colorcoordinated outfits that match the rooms, the importance of the decorative
touch of matching wallpaper and fabrics. Jewish and American split-level
styles are a world away from the sensibilities of Lenny Bruce and William
Klein. Nevertheless, they share a dynamic of American Jewish passing: hiding
and seeking and showing off. Levitt likes Pictures from Home because Jewishness
is merely part of the story. She sees Sultan’s Jewishness in an “ambivalent double move of display and then concealment” and notes the seemingly deliberate effort by critic Vicki Goldberg to portray Sultan’s work as universal. “It
almost doesn’t matter whose family it is,” Goldberg writes.83 Almost. Levitt interprets both Goldberg’s interpretation and Sultan’s desire to be seen as “really
American” as Jewish gestures.
A Love r’s Quarre l
Through the 1970s, New York School photographers struggled to visualize the lineaments of disrupted empathy in contested public spaces. Whether
or not Jewish photographers considered these perceptual disorders to be particularly relevant to themselves as Jews, they seldom explored multiple displacements among Jews as Jews. Consider a partial roll call of photographers
associated with the New York School: Weegee, Ben Shahn, Morris Engel,
Alexander Alland, Aaron Siskind, Arnold Eagle, Sid Grossman, Rebecca Lepkoff, Sol Libsohn, Ruth Orkin,Walter Rosenblum, Rudy Burckhardt, Lisette
Model, Saul Leiter, Helen Levitt, Leonard Freed, Eve Arnold, Robert Frank,
Diane Arbus,Ted Croner,William Klein, Richard Avedon.With several exceptions (e.g., Leonard Freed and Arnold Eagle), few of these photographers took
many pictures of people ritually identified as Jews. Perhaps only Model, Frank,
and Avedon ever seriously focused on family members. Kozloff notes the
emergence of a perceptual division within the group and cites Weegee as the
first practitioner of a newly unsentimental street portraiture. He suggests that
“an intrusive sympathy runs through 1930s social photographs of New York,”
but that Weegee’s “colder” eye, an eye trained by his own hard experiences,
“deflected the commiserating dynamic of that tradition.”84
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Here begin successive sea changes in work by Jewish photographers and in
the critical reception of that work.The spread of a new street aesthetic roughly
coincides with World War II. An ambivalent and skittish melancholy became
associated less with political/social activism than with existential toughness.
Kozloff identifies this work with “Model, Klein, Arbus, [Leon] Levinstein,
Mary Ellen Mark, [Garry] Winogrand, [Bruce] Davidson, Nan Goldin, Eugene
Richards (a rare gentile), and Bruce Gilden.”85 These photographers fled from
what struck them as sentimental work with reformist pretensions. But personal
misfortune hardly explains the “tougher” dispositions associated with their
photographs.
In her best-selling book On Photography, Susan Sontag argues that the
tough, perhaps pathological photographs by Diane Arbus were characteristic
of work by emergent Jewish photographers.Arbus, writes Sontag, was “from a
verbally skilled, compulsively health-minded, indignation-prone, well-to-do
Jewish family.” Arbus was troubled because, as Sontag quotes her, she “ ‘never
felt adversity. . . . And the sense of being immune was, ludicrous as it seems, a
painful one.’ ”86 As compensation, or out of self-hatred, suggests Sontag, Arbus
used her camera for “procuring” experience, specifically that which is “taboo,
perverse, evil.”87 Similar judgments have been leveled at Weegee, Model,
Klein, Avedon,Winogrand, and Mark.
Yet the hardness people see in some of the work by older members of this
group may have something to do with conflicts engendered by the Holocaust.
A. D. Coleman reminds us that Arbus chose her physically, mentally, or emotionally marginalized subjects,“not out of any decadent search for the outré but
because she saw them as heroes who had already passed their individual trials
by fire while most people stood around pleading for theirs to be postponed.”88
Arbus was a young American Jew impotent as catastrophe engulfed Jews in Europe. Unlike her brother, poet Howard Nemerov, she could not, in eagerness to
fight the Nazis, join the Royal Canadian unit of the U. S. Army Air Force.89
Where one person will perceive hardness, another sees a continuing struggle to
stay on one’s feet, maintain some moral traction, to take nothing at face value.
Diane Arbus spent her life exposing the mortal awkwardness of face value.
After the war a second, overlapping transformation in photography by
American Jews began, associated with broadened employment opportunities
for younger Jews and the widening character of their engagement with American life. Increasingly those who grew up after the war went to college. From
this group emerged photographers engaged in another version of the “lovers’
quarrel.” They include Eleanor Antin, Joel Meyerowitz, Barbara Kruger, Nan
Goldin, Larry Fink, Mary Ellen Mark, Sherrie Levine,Annie Leibovitz, Mitch
Epstein, Eileen Cowin, Lois Greenfield, Merry Alpern, Herb Ritts, Lauren
Greenfield, Richard Nagler, Sylvia Plachy, Larry Sultan. Here we find street
photographers, conceptual artists, studio portraitists, and diarists, many of
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whom have been drawn to bohemia and to the difficult mystery of family.
Several of them have produced major projects involving their own parents, or
Jews of their grandparents’ generation, or the sites of their own childhoods.
Goldin has made a career of documenting her own life among bohemian surrogate families. As love for America continued to deepen among Jews, countervailing anxieties intensified in a constant process of disconnecting and
reconnecting.
Works by American Jewish photographers evidence both the achievement
and the cost of still being at home away from home. By scrutinizing rituals of
looks these photographs manifest an ongoing need for Jews to observe rites of
passing.Through visual dislocations that embrace and interrogate, such pictures
discomfit us for cause. Ironic and contingent representations risk misunderstanding; however, they also hazard being understood on multiple levels, which
is where we live. Representations believed to be transparent—simple, clear, sincere, authentic—can be trap doors to hell. A Jew cannot be too observant.
Note s
1. To photograph is to nominate a particular view. To select one negative and then one
print, etc., is to further nominate and promote a series of re-views.
2. Jane Livingston, The New York School Photographs 1936–1963 (New York: Stewart,
Tabori and Chang, 1992). The development a century ago of documentary and
street photography as American forms is associated with Jacob Riis, Lewis Wickes
Hine, and Alice Austen.Around the same time, art photography in the United States
gained institutional life, largely through the efforts of Alfred Stieglitz. He came to
see a protégé in Paul Strand, who had studied with Hine. Stieglitz and Strand were
Jews in a field still mainly gentile.Their work influenced the early New York School
directly, but also through Walker Evans’s modernist vernacular synthesis. Some New
Yorkers were inspired more by Europeans like Brassai, Bill Brandt, Martin
Munkacsi, and Henri Cartier-Bresson (Livingston, The New York School, 277; James R.
Mellow, Walker Evans [New York: Basic Books, 1999], 548–554; Alan Trachtenberg,
Reading American Photographs: Images as History Mathew Brady to Walker Evans [New
York: Hill and Wang, 1989]).
3. Livingston, The New York School, 316; Sarah Greenough, “Fragments That Make a
Whole Meaning in Photographic Sequences,” in Robert Frank: Moving Out, ed. Sarah
Greenough and Philip Brookman (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1994),
107; Ann Thomas, Lisette Model (Ottowa: National Gallery of Canada, 1990), 95.
4. Livingston, The New York School, 265, 313.
5. Max Kozloff, New York: Capital of Photography (New York:The Jewish Museum; New
Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 2002), 70, refers to “seer and seen.” Kozloff ’s
catalog essay also serves as a starting point for Sara Blair, “Jewish America Through
the Lens,” in Jewish in America, ed. Sara Blair and Jonathan E. Freedman (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2004), 113–134.
6. Laura Levitt has suggested that “what makes an image Jewish is literally how it is
framed, who sees it and where.” Photography seems to promise a simple window on
reality, yet it is a contingent process of perceptual interactions (Laura S. Levitt, American Jewish History, 90, no. 4 [December 2002]: 468).
7. Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (New York: An Aperture Book,
1986), 6.
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8. Peter Schjeldahl,“Looking Back” New Yorker, March 21, 2005: 78.
9. Max Kozloff,“The Awning That Flapped in the Breeze and the Bodies That Littered
the Field:‘Painting and the Invention of Photography,’ ” in The Privileged Eye: Essays
on Photography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 261. Emphasis in the original.
10. John Berger,“Understanding a Photograph,” The Look of Things, in Classic Essays on
Photography, ed.Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, Conn.: Leete’s Island Books, 1980),
292.
11. Ibid., 292. Emphasis in the original.
12. Ibid., 294.
13. Quoted in Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1. See his introductory discussion, “The Provisional City.”
14. Kozloff, New York, 77.
15. Ibid., 70–75.
16. Before the Holocaust, race was a flexible term that referred to various human aggregates defined, at least metaphorically, by blood: family, clan, tribe, nation, subspecies, even genus homo itself. Racism is a textbook case of class and culture
masquerading as nature; in racism, ideologies of privilege and destiny are propped
up with pedigrees. Culture can be brutal; but even those aspects received as if in our
mothers’ milk are not genetic, not unchangeable.
17. Anthony Lane,“The Shutterbug,” New Yorker, May 21, 2000: 80, quoted in Kozloff,
New York, 70.
18. John Cohen, ed., The Essential Lenny Bruce (New York: Ballantine, 1967), 41–42.
19. It would be nice to think that Klein’s comparison references culture, not biology.
See Kozloff, New York, 70.
20. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, about the photographic skinning of the world,“Men
will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects . . . for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, 81). The classic text on
photography and death is Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1980).
21. Kozloff, New York, 77. Emphasis in the original. In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois famously
described a “double-consciousness” enforced on African Americans, a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”W. E. Burghardt DuBois, The
Souls of Black Folk (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publishers, 1961), 16–17.
22. James T. Siegel, “Kiblat and the Mediatic Jew,” in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de
Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Elizabeth A.
McAlister,“ ‘The Jew’ in the Haitian Imagination: Pre-Modern Anti-Judaism in the
Postmodern Caribbean,” in Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism, ed.Yvonne Chireau (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Racism, as
David Roediger reminds us, chews its cud: “Even in an all-white town, race was
never absent. I learned absolutely no lore of my German ancestry and no more than
a few meaningless snatches of Irish songs, but missed little of racist folklore” (David
Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
[London:Verso, 1991], 3).
23. Quoted in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins
of Cultural Change (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 10.
24. Christopher Prendergast, The Triangle of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 6–9. Rousseau’s example was theatrical mediation.
25. Quoted in Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, 3rd ed. (New York:
Abbeville Press, 1997), 478.
201
26. “Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by
way of its likeness, its reproduction”:Walter Benjamin,“The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969), 223.
27. Ibid., 221–225. See also Moshe Halbertal et al., Idolatry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1994); Margaret Olin, “Graven Images on Video? The Second
Commandment and Jewish Identity,” in Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and
Modern Art, ed. Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 2000), 34–50, especially 37–39.
28. W. H. F. Talbot published his quarto,“The Pencil of Nature” in 1844 (Trachtenberg,
Classic Essays on Photography, 27–29).
29. Walter Benjamin,“A Short History of Photography,” in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays
on Photography, 202–203.
30. Walter Benjamin refers to Eugene Atget, “who around 1900, took photographs of
deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them
like scenes of crime. . . . They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new
way.” Benjamin,“The Work of Art,” 226.
31. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982),
138–145.
32. Alan Trachtenberg, “The Claim of a Jewish Eye,” Pakn Treger (Spring 2003/5763),
no. 41: 20–25.
33. Ibid., 22. Both Trachtenberg and Kozloff use the term “gentile” when referring to a
person who is not Jewish. Laura Levitt criticizes Kozloff on this account, asserting that
“gentile” is “a religious term generally used to describe those who do not adhere to
the Jewish faith.”Today it may be best to consider gentiles as generic non-Jews.The
root of ‘gentile’ is gen, from the Latin for group, clan, or tribe. Many dictionaries of
current American English list the broader usage for gentile first, a specifically religious
usage second. Effectively the meaning of gentile is dependent on our use of the word
Jew. If a Jew is prescriptively defined by “faith,” then it follows that a gentile is a being
of different “faith.”While it may be essential to promote this or that branch of Judaism
among Jews, we cannot study Jews if we categorically conflate them with Judaism
(Levitt, American Jewish History, 267).
34. Jews have long been praised, but more often pitied or blamed, for being subject to
Second Commandment aniconic prohibitions.Throughout the nineteenth century,
aniconism imputed to Jews was associated with religion and increasingly with
racialist science: putatively sharp eyes perceived monetary value; manipulative eyes
locked hapless victims in a controlling gaze; and color blindness helped to explain
artistic deficiency. Paradoxically, the Jew, it seemed, was master of the copy but creatively disabled.
35. Trachtenberg,“The Claim,” 22.
36. Ibid., 25.
37. Tensions between the near and the far, between connectedness and disconnection,
resonate across the experience of modernity as mediated. The sociologist Georg
Simmel suggested that this duality defines an objectivity characteristic of the urban
“stranger,” one who “comes and stays” but remains a “potential wanderer.” Such
“objectivity does not simply involve passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement” (Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt Wolff [New York:
Free Press, 1950], 402, 404).
38. The New York Photo League had its origins in the Workers Film and Photo League,
established in New York City in 1930, sponsored by the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe. Workers Film and Photo League members rejected “bourgeois” practices of
202
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
photographing the nude, landscape, and still-life, emphasizing instead everyday life
of the poor and unemployed, documenting it in a direct, straightforward style.They
also stressed photographing one’s own milieu. In 1933 the group dropped the term
“Workers” from its name. In 1936 the photography group split from the more politically engaged film section. Photo League members published photographs in
Life, Look, and smaller publications, but not in their own Photo Notes. See Leah Ollman, “The Photo League’s Forgotten Past,” History of Photography 18:2 (Summer
1994): 156–157.
Quoted in Anne Tucker, “A History of the Photo League: The Members Speak,”
History of Photography 18:2 (Summer 1994): 174.
See This Was the Photo League: Compassion and the Camera from the Depression to the
Cold War (Chicago: Stephen Daiter Gallery; Houston: John Cleary Gallery, 2001),
especially the essay by Anne Wilkes Tucker,“The Photo League: A Center for Documentary Photography,” 9–19.
Kozloff, New York, 23.
Susan Kismaric and Eva Respini, Fashioning Fiction in Photography Since 1990 (New
York:The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 12.
A. D. Coleman,“The Directorial Mode: Notes Toward a Definition,” in Light Readings: A Photography Critic’s Writings 1968–1978 (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1979/1998), 246–257.
Kismaric and Respini, Fashioning Fiction, 22.
Similar strategies were later pursued with striking success at men’s magazines like
Esquire and Playboy.
Ann Thomas, Lisette Model (Ottowa: National Gallery of Canada, 1990), 361.
Representatives for Model’s estate remind us that Model was not Jewish; certainly
on grounds of traditional Jewish law she should not be so construed, for her mother
was not Jewish. We know neither how people within her Jewish milieu construed
Model’s identity, nor how she negotiated these issues.
For Model’s biography, see Thomas, Lisette Model.
Excerpt of interview with Lisette Model by Philip Lopate, at http://www.twinpalms
.com/Pages/frameset.html?—odel.html, June 28, 2004.
Quoted in Thomas, Lisette Model, 66–67.
Kozloff discusses this in “Leon Levinstein and the School of New York,” The Moment of Exposure: Leon Levinstein (Ottowa: National Gallery of Canada, 1995), 48.
Jews knew that many Americans saw New York City as less an American city than a
foreign one, in part because so many Jews lived relatively comfortably there. Certainly for the first half of the twentieth century, New York was a Jewish city not only
in the imagination of many Americans but also in fact. With close to two million
Jewish residents, not to mention several million Catholics, New York lacked a majority population.
Kozloff, New York, 73–74.
Ibid., 74.
Julio Cortazar, “Blow-Up,” in Blow-Up and Other Stories (New York: Pantheon,
1967), 129.
Thomas W. Southall notes that Saul Leiter, a New York Photo League member, had
been working in a similar direction for the same magazine (Thomas W. Southall,
“The Magazine Years, 1960–1971,” Diane Arbus Magazine Work, ed. Doon Arbus and
Marvin Israel [New York:Aperture, n.d.], 159). Petal Pink is reproduced in Southall,
“The Magazine Years,” 29.
Ibid., 159.
Arbus never explicitly identifies the Tarnapol family as Jewish, although it seems
clear in her letter that she immediately assumed June was Jewish. From their first
meeting in a bookstore Arbus interpreted her blond hair and enormous eyelashes to
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
203
mean that she was “probably married to a dress manufacturer or restaurateur.”
Quoted in ibid., 168.
The magazine spread of “Two American Families” is reproduced in Southall, “The
Magazine Years,” 106–107. Both individual images can be seen in print and on
the web. Diane Arbus, Revelations (New York: Random House, 2003), 9, 329;
http://masters-of-photography.com/A/arbus/arbus_brooklyn_family_full.html; http://
masters-of-photography.com/A/arbus/arbus_westchester_family_full.html, September
6, 2005.
Shirley Polykoff was probably the most important Jewish woman in advertising. Her
Clairol ad campaign was “almost a test case for advertising methods because the idea
of hair-dyeing was not socially acceptable.” The percentage of women using hair
coloring rose rapidly within a few years in the 1950s from 7 percent to 50 percent
(Andrew R. Heinze,“Advertising and Consumer Culture,” Jewish Women in America:
An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore [New
York: Routledge, 1997], 31).
Anthony W. Lee, “Noah’s Ark, Arbus’s Album,” in Diane Arbus: Family Albums, ed.
Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 2003), 22.
Heinze,“Advertising,” 31.
Susan Wender, “Marilyn Enters a Jewish Family,” Modern Screen (November 1956),
excerpted in Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, ed. J. Hoberman and
Jeffrey Shandler (New York: The Jewish Museum; Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003), 182–187.
Gertrude Berg’s popular show, The Goldbergs, ran on the radio from 1929 to 1952,
and on television from 1949 to 1956.There was also a movie version, Molly (1951),
and a Broadway show, Me and Molly (1948). See Donald Weber, “Goldberg Variations:The Achievements of Gertrude Berg,” in Hoberman and Shandler, Entertaining America, 113–123; and Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here:The Rise of the
“Jewish” Sitcom (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 21–42.
See “Two American Families,” in Diane Arbus Magazine Work, 106.
Delmore Schwartz, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” in Jewish American Stories,
ed. Irving Howe (New York: New American Library, 1977), 192.
Philip Roth, “Eli the Fanatic,” in Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (New
York:Vintage Books, 1959), 261. How wroth was he with Phil “the faker” Greenberg as portrayed by Gregory Peck?
On suburbanization see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier:The Suburbanization of
the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); on family life in postwar America see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold
War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); and on the transition between post–World
War II suburban family ideals and “alternative families” lifestyles of threat and
promise, see Anthony Lee, “Arbus, the Magazines, and the Streets,” in Diane Arbus:
Family Albums, ed. Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 2003), 24–28.
Nan Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency (New York: Aperture Book, 1986), 9.
Ibid., 145. On art scene “tribalism,” see Tom Holert,“Blood of the Poets:The Tribal
’80s,” ArtForum 41, no. 7 (March 2003): 234–237, 275–276, 280–281.
Barbara Goldin killed herself in 1965, six years before the suicide of Diane Arbus.
In a 2003 interview,Tom Holert asked Goldin about family.“TH:What did the idea
and practice of family mean to you? NG: It was about re-creating a family and developing a history. The text of The Ballad talks about bonds stronger than bloodfamily bonds, because the family was bonded by sensibilities, political views,
aesthetics, sense of humor, shared history. David, Suzanne, and I had grown up together; we met at a hippie free school” (Tom Holert, “Nan Goldin talks to Tom
Holert—’80s Then—Interview.” ArtForum 41, no. 7 [March 2003]: 274).
204
71. Goldin, Ballad, 146.
72. Chris Townsend,“Nan Goldin: Bohemian Ballads,” in Phototextualities: Intersections of
Photography and Narrative, ed. Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 106–108.
73. Goldin insists on the purity of her approach. “TH:You didn’t consider yourself as
working in a directorial mode? NG: The thing about my work is, nothing is prearranged, prethought, premeditated. In no way was I directing the pictures; they’re
just fragments of life as it was being lived. There was no staging. When you set up
pictures you’re not at any risk. Reality involves chance and risk and diving for
pearls” (Holert,“Nan Goldin,” 233).
74. Lee,“Arbus,” 62.
75. Lauren Greenfield, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf/Melcher Media, 1997), 5, 7.
76. Larry Sultan, Pictures from Home (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 18.
77. Ibid., 18.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid., 31.
80. Kozloff, New York, 71.We use Kozloff ’s characterization of a Jewish “lover’s quarrel”
with American cultural assimilation.
81. Jewish communal agencies considered “orphans” children who had lost a parent, incapacitating the remaining parent who had the difficult task of earning a livelihood
and caring for children.
82. Laura S. Levitt, “Photographing American Jews: Identifying American Jewish Life,”
in Mapping Jewish Identities, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein (New York: NYU Press,
2000), 68, 83, 86.
83. Ibid., 75.
84. Kozloff, New York, 76.
85. Ibid.
86. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), 43.
87. Ibid., 43.
88. Coleman, Light Readings, 126–127.
89. Harvey Shapiro, ed., Poets of World War II (New York:The Library of America, 2003),
235.Arbus’s husband,Alan Arbus, served in the Army Signal Corps (Livingston, The
New York School, 348). Also see the analysis of Dorothea Lange’s relationships with
Jews and with people at “the last ditch,” in Judith Fryer Davidov,“ ‘The Only Gentile among the Jews’: Dorothea Lange’s Documentary Photography,” in Women’s
Camera Work: Self/Body/Other in American Visual Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 223–232.
⡣
Film
The postmodern surge in American films featuring Jewish
main characters and Jewish themes is unlike any since the 1960s, when what
Henry Popkin called the Great Retreat (since the 1930s) in Jewish cinematic
and other popular cultural representation1 was shattered by a spate of literary
adaptations, Holocaust films, Barbra Streisand vehicles, the Woody Allen and
Mel Brooks comedies, and many more.Although several high-profile “Jewish”
films have been made in the interim (along similar lines), a full-fledged “new
wave” in American Jewish film was proclaimed by critic Harry Medved in
1998.The difference here was twofold: first, most of the new films were independent rather than major-studio productions; and, more significantly, many
of them were overtly religious—to the point of suddenly making “Chassidism
sexy.”2 Some of the religious-themed films include Brooklyn Babylon, Fool’s
Gold, Pi, and A Price Above Rubies, as well as documentaries (long a Jewish bastion) such as Chassidism in America:A Life Apart, The Return of Sarah’s Daughter,
and While the Messiah Tarries.
Besides the rise in religiosity in the late 1990s and continuing into the
2000s, this period has been marked by an unprecedented flurry of American
features centered on Jewish women: e.g., A Price Above Rubies (1998), A Walk
on the Moon (1999), Amy’s O (2001), A Family Affair (2001), and Kissing Jessica
Stein (2001). Ruth Johnston’s essay focuses on the latter three films, not because they are the most recent, but because all are comedies, all are written
or written/directed by the same woman (or women, in the case of Jessica Stein)
who star(s) in them, and in two of the three (Amy’s O and Family Affair) the
writer/director/star also supplies a first-person voiceover narration.The combination of genre and authorial voice allows for a complex and provocative
comparison of the “women’s films” with those of Woody Allen.This comparison is grounded in Freud’s Jewish-inflected joke analysis and his notion of the
uncanny, as read through the post-colonial theory of Homi Bhabha, who, as
Johnston describes it,“foregrounds the performativity as well as the ethical dimension of the joke-work” by emphasizing, at least in the self-critical joke, the
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Film
contingency of truth, the involvement of the third person or listener, and the
construction of a non-essentialized communal identity.
Daniel Itzkovitz’s essay, alternatively, deals with recent American films centered on Jewish male characters. Specifically, he looks at how contemporary
representations of Jewish men, not only in blockbusters such as Independence
Day and low-budget independents such as The Hebrew Hammer, but in popular
culture generally, while referencing the nebbishe schlemiel of old, both embrace multiculturalism and construct a more virile Jewish masculinity by associating the super-heroic Jewish protagonist with Blacks or other people of
color. A more prevalent and popular variant on the “New Super Jew”3 is the
“new schlemiel,” who, rather than transcending “schlemielitude,” transmutes
it via a “vaguely eccentric embodiment of the middle-class everyman.” Ben
Stiller, Adam Sandler, and (the non-Jewish) Jason Biggs are Itzkovitz’s prime
exhibits for the ethnic anti-hunk, whose at once proud and phlegmatic cinematic assertion of Jewishness Itzkovitz sees as emblematic of the conflicted discourse surrounding postmodern American Jewish identity generally: namely,
the celebration of explicitly Jewish cultural expression on the one hand, and
the fear of Jewish extinction on the other.
Johnston’s and Itzkovitz’s essays offer a contrast not only in gender orientation, but in methodology as well. Johnston’s piece is arguably the most theoretically challenging in the collection; Itzkovitz’s, while no theoretical slouch,
adopts a lighter tone. His piece is also perhaps the most postmodernly Jewish (or
Jewishly postmodern) in the anthology, in that his discussion of film does not
isolate the medium but sees it as a link in a cultural chain ranging from music to
literature to advertising to the internet. Given that mainstream American cinema has become increasingly part of a “commercial intertext,” in which movies
represent but one commodity in a synergistic product line comprising comic
books, video games, theme park rides, television shows, CDs, DVDs, toys, and
myriad other merchandise, such an approach seems right on the money.4
Note s
1. Henry Popkin, “The Vanishing Jew in Our Popular Culture,” Commentary ( July
1952): 46–55.
2. Harry Medved, “Men in Black,” Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, March 27,
1998: 44. Notable religious-themed documentaries since 2000 include Trembling
before G_d and The Divan.
3. The term “New Super Jew” is the title and subject of a Joanna Smith Rakoff article
in Timeout New York, Issue 427 (December 4–11, 2003) (http://www.timeoutny
.com/features/427/427.superjews.html).
4. Eileen Meehan, “ ‘Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!’ The Political Economy of a
Commercial Intertext,” in The Film Studies Reader, ed. Joanne Hollows, Peter
Hutchings, and Mark Jancovich (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 23–33.
Joke-Work
The Construction of Jewish
Po stmode rn Ide ntity in
Contemporary Theory
and Ame rican Film
Ruth D. Johnston
Both contemporary European postmodern theory and
Jews’ self-representations in certain recent American films construct Jewish
postmodern identity in terms of Freud’s definition of the self-critical tendentious joke in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Not that these disparate
texts agree on a definition of Jewish identity—quite the contrary. Instead, an
identificatory mechanism deemed problematic in the European context translates into a distinctive mode of minority discourse in Homi Bhabha’s analysis
and receives different gender inflections in contemporary American films—for
example, Amy’s O, A Family Affair, and Kissing Jessica Stein—all of which ostensibly conform to the structure of the self-critical joke as they appropriate and
revise the comic conventions of Woody Allen’s cinema, Annie Hall in particular.At the same time, each deployment of the joke-work emphasizes a different
aspect of its narrative process and accordingly articulates a different definition
of communal affiliation.
The Construction of the Jew
in Po stmode rn Th e ory
The two terms “Jewish” and “postmodernism” are very closely linked, as
suggested by a joke recounted by Eric Santner about a zoology course in which
students were required to write a paper on the subject of elephants. The
French student wrote about “The Sexual Habits of the Elephant”; the German
student submitted an “Introduction to the Bibliographic Sources for the Study
of the Elephant”; the American student wrote about “Breeding Bigger and Better Elephants”; and finally the Jewish student chose as his theme “The Elephant
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R u t h D. J o h n s t o n
and the Jewish Question.”As Santner comments, the joke assumes a familiarity
with common stereotypes of national and ethnic character: a French preoccupation with sex, German industriousness, American entrepreneurship.The Jew
is an anomaly in the context of the list because “what marks the Jew as a Jew is
a preoccupation with the dilemmas and difficulties of being marked. . . . [The
Jew is] one for whom stereotyping is . . . his typical problem.”1 For Santner
the joke pinpoints a central issue in postmodern theory insofar as the theory’s
preoccupation with undoing all forms of “essentialism” is energized by the
trauma of the historical experience of Nazism and the effort to rethink modern antisemitism, which means a return to the “Jewish Question.”2 Thus Julia
Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves describes the Jew as a sort of embodiment of
Freud’s concept of the uncanny: a “combination of the familiar and the
strange.”And Slavoj Žižek’s investigation of the psychic origins of antisemitism
in The Sublime Object of Ideology characterizes the Jew as a “symptom.”3 For
Jean-François Lyotard in Heidegger and “the jews,” the lowercase “jews” signifies
a resistance to “domestication within the [Western] obsession to dominate,”4 or
“the unrepresentable.”5
However, because I wish to focus on how the preoccupation with Jewish
postmodern identity keeps returning to the joke, I will discuss more fully
the work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. In their essay “The
Nazi Myth,” Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy relate the absence of type to the
Nazi construction of the Jews.The essay, which investigates the psychic origins
of totalitarianism, argues that Germany’s mimetic identification with Greece
was realized via the formation of myth, which became tied to racial identity as
it drew on such works as Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century,
which privileged the concept of “type” as an “absolute, concrete, singular identity” or “the fulfillment of myth itself.”6 As the “antitype” or absence of type,
the Jew was by definition excluded from processes of mimetic identification of
myth, hence from German national identity. In “The Jewish People Don’t
Dream,” Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy “attempt, after Auschwitz, to imagine
what would constitute a distinctly Jewish process of identification” and to offer
“an alternative to the ‘identificatory mechanisms’ ” that, according to “The
Nazi Myth,” “are inevitably complicitous with fascism.”7 They locate in Freud’s
Der Witz ( Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious) a distinctly Jewish identificatory process: “The mocker participate[s] in the defect being mocked. In
other words . . . the Witz is best realized by means of an identification stretching across a doubled, or collective identity.”8 At the same time, the authors recognize that the doubling of identity in the joke structure might problematize
the notion of identity per se: “Perhaps one must discern here . . . a path . . .
which above all would draw analysis beyond or outside itself, and . . . beyond
any identifiable ‘Jewishness.’ One way or another, this path would lead beyond
the identity principle.”9
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209
According to a number of critics of postmodern theory, despite its philosemitic ambitions, the participation in a “discourse of the Jew” transforms the
Jew into a trope for the decentered, destabilized postmodern subject and ends
up fetishizing the Jew.10 A number of years ago, Alice Jardine coined the term
“gynesis” to refer to “the putting into discourse of ‘woman’ to describe the
crises associated with modernity”; she argued that this “semiosis” of woman
had very little to do with actual women. Indeed, the generalization of woman
was often accompanied by the dismissal of feminism.11 In recent postmodern theory, ethnic rather than sexual terms are deployed to define the site of the
other, but with similar results. Accordingly, critics maintain that the postHolocaust idealization of qualities that were previously stigmatized in the discourse of modern antisemitism does not break with the binary oppositions that
structured the earlier discourse. As Max Silverman comments, “Why adopt an
ethnicized allegory for portraying the tension between self and other, the nation
and its others, if not to concur, in a paradoxical way, with a problematic racialized discourse inherited from the era of modernity?”12 So the “Jewish question” remains alive and unresolved in postmodern theory.
But is the “Jewish question” of postmodern theory also as central a preoccupation in the United States, where the situation of Jews may perhaps be
described more accurately as “post-assimilationist” rather than post-Holocaust?
And what are the consequences of this difference for the representation of
postmodern American Jewishness? If in the United States, Jews are not merely
tropes circulated by others, do their self-representations in any way relate to
the tropes used in the theory?
According to Jon Stratton, the peculiarity of Jews in the United States is
that in the post–World War II years they were assimilated on two levels—both
ideologically and culturally. In other words, they were accepted not only as
American (i.e., subscribing to the Enlightenment ideology of liberalism, individualism, and freedom) but also as White (i.e., embracing Anglo-American
culture).13 But the desire for assimilation waned in the 1970s and 1980s as the
politics of multiculturalism gradually supplanted the politics of cultural pluralism, this time placing Jews in a peculiar post-assimilationist situation. As “a
group which had, for three decades, been presented as white, and as subscribing to the key value system of Anglo-America,” Jews were excluded from the
multiculture and faced with the problem “representationally speaking, . . . [of]
how to produce and present difference.”14
Stratton offers some provocative ideas about representing Jewishness in this
post-assimilationist context. Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s concepts of doubling
and mimicry in the post-colonial situation, Stratton argues that Jewish participation in the multiculture involves producing Jewish difference via doubling
and performance.15 At both moments a doubling takes place, but with a radical
shift in perspective. Whereas the post-colonial subject’s mimicry produces a
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psychic splitting in which the point of view of the colonizer predominates and
prevents full assimilation, the post-assimilationist subject performatively constructs her/his own difference.
In the discussion which follows I will retain—with two crucial
qualifications—Stratton’s notions of performativity and doubling, which are
most useful for analyzing the construction of postmodern Jewish difference.
First of all, regarding the first term, though he recognizes that Bhabha’s analysis
of mimicry is indebted to Freud’s notion of the uncanny, Stratton’s readings do
not take into account the unconscious dimension. That is, Stratton uses the
terms “performance” and “performative” interchangeably and conceives of both
as volitional. Instead, my analysis will preserve Judith Butler’s distinction between performance and performativity and especially her insistence on the unconscious aspect of the latter, which thus supports a notion of doubling closer
to Bhabha’s and Freud’s: “The psyche calls to be rethought as a compulsive
repetition. . . . If every performance repeats itself to institute the effect of identity, then every repetition requires an interval between the acts . . . in which risk
and excess threaten to disrupt the identity being constituted.The unconscious is
this excess that enables and contests every performance, and which never fully
appears within the performance itself.”16
As for the second term, I will argue that the most significant doubling occurs, not in the protagonist, but in the enunciation or narration, and that it
therefore implicates the spectator. Consequently, if the situation of the postcolonial subject can best be described via Freud’s essay “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” the
post-assimilationist situation of Jews in the United States may invoke a different Freudian text, Der Witz. But we must not, in the process of shifting models,
forget the joke’s relation to the unconscious. For in this text Freud discovers
that the joke-work’s central mechanisms—condensation, displacement, indirect
representation—are the same that operate in the dream-work. In a recent essay,
Homi Bhabha in fact analyzes the tendentious, self-critical joke as “a mode of
[ Jewish] minority utterance,”17 for as Freud remarks, the most apt instances
“have grown up on the soil of Jewish popular life.”18 Significantly, this focus on
the joke-work as a postmodern identificatory mechanism shifts the definition
of difference from visible or visual marks to “verbal or rhetorical locutions
through which the community hears itself ‘spoken.’ ”19
Bhabha isolates four aspects of the tendentious self-critical joke that I
will mobilize in my analysis: narrative structure, iterative process, performance, and
ethics. His analysis focuses first on the narrative structure of the Jewish joke,
which produces “a doubly articulated subject”—the “subject of the jest (sujet
d’énonce)” or object of fun, viewed extrinsically, and “the subject of the jokework (sujet d’énonciation),” which is not so much a specific person but a process of narration.20
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211
This doubled subject produces a self-critical posture, which Freud describes
as “criticism directed against the subject himself, or to put it more cautiously,
against someone in whom the subject has a share—a collective person, that is
(the subject’s own nation, for instance).” Freud contrasts such self-critical jokes
with comic stories told about Jews by foreigners:“The Jewish jokes which originate from Jews admit [that Jews are comic figures] too; but they know their real
faults as well as the connection between them and their good qualities, and the
share which the subject has in the person found fault with creates the subjective determinant . . . of the joke-work.”21 In other words, the comic stories indicate a confrontation between cultural insiders and outsiders, between two
distinct positions which can be invoked to support the notion of distinct identities. In contrast, the structure of identification or “subjective determinant . . .
of the joke-work” avoids such essentialism because it offers a mode of cultural
affiliation that results from ambivalence. Moreover, such ambivalence is articulated in the doubling of “sharing in” (“the share which the subject has in the person found fault with”) and “to have a share in” (“someone in whom the subject
has a share—a collective person”). Bhabha explains the difference: “To share
in . . . is to participate communally, to associate in fellowship; to have a share in
assumes, at the same time, a contradictory process of division, partialization, separation.” And the joke-work is “caught in the interstices between these double
subjects of ‘sharing.’ ”22
Bhabha also remarks that communal identification involves an iterative process (or “compulsive repetition” in Butler’s terms, as discussed above), which
“has initially to turn upon a destabilizing encounter with alterity prior to the
affiliative bond.”23 Moreover, this iterative process or performativity does not
accommodate a transcendent perspective existing apart or prior to the cultural
performance.
If the representation of the joke-work as an iterative process suggests its performativity, Bhabha also discusses joke-work in terms of performance, specifically the importance of timing, an aspect that works in tandem with the joke’s
ethical dimension, which takes into account the hearer.The first has to do with the
contingent temporality of enunciation, the fact that each time the punchline is
delivered in a different context.24 The ethical dimension involves the uncertainty
of truth, the question of “what determines the truth. . . . Is it the truth if we describe things as they are without troubling to consider how our hearer will understand what we say? . . . Does not genuine truth consist in taking the hearer
into account[?] . . . What [such jokes attack] is not a person or an institution but
the certainty of our knowledge itself.”25 As Bhabha explains, the success of the
joke depends on the third person, neither the joker nor the object of the joke:
“To take the hearer into account is to share in the making of a ‘collective
person’—nation, community, group—from the ambivalent movement that
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circulates in between first and third persons.”26 In short, what Bhabha adds to
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s analysis of the joke-work’s identificatory mechanism is the third person’s function in the constitution of community—the
translation/transformation of the identificatory process by the ethical dimension.
The Construction of the Jew
in Woody Alle n’s Cinema
Though Woody Allen’s humor is most frequently characterized as drawing on the tradition of the schlemiel, I will instead emphasize his humor’s
structural relation to the joke-work to illustrate how it functions to construct
a non-essentialized Jewishness. Stratton defines the schlemiel as “a character in
a joke” who “provides the community with an opportunity to laugh at its own
circumstance and at the dominant society that has placed it in this circumstance.”27 But by focusing on a character (in Bhabha’s terms, the “subject of
the jest” who is the object of fun), this definition ignores both the subject of
the joke-work and the iterative narrative process by which the community—
non-essentialized—is created; the quoted definition rather assumes an already
consolidated communal identity. Consequently, the focus on the schlemiel
fails to explain how Allen’s humor manages, according to Stratton, “to generalize his neuroses and anxieties to the gentile population.”28
In this connection Stratton cites David Biale, who argues, “In some of
Allen’s movies the Jew’s sexual ambivalence infects the gentile women and
turns them into mirror images of himself: even gentile Americans become
‘Jewish.’ The hidden agenda is to identify American with Jewish culture by
generalizing Jewish sexuality and creating a safe, unthreatening space for the
schlemiel as American anti-hero.”29 Certainly this generalizing process occurs
in Annie Hall (1977). Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, begins to remake Annie,
buying her books about death, paying for her psychoanalysis and the tuition
for her evening classes.30 But while this explanation addresses the extension of
Jewish qualities to gentile characters within the diegesis, it does not indicate
how Allen’s cinema manages to implicate the spectator.
From this perspective, the joke structure provides a better mode of analysis.
For the focus on characters omits the crucial role of the subjective determinant
of the joke-work, defined by Bhabha not as a person, but as a process of narration that produces a self-critical posture or ambivalence as a condition of affiliation. Indeed, Annie Hall offers a rich array of narrative procedures that translate
the doubled subject or encounter with alterity of Bhabha’s theory into specifically cinematic terms.Appropriately, the film opens with a comic monologue by
Alvy. Insofar as he directly addresses the camera/spectator, he transcends his
diegetic character role and assumes a narrative function, in effect becoming a
doubled subject who offers a critical commentary on the story. In another scene,
when Alvy produces Marshall McLuhan to challenge the obnoxious pontificating
Joke-Work
213
professor on the movie line, his direct address to the audience acknowledges that
this is sheer wish-fulfillment:“Boy, if life were only like this!” An alternative to
direct addresses to the camera is the use of subtitles, as in the scene at Annie’s
apartment shortly after Annie and Alvy first meet at the tennis court. Here the
doubled subject of the joke-work is produced insofar as the characters’ thoughts
as printed on the screen undercut the pretentiousness of their spoken words.
Thus as Alvy babbles about aesthetic criteria for judging photography, he thinks,
“I wonder what she looks like naked.” In a later scene the insertion of an animated sequence from Snow White performs the same deflating function by caricaturing the central conflicts of the story.Annie, presented as a cartoon Wicked
Queen, and a cartoon Alvy have their usual fight. She complains that they never
have fun any more, and he says she must be getting her period, to which she responds that cartoon characters don’t have periods.
If direct address, subtitles, and animation produce a doubly articulated subject by collapsing the story/enunciation distinction, the film’s innovative use of
flashback produces an instance of doubling that emphasizes the temporal division of the subject by juxtaposing past and present rather than more conventionally interrupting the narrative with a representation of the past. For instance,
when Annie tells Alvy about her former boyfriends—Dennis, from Chippewa
Falls High School, and Jerry, the actor—they enter the flashback to observe and
provide present-tense commentary. Jerry’s tendency to over-dramatize (he says
he would like to die by being torn apart by wild animals) provokes Alvy to observe, “Heavy! Eaten by some squirrels.” Similarly, a visit by Alvy, Annie, and
Rob (Alvy’s best friend) to Coney Island leads into a flashback to Alvy’s childhood home.As Alvy,Annie, and Rob enter the old living room to watch,Alvy’s
mother and father have a ridiculous argument about the Black cleaning
woman’s “right” to steal from them.Then the scene shifts to the welcome home
party for Alvy’s cousin, which introduces other members of Alvy’s family, among
them his Aunt Tessie, who claims to have been “a great beauty” and “quite a
lively dancer” in her youth.As Annie and Alvy lean against each other laughing,
Rob comments,“That’s pretty hard to believe.”These flashbacks expose the cultural differences between Alvy and Annie as they foreground the discontinuity
of time.
Annie Hall is most famous for its split-screen sequences, which, like flashbacks, use juxtaposition to highlight discordant perspectives. For example, when
Alvy joins the Halls for a quiet, elegant Easter dinner, the screen splits in half to
reveal Alvy’s family crowded around the kitchen table, talking loudly and at
once. If this juxtaposition exposes the Singers’ lack of civility, it also represents
Grammy Hall’s antisemitism via Alvy’s sudden transformation into a Hasidic
Jew wearing traditional garb, a full beard, and side locks.And yet the scene ends
with the two families addressing each other across the split screen, which suggests the permeability of the boundary that divides them as it calls attention to
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1. The split screen is used to represent the play of identity and difference in Annie Hall.
Frame grab.
the split-screen device as such. One of the most interesting uses of the split
screen shows Alvy and Annie at their psychiatrists’ offices. In this instance the
discordance achieved by the juxtaposition of images is augmented by the clash
of visual track and dialogue. The visuals emphasize the contrasts in style between the two: on the left the screen shows a very modern office with stark
white furniture and lots of chrome.Annie sits in an easy chair, as does her doctor. On the right side of the screen Alvy lies down on a sofa, his doctor seated
in an armchair behind him. This office has leather furniture and is paneled in
wood. As for the dialogue, though Alvy and Annie give similar replies (both
doctors ask about the frequency of sex), their perspectives on the issue diverge
radically. Alvy responds, “Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week.” And Annie
says,“Constantly. I’d say three times a week.”This doubling of perspectives is in
turn triangulated by that of the spectator, who, thanks to the split screen, is in a
position to laugh in appreciation at the subtle play between identity and difference in the scene (Figure 1).
These scenes demonstrate the aptness of Bhabha’s analysis for understanding how the joke-work functions in Woody Allen’s cinema as a process of narration.The above-cited quotation from Biale does, however, point to another
aspect of the representation of the Jew in Allen’s films that needs further elaboration at this point: the issue of gender. The traditional schlemiel was always
male. And Biale’s book, Eros and the Jew, focuses on the Jew as male sexual
schlemiel.31 Many critics have demonstrated the intersection of racial and
sexual categories in European constructions of the Jew. For instance, Sander
Gilman demonstrates a long-standing linkage between Jewish males and
women, largely because of the ritual practice of circumcision.The circumcised
penis and the clitoris were both regarded as truncated penises. Gilman argues
that Jewish males were therefore seen as feminized.32 As a result, comments
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215
Ann Pellegrini, “the Jewishness of male Jews became as much a category of
gender as of race.” This leads her to observe that “in the homology Jew-aswoman, the Jewish female body goes missing.”33 In the American context, the
representation of the feminized Jewish male is transformed into material for
humor, but the question remains: where does the representation of the Jewish
male as sexual neurotic leave Jewish women, especially since the Jewish male
so often longs for a gentile woman, who, as the split-screen sequence described above demonstrates, becomes the schlemiel’s mirror or double? The
Jewish female thus seems to be doubly displaced.
Here we might invoke the structure of another tendentious joke analyzed
by Freud: the “dirty joke” or smut, in which the ( Jewish) woman functions as
the butt of the joke and is structurally excluded. As Mary Ann Doane comments,“In order for the dirty joke to emerge in its specificity . . . the object of
desire—the woman—must be absent and a third person (another man) must be
present as witness to the joke—‘so that gradually, in place of the woman, the onlooker, now the listener, becomes the person to whom the smut is addressed.’ ”34
The structure of the “dirty joke” is certainly operative in the representation
of the Jewish woman as a “Jewish American Princess,” or JAP. As Biale points
out, the acronym is “suggestive of anti-Japanese racism” in the post–World War
II era. In contrast to the “comic and perhaps loveable” male sexual schlemiel,
the JAP stereotype is characterized as “obsessively materialistic . . . and utterly
uninterested in sex.”35 Riv-Ellen Prell, who locates the prevalence of JAP
humor in the post-assimilationist 1970s, explains that “the woman’s sexuality is
subsumed by consumerism because she embodies the economic system” of the
time, specifically Jews’ participation in a middle-class economy “that depends
on manipulation rather than manufacture and consumption rather than production.”36 Moreover, in terms of the joke structure, whereas the male’s “inner
conflicts and neuroses are revealed and thus [made] sympathetic, . . . [the
JAP’s] sexual pathology remains purely objectified and superficial. Jewish
women become the site for projections of all that seems most hateful about
Jewish sexuality.”37
Woody Allen’s film career coincides with the emergence of the JAP stereotype, and not surprisingly, his humor includes jokes that target the Jewish
woman. Sometimes his jokes assume the absence of the woman.Thus in Love
and Death (1975),Allen’s character, Boris, says,“I hear Jewish women don’t believe in sex after marriage.” On other occasions, as in Annie Hall, the Jewish
woman as JAP makes a cameo appearance as Alvy’s second ex-wife, who is
characterized by her social ambition and lack of interest in sex.
In contrast, Alvy’s first ex-wife, Allison, resists the JAP stereotype and offers a brief critique of its underlying misogyny. At their first meeting at a political rally for Adlai Stevenson, Alvy tries to pin down her type: “You’re like
New York Jewish Left-Wing Liberal Intellectual Central Park West Brandeis
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University . . . the Socialist summer camps and the father with the Ben Shahn
drawings, right?” Allison replies, “That was wonderful. I love being reduced to
a cultural stereotype.” Nor does she conform to type after they are married, for
she urges him to come to bed, but he is too obsessed with the Warren Commission report to do so. In fact, she argues,“You’re using this conspiracy theory
as an excuse to avoid sex with me.”At this point,Alvy addresses the camera directly and admits, “She’s right! Why did I turn off Allison Portchnik? She was
beautiful. She was willing. She was real intelligent. Is it the old Groucho Marx
joke? That I just don’t want to belong to any club that would have someone like
me for a member?”
The extra-diegetic reference to the Groucho Marx joke offers a momentary self-critical acknowledgment of the structural exclusion of the Jewish
woman from the film.The question remains unanswered, except obliquely via
editing, for it is followed immediately by the scene in which Annie and Alvy
attempt to catch a group of live lobsters crawling around the kitchen floor.
Their (unkosher) bonding in this scene contrasts starkly with the failure of Alvy’s
relationship with Allison. Allison Portchnik’s critique of the JAP stereotype
may be short-lived in Annie Hall, but the representational challenge posed by
this character is taken up in the films discussed below.
The Construction of the Jew in Rece nt
Ame rican Wome n’s Films
A number of recent women’s films38—notably Amy’s O (Julie Davis, 2001),
A Family Affair (Helen Lesniak, 2003), and Kissing Jessica Stein (Charles
Herman-Wurmfeld, 2001)—have resisted the Jewish woman’s systematic exclusion from representation by reclaiming Woody Allen territory and swapping
the roles of male schlemiel and JAP, which as the above-quoted comments
by Biale indicate, are actually reverse or mirror images of one another, distinguished primarily by the different perspectives from which they are viewed.
That is, both are sexual neurotics, but the male schlemiel gives us access to his
thought processes while the JAP is viewed extrinsically. Accordingly, in these
women’s films the JAP transforms into the female schlemiel whose sexual neuroses and inner conflicts move to center stage and are explored sympathetically,
taking precedence over differences of class, religion, or ethnicity, while the Jewish male is either objectified or excluded altogether as an object of desire.
As far as class is concerned, all three films assume Jews’ full participation in
middle-class affluence.The protagonists themselves are writers/artists in comfortable economic circumstances, and their parents are well-to-do suburbanites
living in Los Angeles (Amy’s O), San Diego (A Family Affair), or Scarsdale (Kissing Jessica Stein). Even their lovers are of the same class; instead the romantic
conflicts depend on lifestyle-based differences. Of the three protagonists, Amy,
a best-selling author who has earned a million dollars and has bought her own
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2. The confessional represents the doubling of Amy and her priest confessor in Amy’s O.
Frame grab.
house, is the wealthiest. Rachel’s apartment in A Family Affair contains no furniture, just cartons and a folding table for her computer, but this is not because
of lack of money. Rather, she has a problem with settling down. Jessica’s apartment in Manhattan is a well-appointed duplex.Though she quits her job as a
copy editor at a newspaper in order to devote herself to painting, money is not
an issue.
Similarly, the protagonists’ religion/ethnicity is represented matter-offactly, which is to say explicitly but not as a source of conflict. I use the construction religion/ethnicity to accommodate the different representations of
Jewishness in these films. In Amy’s O, the protagonist, in a direct address to the
audience at the beginning of the film, identifies herself as a twenty-nine-yearold, Jewish, Ivy League–educated, successful author, who is insecure despite her
fame and who worries about the cellulite spreading from her ass to her thighs.
“Ethnicity” is the more appropriate term to use here because Amy’s Jewishness
is presented in cultural rather than religious terms. On another occasion she
fears that the man she has started dating is not calling because he is turned off
by her “big fat Jewish ass.” Her self-imposed celibacy leaves her prey to fantasies
of being ravished, even by a total stranger—as long as he is “clean, goodlooking, and Jewish.” In a scene with her parents, they express concern, over a
breakfast of bagels, about her not dating. But there are no Jewish religious observances or rituals presented in the film. In fact, quite the reverse is true: instead of seeking help from a shrink, Amy decides to go to confession to a
Catholic priest because “it’s confidential and it’s free.”The priest’s own celibacy
makes him a mirror image of Amy, which is visually captured in scenes that
show the two in the confessional separated by a wall—in effect a split screen
(Figure 2). Their doubling makes this the most interesting relationship in the
film because it offers an opportunity to explore Amy’s neurosis more critically
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(by the end of the film he has left the clergy, and his nonchalant attitude regarding this decision throws into relief the abruptness of the reversals in Amy’s
story, discussed below).Yet this hint of critical perspective remains undeveloped.
At the other end of the spectrum, religion plays a crucial role in A Family
Affair because Jewishness and sexuality are intertwined. For instance, when
Rachel comes out to her parents as a lesbian, her mother goes into mourning
at the news—represented as her sitting shiva. Of course the representation of
the mother is not confined to religious terms. Her exaggerated reaction also
draws on the stereotype of the Jewish mother, symbolizing “the excesses of
nurturance and the pressures of guilt.”39 In fact, those aspects of the Jewish
mother image remain intact, even after she becomes reconciled to her daughter’s sexuality, for she goes far beyond mere acceptance and becomes an activist
supporter of gay rights, who insists on calling herself “non-gay” rather than
“straight.” Nor does she hesitate to use the pressures of guilt to persuade Rachel
to join in a gay pride parade. Most important, it is the mother who fixes Rachel
up with Christine, a gentile massage therapist, who turns out to be “Ms.
Rightowitz.” Christine in turn embraces Rachel’s Judaism, not merely by celebrating Jewish holidays with her, but by converting. The conversion initially
becomes a disquieting issue for Rachel, but only because it indicates Christine’s
desire for a long-term commitment. Thus religion in itself is not a problem.
Kissing Jessica Stein, like A Family Affair, presents the protagonist’s Jewishness in interarticulated religious/ethnic and sexual terms.The film opens with
a scene of a Yom Kippur service in a synagogue. Jessica’s mother, sitting beside
her, keeps pointing out “eligible” men, while her grandmother, on her other
side, criticizes each candidate and tells Jessica she can do better. In a later scene
of a Sabbath dinner at the parents’ house, Judy, the mother, again adheres to
the stereotype: she calls Jessica into the kitchen and extols the largely nonexistent virtues of Stanley, the young man whom she has invited to dinner.
Judy also tries to enlist Helen’s help in convincing Jessica of Stanley’s worthiness, not understanding at this point in the film that Helen is more than Jessica’s friend. But Judy transcends the stereotype when she figures out that
Jessica is in love with Helen. After Helen and Jessica break up because of Jessica’s reluctance to acknowledge their relationship to friends and family, Judy
notices her daughter’s distress. In a very moving scene she indicates that she
both understands and approves of the relationship. Choking up, she tells Jessica
that “[Helen] is a very nice girl.”The use of understatement in the scene not
only marks its departure from the stereotype but also accounts for its emotional impact.
In short, even if the representation of the families sometimes borders on
caricature in these films, all are very accepting of the daughters’ partners and
do not make an issue of religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.The full support of families, friends, and community in turn situates the conflicts within
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the protagonists themselves so that their sexual neuroses bear the burden of
defining the characters’ Jewish difference.Though their neuroses differ, each is
a sexual schlemiel. Amy describes herself as a “sexorectic”; Rachel is a lesbian
with a fear of commitment; Jessica teeters between heterosexual and lesbian
possibilities. But as I have argued above, the success of the joke-work in each
film hinges on its ability to solicit simultaneously the spectator’s laughter at
and identification with the schlemiel’s dilemma, in short on the spectator’s engagement in the narrative process.
From this perspective, Amy’s O seems more self-indulgent than selfcritical.The direct addresses to the audience (unlike those of Woody Allen in
Annie Hall and other films) are less revelations of character than opportunities
to mug for the camera, and combined with the frequent soft-focus close-ups
of Amy, they emphasize her narcissism rather than her capacity for selfcriticism.The animated inter-titles which quote chapter headings from Amy’s
book (another device indebted to Allen’s films) mimic Amy’s mugging in that
they are self-consciously “cute.”Thus the enunciatory devices in this film only
superficially resemble Woody Allen’s in Annie Hall and other films to create
the doubled identificatory process essential to the joke-work.
Consequently, we are not able to understand and sympathize with Amy’s
neurosis because the narrative never transcends stereotypes and platitudes; it
merely reverses them. Amy, who is so virulently heterosexual that she turns
away and wipes her mouth in disgust when her lesbian literary agent kisses her,
has nevertheless sworn off men and written a self-help book entitled Why Love
Doesn’t Work, which has made her a celebrity and “feminist icon.” But the film
suggests that her self-imposed celibacy, her professional success, and her feminist stance are all the result of a bad breakup, and the superficiality of her convictions (if not her homophobia) is underscored by the ease with which she
abandons her feminist principles after she does an interview with Matthew
Starr, a misogynist shock-jock radio host, and they start dating. Doing an
abrupt about-face, she confesses to being “misguided, horny, and just a hopeless
romantic looking to connect.” Matthew also undergoes a radical reversal. In
fact, he and Amy seem to trade places. Presented initially as a lecherous stud, he
becomes less and less interested in sex the more she seeks it. Precisely because
change is reductively presented as antithesis, it does not offset the shallowness
of the characters.Therefore, in this film Amy does not transcend the JAP stereotype; she assumes it.
Like Amy’s O,A Family Affair follows the abrupt reversals of Rachel’s story,
and the film also begins, in Woody Allen stand-up style, with a direct address to
the audience. Rachel announces that this is a lesbian-themed movie so as to
give those who might take offense a chance to leave the theater, but the warning is unnecessary because the film demonstrates that a lesbian romance can be
just as conventional as its straight counterpart. For Rachel’s lesbianism is
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3. The dinner scene represents Rachel (in the middle) torn between her feelings for
Reggie, her ex (left), and Christine, her new lover, in A Family Affair. Frame grab.
presented as a given, not an issue. As she states in another direct address, “I’ve
known I was gay since I was DNA.”
Like Amy’s O,A Family Affair depends on the comic formula that opposites
attract, in this case pairing the Woody Allenish–New York–neurotic Rachel with
sunny Californian Christine. But Christine is so loving and open to commitment that she does not present much opposition, so the film must provide another explanation of Rachel’s fear of commitment. It actually offers two, which
is one too many. First, Reggie, Rachel’s former lover, comes to San Diego, determined to revive their relationship. Reggie is the opposite of Christine—a
very intellectual, bisexual femme fatale—and she calls into question the credibility of Rachel’s love for Christine. In a painful dinner scene Christine’s ignorance and limited vocabulary are exposed when Reggie states that she is a
physics professor at Columbia University; Christine assumes that Reggie
teaches physical education and she remains oblivious to how Reggie’s satiric responses are mocking her and establishing a connection between Reggie and
Rachel at her expense (Figure 3). The film attempts to offset the intensity of
Rachel’s reaction to Reggie’s reappearance, which threatens to derail the romantic comedy and turn it into melodrama, by offering a forced alternative explanation: Rachel’s phobia about commitment is attributed to her sister’s sudden
death at age thirteen.And all Rachel needs to overcome her phobia is to have a
long overdue talk with her father about the fatal accident. He dismisses Reggie
as just another excuse and proclaims that Christine is the woman Rachel really
loves. This “talking cure” is instantly effective—at least within the diegesis—
for immediately thereafter Rachel is prepared to say goodbye to Reggie and
to commit unconditionally to settling down to a family life in San Diego
with Christine. The film ends—in very un–Woody Allenish fashion—with a
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traditional Jewish wedding, a resigned Reggie among the guests already sizing
up her next conquest, the officiating lesbian rabbi.
Kissing Jessica Stein has been described as a lesbian Annie Hall by a number
of reviewers.40 Others dismiss the film as “just two straight women’s [inaccurate] interpretation of a lesbian relationship.”41 To a certain extent, the plot conforms to Terry Castle’s description of “the underlying principle of lesbian
narrative itself,” which depends on the suppression of “male erotic triangulation,” that is, the triangular desire defined by René Girard as being generated
by the rivalry of two men over a woman,42 which coincidentally also perfectly
describes the structure of the dirty joke.Thus Jessica, after a series of disastrous
first dates with men (represented in a comic montage sequence at the beginning of the film which includes a date with a dead ringer for a young Woody
Allen), decides to answer a personals ad which contains a quotation from her
favorite writer, Rilke.The quotation is about overcoming the shyness that prevents one from opening oneself to the experience of an other. Helen Cooper,
an assistant art gallery director who is simultaneously juggling three shallow relationships with men, has placed the woman-seeking-woman ad after receiving
a long, seductive look from a woman attending an opening at the gallery, who
is shown earlier kissing another woman.Thus male erotic triangulation is suppressed for different reasons for the two characters, which in turn may account
on the one hand for the “ ‘dysphoric’ lesbian counterplotting” of Jessica’s story
(i.e.,“female homosexual desire is a finite phenomenon—a temporary phase in
a larger pattern of heterosexual Bildung”) and on the other hand for the “ ‘euphoric’ lesbian counterplotting” that describes Helen’s story (i.e., the failure of
heterosexual love “functions as a pretext for the conversion to homosexual desire” and offers an alterative to the marriage plot).43 For the film ends with the
suggestion that Jessica will again become involved with ex-lover/boss Josh
while Helen has moved on to another woman.
Yet however nuanced, Castle’s description of lesbian narrative does not
quite fit Kissing Jessica Stein, which is neither a lesbian nor a straight film, for it
escapes such definitive categorization and rather explores the characters’ sexual
fluidity. If Jessica is “straight,” she is queerly so, for she falls in love with another
woman and is happiest when she is with Helen. In a scene near the end of the
film she explains to Josh that Helen “dumped” her because she “wanted someone a little more gay.” The wording is interesting in that Jessica, who is fussy
about language, does not describe herself as straight. Maybe she just doesn’t
have much of a sex drive. (In the Yom Kippur scene at the beginning, her
mother says she hasn’t dated in a year.) Through Jessica’s character the film explores the possibility of romantic love that does not depend on physical expression as well as the eroticism of female friendship (as when Jessica caresses
Helen’s pants in the taxi and says, “What are these? I’m so borrowing”). Her
choice of words also calls into question the assumption—mentioned in a
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number of reviews—that she and Josh will start dating again. For the film ends
with Jessica meeting Helen at an outdoor café at which they launch into a discussion of what Josh said. But prior to Jessica’s arrival, Helen, speaking on her
cell phone to Laura, her new lover, mentions that Jessica is late because she ran
into Josh, thus setting up the topic of their conversation, which in any case is
muffled by the traffic noises.
As for Helen, is she lesbian or bisexual? Though at the end of the film she
is sexually involved with another woman, it is premature to conclude that this
is the end of her trajectory, for her bisexuality has not been presented as a denial either of lesbianism or of heterosexuality. As she tells Jessica, she “find[s]
lots of things sexy.” So for both characters, the ending avoids the definitive
closure upon which Castle’s categories depend. And in any case, the film emphasizes the cadence, not the resolution of Helen and Jessica’s romance.
Therefore,“queer” rather than “lesbian” more aptly describes the narrative.
For as Eric Savoy observes,“queer incoherence” is most usefully deployed in analytic situations, not to negate gay and lesbian specificity, but to articulate such
specificity as “emergent, on the threshold of tentative definition.”44 Accordingly,
Kissing Jessica Stein resists all rigid definitions of sexuality—whether heterosexual (e.g., Amy’s O) or lesbian (e.g., A Family Affair)—and instead foregrounds the
process of coming out, or rather, coming out as an iterative process, one that
bears striking structural affinities to joke-work and thus also requires a reading
that attends to the performative aspects of the text. In other words, because it relies on silences, excesses of connotation, and obliquities of reference, coming
out—like joke-work—interrogates what constitutes a speech act. As Michel
Foucault observes, “There is no binary division to be made between what one
says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of
not saying such things. . . . There is not one but many silences, and they are an
integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.”45 And the
fact that silences count as speech acts suggests in turn that ignorance ought not
to be considered as a singular negative but rather as potent signifying opacities.
As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts it,“Coming out . . . can bring about the revelation of unknowing as unknowing, not as a vacuum . . . but as a weighty and
occupied and consequential epistemological space.”46
Certainly the repeated instances of coming out in the film are characterized by Jessica’s and her interlocutors’ reliance on circumlocution or paralepsis, as in the aforementioned scene when her mother, Judy, stumbles over her
words,“She’s a very nice girl.” Helen in fact complains that Jessica “can’t even
say it,” a construction which itself relies on an evasive pronoun. Jessica’s
brother’s wedding—the celebration of heterosexual union par excellence—
ironically serves as the occasion for many comings out: to the brother; to other
guests and family members; and, most significantly, to Josh.The last is actually
a mutual coming out, which functions simultaneously as joke-work, bringing
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into relief the structural similarities of the two processes as speech acts. Thus
as Josh prepares to confess his feelings for Jessica, she thinks he is about to fire
her.After he kisses her and asks her to have dinner with him the next evening,
she explains that she is “with Helen.” He interprets her words as indicating
that she is planning to dine with Helen, prompting Jessica to clarify that she is
“with Helen, as in ‘with with.’ ” Gestures assume the burden of communication, and facial expressions are crucial in this scene, for they make visible the
multiple ignorances exposed by the silences in the dialogue.
Because the performative effects of ignorance, especially in the vicinity of
the closet, cannot be known in advance, the effects of self-disclosure remain
unpredictable prior to enunciation. Sedgwick has described at length this lack
of epistemological control and the unsettling effects of coming out, which has
the potential to destabilize all identities, both of the one coming out and of
the one receiving the disclosure.47 The “radical uncertainty” felt by the closeted person resonates with Freud’s insistence that the function of the jokework is to expose the uncertainty of knowledge, its contingency on the
reaction of the hearer.
No scene links the reception of the joke to the transformative potential of
coming out better than the one in which Jessica comes out to her friend Joan,
precisely because of its explicitness. Joan’s reaction—singular in its departure
from the indirection of others’ responses—performs what the dialogue describes. The scene begins with a cut to Joan shouting “Lesbian!” which causes
Jessica to start babbling hysterically, then to doubt her relation with Helen. Despite her shock, Joan is not disgusted but “impressed.”And her ignorance is coupled with a shrewd knowingness, a crystallization of intuition that enables her to
guess that Jessica met Helen by answering the ad with the Rilke quotation. She
then proceeds to barrage Jessica with questions, not balking at asking for intimate details. Jessica’s replies reveal that Helen has all the qualities she has been
seeking: she’s “kind and witty, quirky, nurturing”; “the sex is good”; Helen
“makes [her] laugh”; and she’s “as smart as” Jessica. Finally, Joan asks, “And she
gets you?” to which Jessica responds, “Yeah, she does; she really does.” “Gets
you” is noteworthy because “getting” is a term associated with the reception of
a joke and suggests an instantaneous effect: the coincidence of understanding
and induced laughter. As Doane explains, the timing is all important because if
one does not “get” the joke at the moment of transmission, one will never “get”
it, even if one belatedly comprehends it. For in “getting” the joke, one “finds
oneself ” laughing; “finds oneself ” suggests that one is “beside oneself,” other
than oneself.48 In short,“getting” involves a split or doubled subject. So the doubling of the listener mirrors the doubling of the subject of the joke-work. In
each case, doubling suggests an encounter that prevents one’s coincidence with
oneself and that therefore enables the construction of a non-essentialized community. By posing the question, Joan demonstrates that she “gets” Jessica as well.
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The spectator too is invited to “get” Kissing Jessica Stein precisely insofar
as Helen and Jessica’s multifaceted mutual attraction is presented largely as a
semiotic affair, through their language rather than explicit acts, which would
appeal to the spectator’s voyeurism—a structure that depends on the spectator’s separation from, rather than implication in, the narrative process. In fact,
the first time they consummate their relation, the screen goes black. Focus is
directed instead to the tentative emergence of the relationship.Their first date
almost doesn’t happen because Jessica panics and wants to leave immediately.
Upon hearing Helen say, “You don’t have to make up your mind right away;
let it marinate,” Jessica is struck by this use of “marinate” and agrees to stay for
a drink. Next she is fascinated by Helen’s term “sexy/ugly.” For it not only introduces Jessica to a new way of conceiving of sex appeal, but it also picks up
on and formally mimics Jessica’s descriptions of men she’s been dating as not
the right kind of smart and not the right kind of funny (funny/stupid or
funny/tragic). Of particular interest are those occasions when the women reveal their sexuality even though they seem not to be discussing sex at all. For
instance, during their taxi ride to a restaurant (after they have clearly clicked
over drinks) Jessica admires the color of Helen’s lipstick. Helen explains that
she uses three different shades to achieve it and she gives Jessica the recipe, observing that it would look equally good on her. Jessica replies that using multiple shades is “too labor intensive” and that she’s “looking for that one,” to
which Helen counters, “You’ll never find it.You have to blend.” In this dialogue sexuality exists as an in-between state located in the “play” between an
“innocent” and a “loaded” meaning.
Of course, as a film, Kissing Jessica Stein does not depend on dialogue alone
but translates double entendre into visual terms as a dialectic of revealing and
concealing or a play between the visible and the verbal.The verbal or rhetorical locutions thereby retain their importance, as in Bhabha’s analysis of the
joke-work. Of particular interest to my argument is the function of visual double entendre as a mechanism of identification, which engages the spectator on
the basis of such doubling. A good example is the scene in a bar in which two
men join Jessica and Helen’s table, and the topic of male obsession with lesbian
sex comes up. Helen and Jessica sit side by side on one end of the table, each
with her chin resting on her right hand, a pose that emphasizes their doubling.
Then, as the men try to explain what turns them on about seeing two women
together, Helen enacts under the table what they describe in their conversation.Though the table does not literally split the screen horizontally, the same
effect is achieved through editing. For when one man mentions the excitement
of seeing two women touching, the film cuts to Helen caressing Jessica’s thigh,
her hand concealed from the men’s view (Figures 4a and 4b).The scene pokes
fun at—without cruelly mocking—the men’s voyeuristic desires even as it
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4a and b. Voyeurism is transformed into an occasion for laughter as a table hides . . .
Helen’s seduction of Jessica from their male companions. Frame grabs.
withholds their satisfaction. At the same time, it offers the spectator visual access to Helen’s seduction of Jessica yet transforms that voyeuristic pleasure into
an occasion for laughter, thereby calling to mind Bhabha’s description of the
joke-work as “caught in the interstices between [the] . . . double subjects of
‘sharing.’ ” The hidden touching turns the women on too, for shortly thereafter
they head for home, using as an excuse their concern about Jessica’s having
suddenly developed “a slight leg cramp.” When they leave, one of the men
comments with genuine appreciation, “Women really know how to take care
of one another.” And of course, he speaks more truly than he knows.
The rhetorical complexity of this scene depends less on the virtuosity
which characterizes Woody Allen’s cinematic narration—direct address, subtitles, animation, flashbacks, split screens—than on its terms of address, its
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multiple narratees.Thus on one level the dialogue is addressed to the men; this
dialogue is doubled by the physical communication between the women via
touching and is visually displayed. Yet this gender-inflected, dialogized discourse does not produce a narrative palimpsest—a hierarchical relation in
which a surface text conceals a hidden truth or under-text. For the subtext
functions as an illustration—not the antithesis—of the surface text and in the
process queers the heteronormative definition of gender in terms of binary
opposition by disarticulating sex, gender, and sexuality, in effect by triangulating the binary. Finally, a third text on the level of enunciation is addressed to
the spectator, who reads the ellipses and “gets” the oblique referentiality of the
scene in light of an understanding of both sides, and who therefore escapes
being limited to the sex, gender, or sexuality of either.
Finally, vis-à-vis engaging the spectator, mention should be made of the
Manhattan cinematography. For the camera’s love affair with New York doubles the romance between Jessica and Helen and functions to offer the spectator moments of recognition and identification based on a familiarity with the
city. Some sites, such as Central Park and the Manhattan skyline, will be recognized by many. Others, such as a shot traveling down Broadway which includes Zabar’s, Fairway, and other West Side landmarks, or the scene of Helen’s
and Jessica’s first kiss in front of the colorful display window of a Ricky’s drugstore in the village, probably require a more direct knowledge of the city. One
can certainly enjoy the film without recognizing Zabar’s and Ricky’s, but such
moments add to the spectator’s pleasure of being embraced in a community of
New York lovers. Most important, the shots of the city offer different ways of
“getting” them, ranging from recognition from other representations in film
and television to a more direct connection with the city. Needless to say,
representations of New York City in Woody Allen’s films, especially Manhattan
(1979) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), head the list of intertextual pleasures
afforded by Kissing Jessica Stein. Moreover, just as the film explores different
kinds of sexuality, it constructs a relation to the spectator that is not uniform
but fluid.
Conc lusi on
All three films under consideration here—Amy’s O, A Family Affair, and
Kissing Jessica Stein—use the “opposites attract” premise, albeit articulated
differently: female sexorectic/lecherous male stud; New York neurotic lesbian/
sunny Californian lesbian; upper West Side neurotic/downtown hipster. But
only Kissing Jessica Stein escapes the binary logic of the premise by resisting containment by the stereotype; for the relation between Jessica and Helen queers
the straight/lesbian binary and in general resists rigid identity categories. It thus
undoes the exclusion of the woman from the diegesis as it makes a space for the
female sexual schlemiel.
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But even more important is Kissing Jessica Stein’s deployment of joke-work
on the level of enunciation in contrast to the other films’ reliance on manipulation of the spectator—albeit in different ways.That is, in Amy’s O the narcissism of the protagonist extends to the smug “cuteness” of the editing,
camera work, and inter-titles. In A Family Affair the narration—unlike the
protagonist—never recovers from the melodramatic reappearance of Rachel’s
ex, which is why the “happy” ending seems so forced. These films only highlight the significance of Kissing Jessica Stein’s intervention in the construction of
Jewish postmodern communal identity as joke-work, which we are now in a
position to grasp by placing the film in the context of postmodern theory and
Woody Allen’s cinema, in other words by circling back to the discussion at the
beginning of the essay, specifically Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc
Nancy’s location of a distinctly Jewish identificatory process in Der Witz
stretching “across a doubled or collective identity.” If these theorists recognize
that the doubling of the joke structure problematizes identity per se, Homi
Bhabha finds in such doubling or ambivalence an assurance that the self-critical
joke constructs a non-essentialized communal identity. Moreover, by triangulating the doubled identity highlighted in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s
analysis—that is, by insisting on the importance of the third person or listener—
Bhabha foregrounds the performativity as well as the ethical dimension of the
joke-work, which involves the uncertainty or contingency of truth, since truth
depends on taking the hearer into account in a specific, time-bound repetition
of the joke.
Note that Bhabha’s analysis, unlike Woody Allen’s humor, does not specify gender.Though Allen’s films conform to the narrative structure of the selfcritical tendentious joke and therefore provide an identificatory process that
includes the not-necessarily Jewish spectator (i.e., constructs a non-essentialized
communal identity), the inclusiveness of the joke-work is undermined by the
deployment of another kind of tendentious joke, the “dirty” joke, which
structurally functions to exclude the Jewish woman.The woman’s absence simultaneously facilitates the forging of a relation between the teller and listener
(both constructed as masculine) and introduces a radical gender imbalance into
the joke-work.
Though it may fall short of the stylistic ingenuity of Allen’s cinematic narrative techniques, Kissing Jessica Stein corrects the gender imbalance of his
films on the level of enunciation and makes room for the female/queer spectator by attending to the performative effects of the not-shown, the un- or
under-narrated, the un-narratable. Furthermore, by foregrounding the process
of “getting” a joke, it also enriches Bhabha’s analysis of this “mode of minority discourse” (which insists upon the importance of the third person) by
demonstrating that the hearer/spectator participates in the construction of a
non-essentialized collective identity only insofar as s/he mimics the doubling
228
of the subject of the joke-work. For in “getting” a joke, one “finds oneself ”
laughing. This finding of oneself assumes that one is other. In short, the psychic force of the affect (laughter as unconscious excess) provides a limit that
prevents one from coinciding with oneself, as it displaces any conception of
social enunciation as a direct expression of one’s cultural self-presence.
Note s
1. Eric Santner,“Postmodernism’s Jewish Question: Slavoj Žižek and the Monotheistic
Perverse,” in Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances, ed. Lynne Cooke and Peter
Wollen (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 234.
2. Ibid., 238.
3. Both Kristeva and Žižek are discussed in Elizabeth Jane Bellamy’s Affective Genealogies: Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism, and “The Jewish Question” after Auschwitz (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 30.
4. Quoted in Max Silverman,“Re-Figuring ‘The Jew’ in France,” in Modernity, Culture
and “The Jew,” ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press, 1998), 198.
5. Quoted in Bellamy, Affective Genealogies, 146.
6. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Nazi Myth,” Critical Inquiry
16, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 307.
7. Bellamy, Affective Genealogies, 146.
8. Quoted in ibid., 96.
9. Quoted in ibid., 98; emphasis in the original.
10. Ibid., 31.
11. Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1985), 35.
12. Silverman,“Re-Figuring,” 199; original emphasis.
13. Jon Stratton,“Not really white—again: performing Jewish difference in Hollywood
films since the 1980s,” Screen 42, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 146, 145.
14. Ibid., 155.
15. Ibid., 156.
16. Judith Butler,“Imitation and Gender Subordination,” in Inside/Outside: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 28.
17. Homi K. Bhabha,“Foreword: Joking Aside:The Idea of a Self-Critical Community,”
in Modernity, Culture and “The Jew,” ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Palo
Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998), xx.
18. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey
(New York: Norton, 1960), 111.
19. Bhabha,“Foreword,” xvi.
20. Ibid., xvii.
21. Freud, Jokes, 111.
22. Bhabha,“Foreword,” xviii; emphasis in the original.
23. Ibid., xviii, xix.
24. Ibid., xix.
25. Freud, Jokes, 115.
26. Bhabha,“Foreword,” xx; emphasis in the original.
27. Jon Stratton, Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities (New York: Routledge, 2000), 301.
28. Ibid., 299.
29. David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997), 207.
Joke-Work
229
30. David Desser and Lester Friedman, American-Jewish Filmmakers:Traditions and Trends
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 84.
31. Biale, Eros, 205.
32. Sander L. Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 38–39.
33. Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New York:
Routledge), 17, 18.
34. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 30.
36. Riv-Ellen Prell, “Why Jewish Princesses Don’t Sweat: Desire and Consumption in
Postwar American Jewish Culture,” in Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities, ed.
Norman Kleeblatt (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 84.
38. My description of these films as “women’s films” requires clarification at this point.
Amy’s O and A Family Affair were written and directed by women who also play the
lead roles. Kissing Jessica Stein, though directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, was
written by Helen Juergensen and Jennifer Westfeldt, who also play the lead roles.All
three films not only focus on female protagonists but also represent their points of
view, thereby giving them enunciative functions.Yet, as my discussion of Amy’s O
demonstrates, the films are not therefore necessarily feminist films. My terminology
(evoking the woman’s film of the 1940s) refers most crucially to the films’ terms of
address: they are directed (though not exclusively) toward a female audience.
39. Prell,“Jewish Princesses,” 75.
40. Elvis Mitchell, rev. of Kissing Jessica Stein, New York Times (March 13, 2002): E5.
41. Sherri Whatley, rev. of Kissing Jessica Stein, Off Our Backs (July-August 2002): 66.
42. Marjorie Garber, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1995), 427.
43. Ibid., 428.
44. Eric Savoy,“ ‘That ain’t all she ain’t’: Doris Day and Queer Performativity,” in Outtakes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 154.
45. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 27.
46. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 76; emphasis in the original.
47. Ibid., 79.
48. Doane, Femmes Fatales, 40–41.
They All Are Jews
Daniel Itzkovitz
Google the words “Jews” and “famous” and you’ll get an
interesting choice among the top hits. First up,Yahoodi.com: a catalog of Jewish standouts, collected and listed “not to brag or gloat,” but “to convince Jews
they have much to be proud of.” Following not far behind, Stormfront.org: a
“white nationalist resource page,” generously serving as “a resource for those
courageous men and women fighting to preserve their White Western culture,
ideals and freedom of speech.” Google “Jewish celebrity” and you’ll reach Jewhoo.com, where you can ogle with pride the astonishing lists of famous
members of the tribe (Larry David and Sarah Jessica Parker we knew, but
Harrison Ford? Jennifer Connelly?); while “Jews entertainment” will yield Jewwatch.com, a neo-Nazi site dedicated to “Keeping a Close Watch on Jewish
Communities & Organizations Worldwide,” and which has, essentially, the same
information as the philo-Semitic Jewhoo. In the Hollywood executives section,
for instance, one finds a helpful list including “Aaron Spelling—Famous TV producer and father of a great ‘No Talent’ also known as Tori Spelling.” Everyone’s
a critic.
Google has clearly tapped into a wildly disjunctive universe in which the
naches set and the Nazi set seem to share research assistants. It is a universe many
of us have known about for a while now. “WhoosaJew” is a familiar game
played in the halls of Hebrew schools across America and also, apparently, at
Nazi youth rallies. For me, the emblematic text on this subject has always been
the book that sat on my parents’ bookshelf through my childhood: They All Are
Jews.A compendium of impressive figures ranging, as the subtitle not-so-subtly
bragged, “from Moses to Einstein,” the book brought together the likes of
Louis Brandeis, Emma Goldman, Karl Marx, and Roy Cohn with its triumphant and, let’s be frank, paranoia-inducing title and style. As a teenager,
books like this one set my own personal cycle of celebration and vilification
spinning.And for this reason, in the yeshiva in which I grew up there were limits: Jews may run Hollywood, but no one seemed to bring it up during our
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They All Are Jews
231
Jewish history lessons. Despite our suspicions, and despite the boosterism that
otherwise guided our searching for landsmen in the news, this much we all
somehow seemed to know: if the Jews did “run the entertainment and media
industries” (and the evidence seemed irrefutable), it was bad for the Jews.
This made sense. Conspiracy theories concerning Jews had gathered
steam in the nineteenth century and, by the time I reached the yeshiva, were
amazingly common across the globe.The most famous of these of course was
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, trumped up by Czar Nicholas II’s secret police, which helped lay the groundwork in the early twentieth century for the
modern fear of Jewish world domination. By the 1920s, Henry Ford was gleefully boiling the protocols down for American audiences newly attuned to the
powers of mass culture. “The Twelfth Protocol,” proclaimed Ford’s Dearborn
Independent, “contains the entire plan of Control of the Press, reaching from
the present time into the future when the Jewish World Government shall be
established.”1 At this same moment (need I add?), a small number of Jewish
immigrants were busy creating the major Hollywood studios, which would, of
course, eventually come to control the thoughts and desires of all Americans
(if not all humanity).
So it was with great interest in fall 2004 that I read my Amazon.com home
page, which for three days running had confronted me with a wacky ad headline for the new Jon Stewart/Daily Show book, America:“Oy vey, can you see!”
This ad was replaced then by a new one, also for the Daily Show book, which
read: “Star Spangled Laughs!” Read next to one another, the point of these
Americana-soaked Amazon ads was clear:America had finally been taken over
by the Jews and remade in their hilarious image.As Stewart himself said on his
show when discussing Madonna’s recent visit to Israel, and her kabballahinspired name change to Esther: “Everyone loves the Jews, everyone wants to
be us.” The situation was made even more compelling by America’s competition at the top of the bestseller list, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, a
novel that imagines not Jewish national dominance, but the exact opposite—
a 1940s America overrun by fascist antisemites (not to mention another book
just a few notches down on the list: Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, the story of a Jewish man who re-creates and re-popularizes the music of America’s folk).
The mapping of American national identity onto Jewishness has some precedence in U.S. history. In the 1950s, in the wake of the Holocaust and in the
midst of the rise of the great Jewish American author (e.g., Roth, Saul Bellow,
Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Herman Wouk, Leon Uris),
some of these writers realized the worst fears of antisemites by promoting themselves as a proud symbol for America itself. “We all are Jews,” Mailer wrote in
1951, and he was echoed by others: “Every man is a Jew,” Malamud opined,
“though he may not know it.”2 “Jewishness,” in the words of one historian of
the 1950s, was “twentieth-century Americanism.”3
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Dan i e l I tz kov i tz
However, the early postwar move to universalize the Jew was fairly shortlived: as new urgencies and identifications entered the consciousness of Americans in the 1960s, the notion that Jews represented a quintessential and
fundamentally American “other” largely faded from view. And the universalizing impulse had other problems from the outset: in a repressive 1950s haunted
by very real anxiety about antisemitic backlash, the move to universalize the
Jew came for many at the expense of any outward signs of Jewishness. If
Mailer’s “we all are Jews” turns the exceptionalism of They All Are Jews on its
head and, in the process, makes everyone a Jew, it also worked to universalize
Jewish uniqueness out of view entirely.This result was presumably also acceptable for those who wished not to universalize Jewish difference but to “normalize” it: to claim not that everyone was a Jew, but that the Jews were just like
everyone else. But the often desperate push to normalize the Jews in the 1950s
worked only to a certain degree. For every Molly Goldberg invited into
“America’s living room” on television, there was an Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
or a Hollywood blacklist chock full of Jewish names reminding Americans just
how un-American the Jews really were.4 It makes sense, then, that the impulses
to universalize and to normalize the Jew were accompanied, among many Jews
who worked in popular culture—the movies, television, mainstream music, the
news media—by a desire to conceal their Jewish identities and, even more so
(since Jewish involvement in the mass media was fairly common knowledge),
to avoid Jewish references in their cultural production altogether. In “The Vanishing Jew of Our Popular Culture,” a widely circulated essay published in
Commentary the year after Mailer’s “we all are Jews,” Henry Popkin noticed
with disdain this disappearance of Jewish expression in American popular culture, noting the “unwritten law that makes the Jew the little man who isn’t
there.”5
The recent resurfacing of the Jew/America confluence is, in important respects, markedly different from its 1950s predecessor, not least because the climate for Jews has changed so radically in recent years. Such esteemed Jewish-life
pundits as Alan Dershowitz have proclaimed “the end of institutional antiSemitism, the end of Jewish persecution, and the end of Jewish victimization,”
and even when they appear on the internet, the antisemitic extremes of Jewwatch.com and the ethnic boosterism of Jewhoo.com seem relics of an archaic
time.6 In the midst of such a benign Jewish American moment, the evidence
mounts that, for better or worse, American and Jewish identities have begun to
speak through one another in new ways. Jewish characters abound in mainstream Hollywood cinema, for example, in numbers and varieties not seen since
the first big “coming out” of the 1960s, and Jewish artists and performers,
dubbed “new Jews” by some in the media, seem unabashed about their
Jewishness—onscreen and off—as never before.7 But how are we to take the
“new Jews,” both in and out of Hollywood, especially given that this onrush of
They All Are Jews
233
Jewish expression has occurred at a moment when increasing anxiety about decreasing numbers of American Jews pervades many Jewish communities (the
problem that spurs Dershowitz’s The Vanishing American Jew)? The self-confident
presentations of the “new Jews,” and the excited media response to this phenomenon, at the very least conceal a complex dynamic, in which the “new Jew”
presents more of a challenge than an answer. In examining the knotty permutations of Jewishness in contemporary cinema and elsewhere, I hope to show that
what is most interesting about the “new Jews” is not (save for their very public
self-affirmations) new at all, but rather part of an ongoing process of Jewish expression that paradoxically undermines the very process of identity-making. It is
a paradox informed by Jewish history, and with sharp ramifications for America’s
multicultural future.
Jews in Spac e
It seems odd and, to me, a little exciting that Jews, unabashedly selfdeclared this time, may be taking over America at a moment when our nation
seems also to have been hijacked by evangelical Christians; but there have been
rumblings of such a development for a few years now.8 We can trace the current cultural juncture, including some of its more worrisome liabilities, at least
as far back as the 1996 blockbuster Independence Day, the eighteenth-highest
grossing film in history: a sci-fi–disaster film which provides an imposing mapping of Jewishness onto American national identity (the film’s Jews, as leaders
of a multicultural vanguard, are at the center of a U.S.-led world salvation), and
which is surely one of the more embarrassing popular representations of Jewishness in recent memory. An alien attack destroys iconic monuments such as
the White House and the Statue of Liberty—images that look downright eerie
in the wake of September 11—and Americans are understandably desperate
and panicked. Meanwhile, computer geek David Levinson, played by eccentric
Jewish intellectual du jour Jeff Goldblum, figures things out like crazy and ultimately teams with Captain Steve Hiller, a Black fighter pilot played by Will
Smith. In a process that finalizes the conversion of the Jewish nerd into a manly
hero, Levinson and Hiller enter and destroy the aliens’ mothership—somehow
Levinson wirelessly connects with the aliens’ mainframe and uploads a computer virus—and, upon their return to earth, enjoy a triumphal cigar, as they
are embraced by their adoring women (Figures 1a and 1b). Levinson’s Yiddishinflected father, Julius, played by Judd Hirsch, hands out ancient wisdom, davens soulfully in a yarmulke, and dresses down the people who get in his son’s
way. And lest we confuse this new American Jew with the old-school style,
Harvey Fierstein looms in the film’s first act as Goldblum’s hysterical, gaycoded officemate Marty Gilbert, who hides under his desk whining until he
gets squashed by aliens on his way to his mother’s house. The world is once
again safe.
234
1a and b. In Independence Day, genius David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) and Captain
Steven Hiller (Will Smith) fly off to vanquish the alien mothership . . . and return to a
hero’s welcome. Frame grabs.
Here Jews play a pivotal role in a new (American) world order (“We can’t be
consumed by our petty differences anymore,” the president tells his troops prepping for the final battle. “The Fourth of July will no longer be known as an
American holiday,” he continues, “but as the day the world declared in one
voice . . . ‘Today we celebrate our Independence Day!’ ”). But Jews are only able
to take on this new role after they are remade into an unironically hypermasculine and stunningly generic ethnic: my big-fat-Jewish-savior, whose ultimate job
is simultaneously to stand in as a universal representative of an unthreatening and
vacuous difference, and to do so in part by converting everyone else to the newly
watered down Jewishness too.9 Toward the end of the film, for instance, at the
height of the counterattack on the aliens, Julius Levinson holds a prayer circle in
the government’s underground bunker. He is surrounded mostly by African
American children, when Albert Nimziki, the harsh, friendless, and recently fired
secretary of state, shuffles up to them. “Everybody, hold someone’s hand,” Julius
urges, and then, turning to Nimziki, invites him into the circle.“I’m not Jewish,”
Nimziki replies. “Nobody’s perfect,” Julius quips, quoting Some Like It Hot,
whereupon Nimziki joins the otherwise Black/Jewish prayer circle.
They All Are Jews
235
Placing the disturbing issues of U.S. world domination and humorous homophobic violence aside for the moment, what I find most striking about this
vision of an American future reflected in the conjunctive images of Black and
Jew—and this is reflective of broader and more recent cultural movements I discuss below—is that Hollywood’s “new (male) Jew” reaches his world-changing,
world-converting cinematic pinnacle at a moment in U.S. history when actual
Jews most fret their individual and collective self-destruction.10 In this film, the
multicultural future and American world salvation/domination both rest on the
backs of Jews and Blacks (not only Goldblum and Smith, but also Hirsch and
those Black kids in the prayer circle saying Shema), while on the streets of America Jews grow increasingly fearful not so much of antisemitism, but of an alternatively insidious loss of Jewish identity through assimilation and intermarriage.
This disparity between screen image and real-world perception suggests at
the very least that Jewishness still carries a great deal of symbolic weight in U.S.
culture, independent of its lived presence in America. And Independence Day,
with all the expectations it places on Jewish shoulders, is just one example of a
not-so-subtle shift in U.S. popular culture regarding Jewishness.The Billy Crystal vehicle City Slickers (1991)—a banal formula comedy that re-imagines Mel
Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974) with yuppie angst replacing giddy anarchy—was
an early touchstone in this process.11 Such films’ aggrandizing but flattening out
of Jewishness also helps explain why critics seem to read American mass culture’s
relationship to Jews in such disparate ways. It is hard not to be confused, given
the surge in expressions of explicitly identified Jewish representation in the mass
media and the simultaneous growing sense that Jewish identity is in grave danger.An example of how this conflict emerges in film criticism: while some critics have noted a Jewish “new wave” since the 1990s,12 others see the opposite,
such as Malina Sarah Saval, who lamented in 2003, “Over the past several decades there has been a shocking dearth of Jewish films in the mainstream Hollywood market. Perhaps the most noticeable absence in recent years occurred
during the 1990s, in which period not one American movie featured a rabbi.
On the flip side, an everlasting stream of movies keeps us in constant supply of
Christian clergyman.”13
Underlying these dueling perceptions of Hollywood’s representation of
Jews are long-standing questions concerning the meaning and constitution of
Jewish identity. Only certain types of Jews and Jewish behaviors, for instance,
seem to qualify for Saval (it would hurt them to show a rabbi now and then?).
Such discussions beg the exhausting and interminable question of how to determine what “counts” as Jewish, a question which in this context leads to
considerable confusion, not simply about the relationship between Jewish secularism and religiosity, but also about the relationship of “American culture” to
“Jewish culture.” (Seen from a purely industrial perspective, for example, isn’t
the very concept of a Jewish film festival redundant?) In any case, representations
236
2. Bernie Focker (Dustin Hoffman) smirks as his son, Gaylord (Ben Stiller), greets Isabel
(Allanna Ubach), the Latina maid who took his virginity, in Meet the Fockers. Frame
grab.
of Jewishness—even when watered down—have been increasingly visible in
U.S. culture; and at least for those whose concern has been the pending demise
of secular Jewish identity, this is a provocative development.
It also indicates that perhaps the notion promoted in Independence Day that
the Jew can stand as the ideal standard bearer for a new American multiculturalism is not far off target.The 2004 blockbuster comedy Meet the Fockers, for example, specifically pits Jews (played by Ben Stiller, Barbra Streisand, and Dustin
Hoffman) who revel in anti-conformity, broadly liberal worldviews, and bodily
pleasures against an alternate vision of the American melting pot: a WASP/
Italian American coupling (Blythe Danner with Robert De Niro) that results
in a politically conservative, suburban lockdown of anal-retentive anti-pleasure.
After a rocky beginning, the Jews emerge handily victorious. Of course, such
an edificatory role makes sense for all the obvious reasons: as successful White
ethnics whose collective story in America is one of triumph and who carry
with them historically liberal credentials, “new Jews” seem comfortably familiar in the postmodern era while opening a space for others who might also be
“different” in a palatable way—as we see, again, with the kooky Focker family,
who, with their pride in their son’s losing his virginity to their Latina maid and
their displays of his various ninth-place ribbons and trophies, are all about the
embrace of both difference and mediocrity (Figure 2).
But Jews have come to seem ideal as the gateway to the multicultural world
for another more subtle reason as well. For some Jews and antisemites alike, Jews
in the modern era have often been culturally interesting not because of the
specificities of Jewishness (religious, racial, historical, cultural), but because of
their ability to throw off these distinctive markers and inhabit other identities.
This is the trait Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer have described as the
They All Are Jews
237
Jews’ “undisciplined mimicry . . . passed down by a process of unconscious
imitation in infancy from generation to generation, from the down-at-heel
Jew to the rich banker,”14 and what Ella Shohat and Robert Stam explain, in
their discussion of Woody Allen’s memorable satire of this shapeshifting
propensity in his mockumentary Zelig (1983), as “the enforced plurality of the
Jewish experience, the long historical apprenticeship in cultural mimicry and
the syncretic incorporation of ambient cultures.”15 To many observers over the
past century, this performativity has seemed to be the most Jewish trait of all,
often accompanied by a corollary talent for translating other cultures into an
American idiom. Hence, to name a few prominent examples from the early
twentieth century, George Gershwin’s “jazz symphonies,”Al Jolson’s blackface
performances, and Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot (1908), a play which takes
as its subject a Jewish composer who plans to bring the music of all the various cultures of America together to create an “American symphony.”
Edgy Jews
Jewish involvement in multiculturalism can be seen as a postmodern extension of this time-honored tendency toward “plurality,” yet with a twist—
exhibiting both an aggressive assertion of identity and a commingling of
“otherness.”This fluid and ambiguous relationship to specificity is evident in
much of the recent explosion of overtly Jewish cultural production, not only
in cinema, but across the board. Besides the more traditionally informational
websites glossed above, still others have found heavy traffic with wry articles
and ironic consumables, such as Internationaljewishconspiracy.com, from which
one can purchase a useful lunchbox with an insignia that reads:“Proud Member: International Jewish Conspiracy. From the people who brought you
banking.”16 Numerous out and proud Jewish performers have emerged, from
comedians Sandra Bernhard, Judy Gold, Sarah Silverman, and Susie Essman, to
musicians MC Paul Barman, Princess Superstar, the Beastie Boys, Hip Hop
Hoodíos, Blood of Abraham, and Northern State, to John Zorn’s avant-garde
Radical Jewish Culture series on his Tzadik label. An unusually large crop of
new books, academic and otherwise, about Jews in popular culture have been
published, some with titles—Jews Who Rock; Rock ’n’ Roll Jews— that give the
lie to the ( Jewish?) media’s recent focus on Christian rockers.17 The Spielbergbankrolled Heeb magazine, meanwhile, has not only helped redress the discursive imbalance, but added its own distinctively hybridized voice to the mix.
I do not mean to shmush all these media expressions into one latke: John
Zorn’s relationship to Jewish expression, for instance, is, in most important
senses, worlds away from that found in the books on Jewish rock, many of which
read suspiciously like They All Are Jews, Millennium Version.18 But the sheer intensity of recent self-conscious (and largely secular) Jewish cultural production suggests that something significant has changed. Not surprisingly, it is not
238
difficult to find grand pronouncements on this front. Take, for example, a December 2003 cover story from Time Out New York, which claimed that we have
entered the era of “The New Super Jews,” and which served as a resounding rejoinder to the infamous 1963 Look magazine cover announcing “The Vanishing
American Jew.” “The neurotic nebbish is out,” Time Out loudly proclaimed in
an article that prominently featured Jonathan Kesselman’s sharp and silly blaxploitation parody The Hebrew Hammer (2003); “the swaggering ass-kicker is in.
From music and film to comedy and fashion, Jewish artists and performers are
exploring edgy new personas.”19
Poke around a bit and it is not difficult to find holes in this theory. Fantasies
about muskeljuden (muscle Jews) who are “swaggering ass-kickers” notwithstanding, aren’t “neurotic nebbishes” and edgy Jews often one and the same, as
The Hebrew Hammer itself demonstrates? And is the neurotic nebbish really
“out,” or for that matter, is “edgy-Jews-exploring-new personas” really a new
phenomenon? Isn’t it but a short analytical leap to categorize the politically subversive pleasures of, say, the Marx Brothers films of the 1930s as perverse precursors of Independence Day’s multicultural fantasies, with Groucho and company
cast as a group of immigrant-aliens who anarchically sweep in, take over, and
leave chaos and destruction in their wake?
If Time Out New York is off in its historical claims, it does seem to have collected an unusually large number of contemporary artists and performers who
are unapologetically “out” about their Jewishness in popular culture, historically a space heavily populated by Jews sworn to public silence about Jewishness. But despite the seeming comfort of the newer performers with their own
Jewishness, part of what generates and maintains the “edginess” heralded by
Time Out New York can be connected to a persistent dilemma that has long
faced American Jews: that neither a complete and comfortable assimilation, nor
a solid and stable sense of Jewish identity, is easily attained. Compare, for instance, the venerable Roth’s Plot Against America (2004) alongside The Hebrew
Hammer, a low-budget independent film that received only limited theatrical
release but that has already achieved cult status at Jewish film festivals and in the
world of “new Jews.”The premise of the film, which places a dubiously tough
Jew, Mordechai Jefferson Carver (Adam Goldberg), where once roamed blaxploitation heroes Shaft, Youngblood Priest, and Sweet Sweetback,20 is like a
bizarro riff on Roth’s novel, an alternative history that imagines what might
have happened had President Roosevelt been defeated in the 1940 election by
an antisemitic and Nazi-sympathizing Charles Lindbergh.
The plot of The Hebrew Hammer also spins on a scheme to overrun and potentially eradicate the Jews of America, and the primary weapon of choice, as
in Roth’s novel, is culture. In The Plot Against America, President Lindbergh’s
“Office of American Absorption” creates a program called “Just Folks,” which
brings young urban Jews to the American heartland, teaches them to work the
They All Are Jews
239
soil, and essentially gets their wires so crossed that by summer’s end they speak
with a twang and use words like “chitterlings”; in The Hebrew Hammer, the chief
villain, Damian Claus, murders his egalitarian father Santa—who had joyfully
endorsed not only Christmas, but also Hanukkah and Kwanza. Damian then
hatches a plot to destroy Hanukkah by passing out bootleg videos of the
Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life to young Jews, who take to it like crack.
Insofar as the film reframes blaxploitation films that view drug abuse as a source
of the Black ghetto’s ills, the video distribution scene in The Hebrew Hammer
(filmed as a direct parody of Superfly [1972], complete with Curtis Mayfield’s
“Pusherman” on the soundtrack) reveals an incisive (if also problematic) understanding of Jews and Blacks and their sociohistorical similarities, and differences. In saving a young Jew from bullies early in the film, Carver implores the
boy to “stay Jewish,” and, contra such blaxploitation films as Superfly or Coffy
(1973), it is clear that what threatens to destroy Jews is not drugs, but culture.
Crucially, despite this seeming faith in and concern about the possibilities
of cultural conversion, Jewish protagonists attempting to pass for non-Jewish
fail miserably in both the film and the novel.There is a very funny set piece in
The Hebrew Hammer that speaks to this anxiety.The film’s hero, Mordechai, and
his Jewish girlfriend, Esther Bloomenbergansteinthal (played by Judy Greer),
go undercover as WASPs to K-Mart to corner Damian Claus, but it is not long
before they are detected; the loudspeaker blares: “Attention Kmart shoppers!
There are Jews in aisle 5.” In other words, behind the similarities of The Hebrew Hammer and The Plot Against America lurks a central confusion and an ongoing concern in American Jewish life: not simply the fear that Jews will so
easily be absorbed, but the simultaneous and far more subtle anxiety that Jews
can never truly be absorbed.
Such continuities between “new Jewish” expressions and ongoing issues in
American Jewish history are often lost in most discussions of the “new Jew”
phenomenon, which has also found its serious detractors. As is perennially the
case, “too much” Jewishness for some is “not enough” for others.Thus, unsurprisingly, much of the recent Jewish cultural expression has been attacked for its
ironic and seemingly content-less relationship to Jewish identity. Baz Dreisinger,
for instance, takes “ ‘new’ Jewish comedy” to task for recasting “Jewishness—
otherness—as a trendy accessory that can be taken on and off at will.”21
Dreisinger’s point is well taken, especially after witnessing the honorable intentions of an idealistic multicultural movement, focused on cultural preservation,
devolve in the 1990s into a commodified, self-indulgent buffet of ethno-racial
styles.
But such critiques also miss at least part of the point when it comes to Jewish involvement in the “multiculture,” and what is potentially most interesting
about the act of taking “on and off [Jewishness] at will”—namely, this sleight of
identity itself. Indeed, this development, hardly a recent one in Jewish life,
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might be read as another example of the fabled Jewish capacity to duck and
merge into whichever culture one happens to inhabit.22 Secular Jewish identity, in particular, has, since the early days of modernity, been the quintessential postmodern identity precisely because it has been defiantly elusive, rebuffing
all attempts to pin it down, to the point that the Jewish presence has the potential to complicate the project of identity-making entirely. In the context of
a multicultural movement deeply invested in holding onto static notions of
identity, such an approach is especially noteworthy. What makes more recent
Jewish performativity different from, say, the blackface or high-society parvenu incarnations of old is its self-consciousness, its knowingness, and its celebration rather than defensiveness over the capacity to deconstruct identity, so
that now (as the quote from Dreisinger suggests) it is Jewishness itself that the
so-called new Jews (and others) perform—and often in heretical fashion.
Consider, for instance, a Heeb magazine photo spread celebrating the Jewish
American Princess ( JAP) that used punk-style models—Brandy, Celeste, Danica,
Dawnn, and Jillian Ann—who challenge traditional notions of what a Jew looks
like.The magazine embraces what once seemed a disturbing antisemitic stereotype, and urges readers to “liberate your inner JAP by trading your torn fishnets
for pastel velour, combat boots for Uggs and army surplus dogtags for those of
the Tiffany variety.Watch as punk sirens prove that with daddy’s gold card you
too can become a card-carrying JAP.”23 No doubt irony can become tiresome,
vapid, and subject to commodification pretty quickly, but here the irony, in the
context of the new Jews’ secular refusal to erase their Jewishness, also stands (as
Jewishness has for generations) as a call to think, and potentially as a challenge to
our often precious and overly proprietary sense of individual and group identity.24 In looking more closely at some of the many recent American films released by major studios that feature explicitly identified Jewish protagonists, the
challenge will be to discern how Hollywood has responded to the open questions presented by the “new Jew”: to think about how this largely bland cinematic outpouring of Jewishness has been informed by the more complicated
terms of Jewish performativity, and how recent mainstream cinema has reimagined Jewish liminality in its own image.
Jews on the Edg e
Since the 1990s, mainstream Hollywood cinema has embarked on its own
Jewish “renaissance,” though one markedly different from those both in the
other arts and in alternative and independent films such as The Hebrew Hammer.25 Saval’s criticism notwithstanding, there is evidence of an astonishingly
broad receptivity, among Jewish and non-Jewish audiences alike, to a certain
brand of recent American Jewish cinematic expression. In appealing to a mass
(and overwhelmingly non-Jewish) audience, of course, mainstream U.S. films
can hardly afford to resort to such identity-bending provocations as Heeb
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magazine’s JAP photo spread. Whereas such bricolage works to unsettle its
(presumably, largely Jewish) audience, or at least to challenge it to reconsider
presuppositions about the boundaries of Jewish identity, Hollywood’s new
focus on Jews has, for the most part, worked to incorporate Jewish liminality,
folding it back into a space of familiarity and comfort.This process of popularizing the Jew ultimately tells us as much about American self-perception in
the postmodern era as it does about Jews.
There have, of course, always been large numbers of Jewish actors, writers,
and directors in Hollywood, but never before have there been so many Jewish
characters, particularly Jewish male characters, at the center of major Hollywood
productions.26 Here Jewish men typically fall into one of two overlapping
categories: newly prominent secular Jewish characters in Hollywood stand in
either as vaguely eccentric standard bearers for ethnic tolerance in a new multicultural America (as we have seen in Independence Day, and more recently in
Meet the Fockers), or as vaguely eccentric embodiments of the middle-class
American everyman.As the latter group makes clear, if the “neurotic nebbish” is
really “out,” someone forgot to tell Hollywood, where, to the contrary, the neurotic nebbish has, since the mid-1990s, revitalized the schlemiel a generation
after Ruth Wisse observed that “by the end of the 1960s, the Jewish fool began
to falter.”27
I am referring in particular to the increasing body of films that present lead
characters (think Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, and Jason Biggs, with perhaps an
honorable mention for Seth Green in Without a Paddle [2004]) who challenge
us to rethink the manly Jewish triumph celebrated by Goldblum’s character
in Independence Day. Even if we disagree with Saval, it is not hard to see what
has upset her about films like these: they are far less interested in “the spirit of
the Jewish people” than in finding their laughs in the targeted humiliation of the
Jewish male lead.28 While Goldblum, in Independence Day, provides a certain answer to America’s yearnings for a new Jewish hero, like the classical Hollywood
hero but ganglier and good at chess, Sandler, Stiller, and Biggs, in many of their
films, provide an unwholesome trinity of anti-heroes in whose humiliations
we find supreme pleasure. The quintessential example of the “postmodern
schlemiel” genre can be found in the Meet the Parents series (2000, 2004, subsequent sequels no doubt to follow), in which Ben Stiller’s Jewish male nurse Greg
(née Gaylord) Focker has one painfully embarrassing encounter after another
with the all-American parents of his girlfriend/fiancée/wife. Stiller has made a
cottage industry of such roles, but he is matched by Jason Biggs in such films as
Saving Silverman (2001), Woody Allen’s Anything Else (2003), and the American
Pie trilogy (1999, 2001, 2003), in all of which the non-Jewish Biggs plays young
Jewish men (Darren Silverman, Jim Levenstein, Jerry Falk) whose various encounters with emasculation and sexual humiliation become the comedic centerpiece (Figure 3).29 In the context of his overwhelmingly popular Hanukkah
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3. Jim Levinson (Jason Biggs) working to get Nadia’s (Shannon Elizabeth) attention in
American Pie. Frame grab.
song that “outs” famous Jews, it is difficult not to read Adam Sandler’s oeuvre
in a similar light: in The Waterboy (1998), Punch Drunk Love (2002), and Anger
Management (2003) he plays nice guys prone to humiliation by tougher men
and women but who ultimately triumph; in other films (Billy Madison [1995],
Big Daddy [1999], Eight Crazy Nights [2002], 50 First Dates [2004]), the manhood of his Peter Pan–ish characters is called into question by their inability
to “grow up.”
There are, of course, significant distinctions to be drawn in the work of
these actors: Stiller’s characters, for example, seem never to emerge from their
neurotic tangles, and the recuperative moments at the end of his films are usually fraught with unresolved tension. Sandler’s characters, who tend ultimately
to tap and harness their anger, usually find a way to become self-determined
by film’s end by emerging into a more normative masculinity (most memorably in The Waterboy, most “artistically” in Punch Drunk Love).And Biggs plays
young Jewish men at their most passive and neutered, thoroughly neurotic but
without the nervous ferret-like energy of Stiller or the pent-up rage of Sandler. Biggs often plays characters who are passively swept along after falling for
women who ultimately and unhealthily dominate him. So in Saving Silverman,
Darren Silverman inexplicably falls for a mean and dominating psychologist
(Amanda Peet), who tells him what to order at restaurants, withholds sex, and
is taken to saying things about Darren such as “he’s my puppet.”
Such distinctions between characters themselves point to the multiplicities
and complications in the representation of the Jewish male, but the schlemielish similarities are more striking still. In the face of this nebbishe outpouring,
wouldn’t we be better served to ask why, suddenly, audiences are so receptive
to this caricature, than to conjure, with Saval, more rabbis, and lament the
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“self-mockery”? To take the point a little further: the desire for more rabbis onscreen suggests that Jewish identity should move toward a more conventionally
recognizable and stable identification with religiosity at its foundation. But
what seems most interesting to me about the proliferation of these new Hollywood Jews is that together they reveal more about the instability of postmodern American culture than about Jews, who have contended in various ways
with such demeaning stereotypes for generations. Reveling more in Jewish
liminality than in staid religiosity, the postmodern “schlemiel films” indicate
that as much as American Jews are becoming mainstream, American audiences
are “becoming Jewish”—with all the attendant, unsettling ramifications.
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw antisemitism speak in
part through an undermining of Jewish masculinity, and a subsequent analogical
relation between Jewish men and gay men.30 It is a theme explicitly picked up
in The Fockers, in which Gaylord’s father simply calls him by the nickname
“Gay.”The vision of the Jewish man as not manly in the “right” ways, according
to the constructs of Western culture, persisted in American popular culture; although Jewish male comics, in particular—in the movies, on radio, in nightclubs, and on TV—sometimes found ways to put the alternate masculinities they
embodied to subversive use. Eddie Cantor, for instance, in his complex Jewish
sissy and blackface pansy characters (Whoopee! [1930]; Strike Me Pink [1936]),31
is part of a long lineage of Jewish men (Danny Kaye, Jack Benny, Morey Amsterdam, Jackie Mason, et al.) whose performances of gender and race (onstage
and off ) undermine conventional notions of Western masculinity.32 In this context, the recent “schlemiel films” are notable not because they repetitively frame
Jewish masculinity as thoroughly abject, but because they make this quality utterly ordinary.
We can see writ large this impulse to flatten the difference between Jews
and other Americans in the most overtly Jewish of the Sandler films, Eight
Crazy Nights, which posits the absolute meaninglessness of Jewish difference
except as pure difference itself. Weirdly imagining a New England town
where Jewish holidays are celebrated equally with Christian holidays (though
there are few Jews in evidence, for example, giant ice sculptures of Santa and a
menorah share equal footing at the center of the film’s small New England
town), the film constitutes a jaundiced wish fulfillment: a Jewishness emptied
of content in a world without antisemitism, a clone of a washed-out Christianity in a bland copy of Christmas films past. Eight Crazy Nights simply plays
out the ultimate logic of the double discourse of contemporary Jewish male
representations, by which the Jewish embodiment of abject masculinity becomes the Jewish embodiment of the American everyman (Figure 4).
Though perhaps not as blatantly as in Eight Crazy Nights, most of the “new
schlemiels” are hardly “edgy new personas,” but rather reprisals of old personas,
somehow made palatable for mass audiences.This becomes clear in the repetitive
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4. Christmas and Hanukkah finally find equality in Adam Sandler’s mythical smalltown America in Eight Crazy Nights. Frame grab.
nature of many of the characterizations, whereby the Jewish man has become an
ordinary, lovable, supremely unthreatening mensch who could use a little excitement and finds it in a pairing with a non-Jewish and often zanily extreme character. In this “normalizing” of the schlemiel, we can see a clear lineage (with
some nuances and variations, and perhaps different intents) from Billy Crystal’s
Ben Sobel in Analyze This (1999) and Analyze That (2002) to Sandler’s Dave
Buznik in Anger Management to Biggs’s Jerry Falk in Anything Else to Stiller’s
Reuben Feffer in Along Came Polly (2004).
This last film distills the essence of the “new schlemiel” type in its purest
form: Stiller plays a nice Jewish risk analyst for an insurance firm (“it’s my job
to worry”) who tells the zany Polly Prince (Jennifer Aniston),“I try to manage
that risk by avoiding danger, and having a plan, and knowing what my next
move is.” Reuben’s endless stream of middle-of-the-road claims (“I don’t want
freedom . . . I want to be married”)33 are matched by Polly’s caricatured freespirited ways (“I like to live life on the edge,”“I’m not really big on the whole
long term commitment thing,” etc.).Although the plot banks on a move to the
middle for both characters (despite Reuben’s claims that “I’m never going to
be a dirty dancer,” he ultimately has a triumph of sorts on the salsa floor), the
room for any sort of real change in this White, middle-class, heteronormative
world is minimal.
If the Jewish characters in this and the other “new schlemiel” films do
embody “edgy personas,” we might think of them not as Jews with an edge,
but as Jews on the edge. Caught in the most bourgeois of dilemmas, we meet
them stuck between their taste for adventure and their instinctive craving for
safety and normalcy. Figures of abuse, abjection, and ambivalence at the outset,
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these liminal characters play out in bland fashion the dangers of an increasingly smaller world, and ultimately remind us of the comfort and safety
of the bourgeois home by landing back there themselves, a little less abject
and significantly empowered. For these characters, the “getting there” often
bears resemblance to Goldblum’s more conventionally heroic David Levinson
after all. Look at the triumph of Crystal’s Ben Sobel at the mob meeting toward the end of Analyze This, or Reuben Feffer on the dance floor in Along
Came Polly, or Sandler’s awakenings in Punch Drunk Love and Anger Management. Meeting the alien can be solidly invigorating as long as one ends up
safely back home by film’s end. Such a fate is in keeping with Wisse, who argues that “the schlemiel embodied those negative qualities of weakness that
had to be ridiculed to be overcome.”34 But while Wisse sees “schlemiel literature in general . . . us[ing] this comical stance as a stage from which to challenge the political and philosophic status quo,” what is interesting in
Hollywood’s “new schlemiels” is that they do not challenge the status quo,
they embody it.35
Taken as a whole, the “new Jew” Hollywood films are notable insofar as
they imagine the Jewish man as the exemplary liminal figure on either side of
bourgeois acceptability. A generation ago, such characters were palatable outsiders at best, subversive encroachers at worst. The ascendance of the liminal
Jewish man to normative American everyman suggests a profound popular
identification with the unsettled and unsettling Jewish man in the postmodern era, and the desire to contain that liminality. Consequently, by taking what
is potentially threatening about Jewish liminality and domesticating it, thereby
working to normalize and ultimately remasculinize the Jewish man, Hollywood’s “new Jew” films also reaffirm the solidity of the American middle class.
Jewface/Blackfac e
When I started writing this essay, my initial impulse was to try to make
sense of the new expressions of Jewishness in American film and U.S. culture in
general in relation to the burgeoning popular discourse that reflects longstanding anxieties among many American Jews, and reads Jews as having broken off
into warring factions (and often contributes to the conflict through its own
polemical positions). Samuel Freedman’s bestseller Jew vs. Jew (2000), for instance, piggybacks onto the longstanding fear, grown massive since World War II
(and well-nigh hysterical after the Jewish population surveys of recent decades),
of Jewish destruction not through violence, but rather through assimilation, intermarriage, and general indifference to tradition. Freedman’s book chronicles a
last-gasp Jewish secularism doing battle with, and for the most part losing out to,
fundamentalism in staking claims to Jewish identity; secular Judaism without
Yiddishkeit, which once enabled its coherence as a community, in this view, is
not simply decentered, but utterly lost.36 The battle between secularists and
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religious fundamentalists finds a counterpart and counterpoint in J. J. Goldberg’s
Jewish Power (1996)—the finest of many books to take on this topic—which sees
a similar war taking place in the political realm. Goldberg’s analysis finds secular
Jewish liberals, with whom he sympathizes, losing out to a powerful neoconservative Zionism, as embodied in the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and other staunchly pro-Israel groups, which increasingly stand in
as the self-appointed spokespeople for “the official Jewish community.”37
Confronted with this stridently contentious discourse, it is easy to feel a
little more sympathetic toward Time Out’s “Super Jews,” some of whom seem
to offer a promise for a renewed model of secular Jewish identity, and a new
politics of identity more generally, that speaks a cultural language less mired in
party politics and religious wars.The possibility offered by the so-called “new
Jews” is not simply grounded in their public pride, a clear byproduct of 1990s
identity politics, but in the fact that the most interesting of them dive directly
into the contradictions of Jewish identity, and by grappling and playing with
questions of Jewishness, race, nation, and sexuality, work simultaneously to express and refuse them.
Jon Stewart is a fascinating figure in this regard insofar as his frank relationship to his own Jewishness plays such a crucial role in his strange status as
popular American gadfly. In the “Oy vey, can you see!” ad, his humor, taken as
a shrugging and needling call to look directly at, and by looking, to deflate
American mythologies, is a transparent expression of his otherwise undefined
Jewishness.The Latino Jewish band Hip Hop Hoodíos even more overtly decenter and then politicize the expression of their own Jewishness in their EP,
“La Raza Hoodío.”The title plays directly on Jose Vasconcelos’s 1925 essay La
Raza Cosmica, which theorized la raza cosmica (“cosmic race”) as an antidote
to the racist ascendance of White culture. Soon, Vasconcelos famously predicted, Hispanic culture would be ruled by a universal race in which all other
races would be diffused: “The days of pure whites, the victors of today, are as
numbered as were the days of their predecessors. . . . The new period [will
be] the period of the fusion and the mixing of all peoples.”38 The Hoodíos’
mapping of Vasconcelos’s oxymoronic concept onto Jewish Latino culture
brilliantly captures the creative tension and impossibility of Jewish identity,
which, as much as it fiercely asserts itself, refuses ultimately, and at its foundation, to be contained. Despite its postmodern inflection, this fractured view of
Jewishness is, again, in keeping with the history of Jews in America: in the
1890s, for instance, another hip New York magazine, M’lle. NY, made the same
point in some sinister joking about “strange chameleonic Jewish blood,” giving a sense that Jewish difference was, at once, profoundly embodied and absolutely slippery.39
If there is a place that these edgier “new Jews” will find trouble, as they inevitably will continue to, it will recur in the moments when the impossibilities
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5. Mordechai Jefferson Carver (Adam Goldberg) and Mohammed Ali Paula Abdul
Rahiem (Mario Van Peebles) connect in The Hebrew Hammer. Frame grab.
of “chameleonic blood” and a “cosmic race” can no longer be tolerated—
moments, most likely, when blood will win out. The Hebrew Hammer provides
one final example: it is obviously more than accidental that the film’s mockheroic Jewish protagonist, like Jeff Goldblum’s co-savior character in Independence Day, has a Black sidekick, a Huey Newton–like activist played by Mario
Van Peebles (Figure 5). But the implications here reach beyond those of the
standard Black/White buddy film; indeed, they reverse Michael Rogin’s nowiconic reading of The Jazz Singer, which reads Jewish blackface performers as
having worked to demonstrate their Whiteness at the expense of Blacks. In Hebrew Hammer, as in Independence Day, the presence of the Black buddy contributes to the opposite conclusion: that Jews “do difference,” and have blood
in ways similar to Blacks. Rogin reads The Jazz Singer, the ur-film about Jewish assimilation, to be an allegory about Blacks and Jews. The Hebrew Hammer
rewrites the story so that Jewish performance of a new kind of blackface (in
this film parody of the blaxploitation genre) is not about making the Jew
White, but about rendering the film’s “jewface” comprehensible. It makes perfect sense that The Hebrew Hammer’s director, Jonathan Kesselman, falls into the
school of thought that sees mostly the identification of Blacks and Jews with
one another. As Kesselman stated in an interview,
I remember hearing of all of those incidents between Blacks and Jews that
went down in New York on the news, and it baffled me. I’ve always felt
that Blacks and Jews are basically one in [sic] the same. Here are two
groups of people who have always been somewhat outsiders to mainstream white American culture.Two groups that share a very similar history of fighting oppression and prejudice. Over the years people have
either hated us or have been curious about us. We even share a similar
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sense of humor and comedy. That was something I wanted to address in
the script.40
This cross-cultural position, however, is both presented and consistently
undermined throughout the film, which is astonishingly vexed about the relationship between Blacks and Jews. A profoundly sentimental understanding of
Black-Jewish relations that matches Kesselman’s stated beliefs (the White accountant of the “Kwanza Liberation Front” is told that it’s fine for Blacks and
Jews to call one another “nigger” and “kike”: “That’s how we do it.”) coexists
uneasily with the clear understanding that Jewish identification with Blacks
can only end up as a joke.This troubled identification is most startlingly played
out as the lead characters make their escape from K-Mart. Cornered, they are
suddenly whisked through a secret door to the “underground Jewish railroad,”
by an elderly Jewish woman who identifies herself as Harriet Tubbleman.The
couple finds itself on a cart-driven tour of Jewish history, complete with images
from the biblical days of Jewish slavery (with the soundtrack playing “Go
Down, Moses”), the Holocaust (“to the showers with you, Juden”), and incongruously, the Saks check-out line (“Your credit card is declined”—“OY!”).The
postmodern pastiche of connections boggles the mind, as does the highly
charged use, and comic reframings, of both Jewish and Black history. Ultimately, though, one gets the sense that such moments of equal-opportunity
disrespect share a sensibility with the sentimental fantasy of the “nigger”“kike” conflation.And although provocative and far richer in complexity than,
say, Sandler’s Hanukkah film, Eight Crazy Nights,The Hebrew Hammer ultimately
leans toward a nostalgic return to a Black/Jewish Neverland.
Such an interpretation is borne out in audience responses to the film. Despite its ideological lapses, the film’s self-consciously edgy and sacrilegious attitude would still seem to pose significant problems for many Jews.Therefore,
I was at first confused to learn that both Hasidic and West Bank audiences of
The Hebrew Hammer were reportedly “laughing in the aisles.”41 But it is clear
that the film’s fantasies of racial identification, grounded both bodily and
geographically—for example, the film’s inability to imagine Jews who are neither Hasidic nor body doubles of Moshe Dayan, and the film’s ultimate focus
on that rare and threatened fictional fluid, “Jew-dayum,” which exists only on
the outskirts of Jerusalem42—come through loud and clear, and provide something these audiences can not only live with but openly embrace. As in Independence Day, it seems, there is a potentially short and logical leap from those
aspects of the film that emerge out of a self-congratulatory multiculturalism
informed by racial and cultural difference to a newly facile notion of a Jewish
identity, solidly grounded bodily, sexually, and nationally—a leap, it is clear, to
which at least some fundamentalists are not averse.
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One gets the sense that this cycle could go on forever: the very existence
of the Jew raises questions about what it is to be Jewish, which in turn leads
to strong assertions of Jewish identity (or nostalgia for a lost Jewish stability),
which in turn leads once again to questions and instability. All of which is to
say that if we can learn one thing from the “new Jews,” it is that they are in
some elusively essential way the same old Jews, only more so.
Note s
1. For more on Ford, see Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews:The Mass Production of
Hate (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001).
2. Norman Mailer,“Introduction” to John W. Aldridge, After the Lost Generation (New
York: Arbor House, 1985 [1951]), iii; Bernard Malamud, Conversations with Bernard
Malamud, ed. Lawrence Lasher (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), 30.
For more on this move to analogize Jews and America, see my essay “Secret Temples,” in Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, ed. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
3. Michael Staub, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 37.
4. The eponymous Jewish family on the long-running television series The Goldbergs
(1949–56) were themselves de-Judaizing in public with astonishing rapidity while
one of the show’s stars, Philip Loeb, was fired after generating publicity for his leftist politics. As Gertrude Berg said in a 1956 interview in Commentary, “The Goldbergs are not defensive about their Jewishness or especially aware of it.” But she
revealed the anxieties behind this statement with what followed: “I keep things average. I don’t want to lose friends” (cited in Donald Weber, “Goldberg Variations:
The Achievements of Gertrude Berg,” in Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and
Broadcasting, ed. J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003], 122). See also Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here:The
Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003);
and Donald Weber, “Memory and Repression in Early Ethnic Television,” in The
Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons, ed. Joel Foreman (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 144–167.
5. Henry Popkin,“The Vanishing Jew of Our Popular Culture:The Little Man Who Is
No Longer There,” Commentary 14, no. 1 (July 1952): 46. Besides The Goldbergs,
other crucial exceptions to Popkin’s dour assessment include, of course, the popular
TV variety-show hosts Milton Berle and Sid Caesar. Indeed, Irving Howe went so
far as to proclaim the postwar years a philosemitic period in U.S. culture (Irving
Howe, World of Our Fathers [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976]).
6. “The long epoch of Jewish persecution is finally coming to an end,” Dershowitz
continued. “Introduction,” The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for
the Next Century (New York:Touchstone, 1998), 7. However, as Jonathan Freedman
points out in a fascinating recent essay on the bestselling “Left Behind” series of
Christian Rapture novels, an insidious brand of philosemitism within evangelical
Christianity gives much cause for concern (“Anti-Semitism Without Jews: Left Behind in the American Heartland,” unpublished mss.).
7. For an overview of Jewish representation in American film through the mid-1980s,
see Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1984), and Lester D. Friedman, The Jewish Image in American Film (Secaucus,
N.J.: Citadel, 1987).
250
8. Of course, the unholy recent alliance between some Fundamentalist Christians and
some branches of Jewish Zionism is an unsettling example of how these forces have
in some important ways worked together over the past decade and more.
9. And just as Jewishness is watered down, so too the Blackness of the accessibly phallic Steve Hiller.
10. For an excellent review of how recent writing on “Black-Jewish relations” finds
Blacks and Jews at the center of aspirations for an American multicultural future, see
Rachel Rubinstein, “Textualizing Black-Jewish Relations,” Prooftexts 22, no. 3 (Fall
1992): 392–402.
11. The DVD packaging of City Slickers makes the connection directly, calling it “the
rowdiest Western jokefest since Blazing Saddles.”
12. On new waves in Jewish American film, see Harry Medved,“A Jewish New Wave,”
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, February 13, 1998: 40. On Jewish American new
waves in literature, see Morris Dickstein, “Ghost Stories: The New Wave of Jewish
Writing,” Tikkun 12, no. 6 (1997): 33. See also note 1 in Janet Burstein’s essay in this
volume.
13. Malina Sarah Saval, “Gangsta Hassid:Why is Hollywood keeping films that are ‘too
Jewish’ under raps?” Jerusalem Post, April 11, 2003: 16. As Popkin’s essay attests, this
discussion is longstanding. See also, for example, Marcia Pally,“Kaddish for the fading image of Jews in film,” Film Comment 20 (February 1984): 49–56.
14. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John
Cumming (1944; reprint, New York: Continuum, 1991), 182.
15. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat,“Zelig and Contemporary Theory: Meditation on the
Chameleon Text,” Enclitic 9 (1985): 176–193. In Zelig, Zelig’s Jewishness is repeatedly understood to have a clear relation to his shape-shifting (as when one elderly
antisemitic radio commentator succinctly says,“In keeping with a pure society, I say,
lynch the little Hebe”). Appearing as a faux-commentator in the film, Irving Howe
observes of the chameleonic character: “His story reflected a lot of the Jewish experience in America—the great urge to push in and to find one’s place, and then to
assimilate into the culture. I mean he wanted to assimilate like crazy.” For more on
the specifically American nature of Jewish chameleonism, see Daniel Itzkovitz,
“Passing Like Me: Jewish Chameleonism and the Politics of Race,” in Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion, ed. Maria Sanchez and Linda
Schlossberg (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 38–63.
16. Other websites of this sort include Jewcy.com and Jewishfashionconspiracy.com.
17. Guy Oseary (with an introduction by Ben Stiller), Jews Who Rock (New York: St.
Martins Griffin, 2000); Michael Billig, Rock‘n’ Roll Jews (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001).There are many other examples.
18. For more on Zorn and other recent Jewish music, see the essays in this volume by
Judah Cohen and Marsha Bryan Edelman.
19. Joanna Smith Rakoff, “The New Super Jew,” Timeout New York, Issue 427 (December 4–11, 2003) (http://www.timeoutny.com/features/427/427.superjews.html);
also Jonathan Schorsch,“Making Judaism Cool,” in Best Contemporary Jewish Writing,
ed. Michael Lerner (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), 331–338.
20. To underscore this lineage, the film includes a cameo by Melvin Van Peebles, director and star of Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song (1971), and co-stars Van Peebles’s
son Mario (see the “Jewface/Blackface” section here, and Figure 5).
21. Baz Dreisinger, “The ‘Jewsploitation’ Craze,” Salon.com, December 23, 2003
(http:/www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2003/12/23/hebrew_hammer).
22. For an international and transhistorical take on this, see Shohat and Stam, “Zelig and
Contemporary Theory.” For examinations of how this phenomenon has played into
American race politics, see Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues:African Americans,
Jews, and American Popular Song (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999);
They All Are Jews
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
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Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Itzkovitz,“Passing Like Me.”
Heeb, no. 7 (November 2004).
For more on Jews and multiculturalism, see David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and
Susannah Heschel, eds., Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.)
For further discussion of recent independent American films with Jewish content,
see Ruth D. Johnston’s essay in this volume.
For a discussion of Jewish female characters in recent American film, also see Ruth
D. Johnston’s essay in this volume.
Ruth R.Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1971), 108.
“Where are the movies that praise the indefatigable spirit of the Jewish people,”
Saval asks (in “Gangsta Hasid”),“the spirit that rises above anti-Semitism and forges
a prominent place in American society?”
Biggs’s “Jewish” credentials have been enhanced on the stage, where he reprised
Dustin Hoffman’s role in The Graduate and played an Orthodox Jew in Modern Orthodox.
See Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct:The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of
the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Queer Theory and
the Jewish Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
Cantor describes the development of his blackface pansy routine in his memoirs,
My Life Is in Your Hands (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 122.
See Maurice Berger,“The Mouse That Never Roars: Jewish Masculinity on American Television,” in Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities, ed. Norman Kleeblatt
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996).
A similar perspective frames most of these films. See, for instance, Biggs’s nebbishy
and moderate character in Anything Else:“I can’t believe I’m in love with a smoker!”
Wisse, The Schlemiel, 5.
Ibid., 3.
Samuel G. Freedman, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). Irving Howe foresaw a similar fate for American
Jewish literature, which, in the 1970s, he understood to be dying out with the loss
of Yiddishkeit, in “Introduction,” Jewish American Stories (New York: Shocken, 1977).
J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (New York:
Perseus Books, 1996).
José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Didier Tisdel Jaen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 16.
Unsigned editorial, M’lle NY 1, no. 6 (1895).
Jonathan Kesselman, interview reproduced in The Hebrew Hammer press kit, published by Jeremy Walker and Associates (2003). For an excellent discussion of analogical thinking as applied to Jews and gays, see Janet Jakobsen’s “Queers Are Like
Jews, Aren’t They? Analogy and Alliance Politics,” in Queer Theory and the Jewish
Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Anne Pellegrini (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003), 64–89.
Kesselman, interview.
“Jew-dayum,” we learn somewhat incoherently in the film, powers the “Jewish
atomic clock . . . keeping the time for the Jewish calendar.”
⡣
Stand-up Comedy
This venerable form of entertainment has been given a
section all its own because of the form’s uniqueness, its indelible Jewishness, and
its overlap with almost all the other sections. Stand-up’s roots in the night club,
the music hall, and vaudeville—themselves extensions of popular theater—are
clear, as are its contributions to film comedy and any number of television genres from the variety show to the sitcom to stand-up specials to regular offerings
on Comedy Central. Stand-up’s kinship with performance art—another noted
cultural hybrid—has already been highlighted in Rebecca Rossen’s piece on
David Dorfman and Dan Froot. Donald Weber here foregrounds stand-up’s
multiple border crossings in his comparative analysis of Billy Crystal’s 1992 film
Mr. Saturday Night (a nostalgic compendium of stand-up’s sources and derivations) with the cutting-edge work of stand-up (recently also sit-down, on the
progressive radio-talk network Air America) Marc Maron.Weber sees Crystal’s
film, and Crystal the real-life stand-up, as heir to the perpetually adolescent, selfhating, id-revealing Jewish stand-up tradition that extends, in its post–World
War II incarnation, from Milton Berle (the primary model for “Mr. Saturday
Night”) to Woody Allen to Jerry Seinfeld. Maron, on the other hand,“represents
the latest important transition in the art of Jewish stand-up.” More a progeny of
the politically charged satire of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl than of the “observational” humor of Alan King and Seinfeld, Maron’s comic monologues, or
“spritzes” (literally “sprayings,” in Yiddish), not only push the ideological envelope decidedly to the left but pair a strong social conscience with a passionate
exploration of Jewish identity.This meshing of the political and the personal is
exemplified in Maron’s tour de force monologue Jerusalem Syndrome (2001),
which Weber examines in detail.
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Genealogies of Jewish Stand-up
Looking Back, Moving Beyond
Donald Weber
With the recent passing of four giants of stand-up
comedy—Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett,Alan King, and Rodney Dangerfield,
a veritable Mount Rushmore of Borscht Belt humor—is there a future for
Jewish stand-up? Can the contemporary Jewish American landscape produce
stand-up artists who match these comic icons’ substantial talent? Does an
emerging cohort of comedians (much less a rising generation) desire to keep
the faith, in Jewish stand-up solidarity? The following essay offers some tentative answers concerning the fate of Jewish comedy in what might be called
our post-Seinfeld era. Before we can appreciate the current moment of Jewish
stand-up, however, we need to revisit the particular world that shaped a previous generation of canonical Borscht Belt tummelers (Yiddish for noisemakers,
tumult-makers), that key transitional interval in Jewish American culture, the
1940s and 1950s. So first, some stand-up genealogies.
According to the received, sacred history of Jewish humor, Berle’s legendary impudence, born of hosting raunchy vaudeville revues, begets the generation of brash, in your face comics, from Don Rickles to the young Jeffrey
Ross (heir apparent to the “blue” material associated with the Friars Club);Alan
King’s more benign,“observational” mode—pointing out the exasperations and
inanities of middle-class life—begets Freddie Roman and Jerry Seinfeld; the
acerbic, politically engaged Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl beget a range of subsequently influential parodists and social critics, from a young Woody Allen in the
1960s to Robert Klein and Richard Pryor in the 1970s to, in our own time, Jon
Stewart, Lewis Black, and the rising stand-up comedian Marc Maron, a key figure in the “alternative” stand-up scene of the 1990s.1 In the example of Maron,
his recent tour de force monologue, Jerusalem Syndrome (2001)—discussed at the
end of this essay—represents the latest important transition in the art of Jewish
stand-up.
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D o n a l d We b e r
Remarkably, figures from the nostalgic heyday of the 1950s and 1960s continue to flourish in our midst: Mel Brooks’s 1968 film The Producers spawned the
smash hit musical on Broadway (2001) and a film adaptation of the musical
(2005); the quirky stand-up monologist Shelly Berman plays Larry David’s
crusty father on the HBO cult hit Curb Your Enthusiasm (2001– ); even the
latter-day hipster Mort Sahl is still around, performing his brand of biting social satire on Bleecker Street. Raking a seasoned critical eye, Sahl remarked recently that “a political satirist’s job is to draw blood.”2 In this respect I imagine
that, for Sahl at least, would-be cable television “spritzers” (rapid-fire comic riffers) like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart lack teeth; they don’t open up a truly dangerous mouth.3
When was stand-up comedy really dangerous? Potentially subversive? Vital
to our cultural life? In his shrewd review of Gerald Nachman’s collection of comedian profiles, Seriously Funny, Adam Gopnik sadly notes the recent transformations in American comedy: a decline, in his view, from those legendary early
practitioners whose art expressed “the will to explode,” to a less engaged—if still
marginally talented—contemporary generation. “The courage and commitment lapsed,” Gopnik laments, “and now comedy is an easier business of attitude and political indifference.” Welcome, alas, to the age of Seinfeld and his
easily discomfited progeny.4
One way of measuring the transformations in Jewish stand-up is through
an analysis of Billy Crystal’s deeply personal film, Mr. Saturday Night, which
Crystal both directed and stars in. A modest hit when it opened in the fall of
1992, the film chronicles a representative Jewish comic’s archetypal “story”
(from Brooklyn to the Catskills, from television stardom to relative obscurity)
along with the implied narrative influence and filial embrace of Crystal himself, the tradition’s proudly self-conscious heir.Viewed in this way, Mr. Saturday
Night provides a rich genealogy of a slowly vanishing cohort of comic artists.
From its opening credits, featuring close-ups of virtually every Jewish culinary delicacy perfected in the New World, Mr. Saturday Night resonates with
Crystal’s unabashed nostalgia—olfactory and gastronomic—for that now hazy,
once haimisch (familiar, homelike) world of 1940s Jewish Brooklyn. In the figure
of Buddy Young, Jr., Crystal conjures an allusively rich composite of familiar
Jewish comics—“a museum of comedy,” by Buddy’s own admission—nourished
in the streets (and kitchens) of the Bronx and Brooklyn, honing their fledgling
acts in the Borscht Belt, longing for popular recognition beyond that provincial
Jewish subculture of hotels in Miami Beach and the Catskills, of koch-a-layns
(“cook-a-longs,” denoting shared cooking facilities among families) and bungalow colonies. In the 1950s, before the Disney-inspired Davy Crockett craze that
would eventually displace him, Buddy arrived as the charismatic star of his own
version of Berle’s Texaco Star Theater (1949–53); when we meet him, in the present, he is now a bitter, washed-up comic still performing his throwback shtick
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1. The legendary comic fraternity and assorted friends, ca. 1955. Top row: Joey Adams,
Eddie Fisher, Red Buttons; Middle Row: Gene Baylos, George Raft, Joe E. Lewis, Sam
Levenson, Morey Amsterdam, Henny Youngman; Front row: Sid Caesar, Milton Berle,
Jan Murray. Courtesy the Friars Club.
on the condominium circuit. Crystal, of course, loves this fraternity of brash,
manic tummelers and traces his own patrimony as Jewish comedian back to
them, without apology. In this respect Mr. Saturday Night distills the story of
modern Jewish American comedy into the vessel—overflowing with nonstop
sarcasm and blue wit—of Buddy Young himself (Figure 1).
For those who can remember, Crystal encodes Buddy with tonic gestures
drawn from a gallery of comedians, above all, the imposing figure of Milton
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Berle. For starters, Buddy opens his mouth with Berle’s signature yell, “MAKE
UP!” during an opening segment that captures the behind-the-scenes chaos of
live 1950s television. Buddy’s mother also uncannily resembles Berle’s own loud
stage mother, whose distinctive laugh rose above the audience, encouraging her
Miltie through a dying monologue. Later, in the mid-1950s, his career in eclipse
and his variety show canceled by the network, we see Buddy hanging onto the
edges of the entertainment world, his brash narcissism and Jewish-inflected “impudence” no longer appealing to audiences beyond the East Coast, as he hosts
what seems like a version of Berle’s Jackpot Bowling.5 The figure of Buddy gesturing with his huge cigar also signals Alan King (King and Crystal played entertainer father and estranged doctor son in the schmaltzy 1988 film, Memories
of Me, written by Crystal); and at a key moment in Buddy’s career Crystal expands the Jewish-comic composite by revisiting Jackie Mason’s notorious 1964
self-destruction on The Ed Sullivan Show.6 In this last, very funny re-visioning,
Buddy loses his composure on national television because, on this Sunday night
of all Sunday nights, he has to follow the Beatles’s first American appearance;
inevitably, the screams of Beatlemania drown out his act.7
Yet for all of Mr. Saturday Night’s desire to get its cultural moment right, for
all its director-star’s effort to fashion a portrait of a comedian’s inner turmoil designed to stand in for a generation of stand-ups, Crystal’s love letter feels thin,
lacking resonance and depth.What, we might ask, ultimately drives Buddy’s particular nastiness? (“You screwed it up with nastiness,” says Stan, his older brother,
manager, pimp, and gofer, speaking the truth about Buddy’s failed career.) What
are the archaic, ultimate, indeed primal sources that determine his will to selfsabotage? What accounts for his “charging vulgarity, the demonic-spieler side”
of his character?8 At various turning points in Buddy’s story—told in flashbacks
of memory and remorse—the film invites such pointed queries; indeed, accounting for Buddy’s particular demons—above all, his fatal Davy Crockett
spritz, an ill-advised attack that costs him his Berle-like national reputation in
the 1950s—returns us to the emotional source that molded this canonized generation of Jewish stand-ups: the shaping crucible of the family.
The most compelling if perhaps wildly speculative description of this
charged filial landscape was floated almost forty ago by Albert Goldman in his
famous essay “Boy-Man Schlemiel,” a brilliant meditation on the cohort of
Brooklyn-bred comics who, in effect, invented stand-up comedy. In Goldman’s view, these boy-men who, tellingly, called themselves by diminutives like
“Lenny,”“Shecky,”“Buddy,”“Soupy,” and “Sandy,” grew up conflicted, obsessed
with questions of identity and feelings of alienation: a coterie of secretly rebellious sons “hocked” by overbearing Jewish mothers, aching to launch
themselves beyond the provincial lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhoods of
their immigrant-saturated youth.
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Building on the early satirical fiction of Philip Roth and Bruce Jay Friedman, Goldman claims that this generation was afflicted by a “prolonged adolescence” resulting in a psychic stance marked by a complex blend of tenderness
and rage: “His only outlet is farcical ambivalence—a love that pursues through
mockery and an anger that disguises itself as humor.” Out of this Jewish crucible
of liberating anger came the famous spritz, those anarchic riffs of verbal abandon (“desecratory” is how Goldman’s describes them), inspired routines that
take on the intimacies of Jewish family life and, eventually, entire spheres of
American (read: goyish) culture, above all popular culture.This boy-man comedian, in Goldman’s vivid rendering, “views life from an isolated position—his
head cocked ironically awry, his eyes and mind alert to control his environment
by total intellectual awareness and his tongue poised to mock both himself and
others, Jews and Gentiles alike.”9
Crystal’s Buddy Young, Jr., appears to have risen fully formed from such
an ethnic-cultural swamp, “the up-from-Brooklyn, down-from-Grossinger’s
generation,” in David Denby’s memorable characterization.10 Mr. Saturday
Night wraps the origins of the Yankelman brothers’ comic art of loving mimicry and lip-synching of Jewish novelty songs (especially Aaron Lebedoff ’s
popular “Romania, Romania”) in the hazy backward gaze of nostalgia. The
brothers are hilarious “living room comics,” like many of our fathers (including mine), able to “kill” their families, generating via the intimacies of Jewish
wit uncontrollable shrieks of laughter, transforming themselves with an accent
and an apron into “Uncle Moe” and “Uncle Julius,” always arguing behind the
bakery counter in heavy Yiddish dialect.Thus the risible disjunctions inherent—
available—in the cultural and linguistic tensions of the Old World/New World
dialectic fueled the comic Jewish American imagination, at least on Sundays,
in Brooklyn living rooms in the 1940s, where families gathered to feast on
brisket and kishka, corned beef and cheesecake (Figure 2).
According to Goldman, this generation of Jewish comedians’ particular
mode of “satire was born in rejection of their immediately surrounding world,
in the desecration of first the family, then the neighborhood and finally the
whole milieu in which they had grown up. Instead of swallowing or disguising
their emotions, these young Jews—consumed with self-hate or shame—came
out in the open and blasted the things that hurt them.”11 I doubt that Gopnik
had this specific passage in mind when speaking of the stand-up’s “will to explode”;12 nor do I assume Crystal did when he and the other screenwriters of
Mr. Saturday Night invented Stan’s signature phrase, “Hurt them.” Uttered, we
gather, at the threshold of every performance, a coded injunction reminding
Buddy of his symbolically violent mission while onstage, “Hurt them” recalls
the “I killed tonight” ideal that stand-ups dream about achieving in their acts,
the desire to leave their audience bent over with laughter, emotionally spent in
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2. Billy Crystal as Buddy Young, Jr.—a.k.a. “Mr. Saturday Night.” Photo by Bruce
McBroom.
the collective release of taboo thoughts. In John Lahr’s apt description of the
transgressive appeal of first-rate stand up,“There is something exquisite, daring,
and liberating about a genuinely malicious wit.The price we pay for living in
civilized society is the repression of our aggressive, infantile instincts; our anarchic impulses must be contained. But we pay top dollar to see those who are
in touch with these murky vindictive feelings express them elegantly for us.”13
Building on Lahr, and applying his insights to the high art of Jewish standup, we might say that Jews, along with (of course) all marginalized groups, use
jokes to express their anxiety and, above all, resentments as outsiders; indeed,
listening attentively to the hectic patter of the stand-up establishes bonds of
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intimacy between audience and the shaman-like figure of the comedian, speaking on behalf of his tribe, speaking to the truth about our silly foibles and
guilty desires, exposing/demystifying, in the process, the powers that be, the
insidious forces that shape our ways of feeling and being.
At certain key, well-remembered moments in Mr. Saturday Night—
memories that structure the film itself—we witness Buddy either forging an
intimacy with his audience or “screw[ing] it up with nastiness,” in Stan’s acute
(if helpless) analysis of his brother’s unaccountable behavior.At what we gather
is the height of his post-war, pre-network television career, we witness Buddy’s
charismatic presence, belting a rousing Yinglish parody of “Romania, Romania” to the absolute delight of an adoring Borscht Belt audience, at home in the
Catskills (shot on location at the old Nevele Hotel, by the way). Safe within this
haimisch world in social and linguistic transition to America, the audience is
able to relax, to relish the “insider pleasure” of Buddy’s familiar style of Jewish
joking, without catching—as we, interestingly, are allowed to overhear—his
own secret disdain for the middle-class Jewish audience that has made him a
star. “Can you believe these schmucks?” he whispers to the bandleader. What
accounts for Buddy’s disgust? For his bad faith? (“This is why I love the
Catskills!”) Is it expressive, following Goldman, of his own self-hatred? Crystal
never directly explains why.
Nor, in my view, do we ever gain a vivid enough sense of why Buddy’s career apparently soars a few years later, as manic host of a Texaco Theater–like variety show. In the case of Milton Berle himself, the contemporary critic Gilbert
Seldes explained “Mr. Television’s” amazing popularity as the result, in part, of
his adapting, with minimal adjustment, an earlier nightclub style—“the loud
voice that had to make itself heard above the talk and laughter”—to the new
medium of television. His “personality is strong,” Seldes noted at the height of
Berle’s status as “Mr.Television”; “he comes across without reservation, nothing
about him is shaded.” Indeed, he possessed a “cocky assurance. . . . It was obvious
that he relished the cracks he delivered.” Ultimately, “Berle’s vulgarity flowed
like the Mississippi, muddy but powerful, and he spent his strength in knocking
out the audience” (Figure 3).14
To be sure, Crystal’s Buddy Young, Jr., doesn’t possess Berle’s or, for that
matter, Sid Caesar’s sheer physical presence; nonetheless, when Buddy crashes
through the wall in the show’s opening bit, it’s clear that his brash style finds
an eager, responsive audience. And when he begins his opening monologue,
Buddy’s signature refrain, “Don’t get me started!” launches him, we presume,
into a series of wicked observations, in the tradition of Brooklyn spritzing.“It
gave you a tremendous sense of power to see people in front of you doubled
over with the pain of laughter,” observes Goldman, distinguishing the spritzer
from the spritz. Ultimately,“Hurt them!” explains the stand-up’s need to control as it highlights his requisite desire for attention. In this respect Buddy’s
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3. Milton Berle as “Carmen Miranda” on the cover of Newsweek, May 16, 1949. Photograph by Ed Wergeles, Newsweek.
other personal, deeply revealing refrain, “Did you see what I did?” leads to
the archaic sources driving the manic routines: whatever the venue, he is always performing to the Brooklyn living room, always seeking unconditional
(mother?) love, gauging affection through laughter.According to the structuring (psycho-)dynamic of the boy-man schlemiel, Buddy needs a responsive,
263
reassuring audience; inwardly, however, he despises their affection—his reflexive mocking amounts to a mode of revenge, a literal spritzing (spraying).15
For me, Crystal stages Buddy’s implied complexity during moments of crisis, of uncontrollable rage, while performing stand-up, most notably when
Buddy loses composure on national television. (Recall, in this respect, that Crystal once quipped that Mr. Saturday Night might also be titled Raging Jew.)16 These
unhinged, self-sabotaging acts continue to mystify, really haunt, the aging comic.
What can we make of them? I believe they lead us to the heart of Buddy Young,
Jr., inviting us to stare into the raging heart fueling Jewish stand-up itself.
“Composure,” observes the psychoanalytic theorist Adam Phillips, is
“something we lose but tend not to find: we think of composure, like confidence, as something we regain.”17 To lose composure is at once the comic’s
worst nightmare and yet, ironically, the source of his art. Indeed, we might say
that stand-up comedy enacts a necessary dialectic of composure lost and regained and lost again: composure must be lost for the comic’s rude honesty to
be transmitted and felt; we might even say that losing composure is the enabling condition of truly dangerous stand-up. Think of the wounded geshreis
(screams) of the late Sam Kinison; or, currently, the shrill verbal pitch of Chris
Rock, who can’t seem to stop shouting at his audience while he speaks the insider truths concerning African Americans; or the emerging cult stand-up
Lewis Black, whose routine amounts to an unfettered rant on the current
American political scene. “It’s the tirade that’s taboo,” Philip Roth once remarked, himself long adept at unsettling Jewish middle-class composure.18
From this implicitly creative zone of composure lost—a landscape marked by
psychic disarray—the “art” of truly brilliant stand-up ruptures forth, lunging.
Of course there is a defensive “type of composure,” Phillips astutely notes,
that creates an appearance of self-possession. . . . The mind creates a distance in the self—often in the form of an irony—from its own desire,
from the affective core of the self, and manages, by the same token, a distance from everybody else. A sometimes compelling but ambiguous aura,
by communicating a relative absence of neediness, renders the other
dispensable. . . . At its most extreme, the neediness is evoked in the other
people around and then treated with sadistic dismay, as though it were an
obnoxious stranger. Hell is not other people, but one’s need for other
people.19
In this stunning analysis Phillips captures perfectly the pathology of
Buddy Young, Jr. In ferocious self-interest, Buddy, at the threshold of jumpstarting his career with a part in a movie, draws his faithful brother out of retirement to manage him—only to lash out at Stan, and the lying director
(played to oily perfection by Ron Silver), when the role turns out to be
smaller than Buddy had been led to believe, and than his buffeted, outsize
264
ego can accept. Such self-absorbed, unhinged behavior forms a pattern in
Buddy’s career; in this respect Mr. Saturday Night amounts to a case study of
Buddy’s pathology of resentment, the resentment of neediness and attention
born years ago in Brooklyn.
Looking back in a sour mood, Buddy cries out,“No one is excited about
me.” The lament issues from the now exposed, vulnerable zone that determines his deepest need. In the 1950s, to Buddy’s complete mystification, audiences suddenly became more excited about Fess Parker’s Davy Crockett
than Buddy’s throwback variety hour; even his daughter sports a coonskin hat,
joining her generation in televisual-commercial solidarity. A raging Jew seeking revenge, Buddy, just before his live entrance, viciously knocks the mythic
frontiersman’s iconic symbol off his daughter’s head and continues, despite
Stan’s warning, to do his monologue—an ungenerous, untimely rant implying
that Davy Crockett is gay, that his “feet don’t reach the floor,” and so on. Despite the ritual invitation from the audience,“Don’t get me started!” (an ironic
appeal which might be translated as “Let me lose my composure for you” or
“Thanks for sanctioning my spritz”), Buddy quickly learns that bashing American icons on national television gets you canceled.
But unlike, say, Lenny Bruce’s wickedly funny routine about the Lone
Ranger as really an Old World Jewish father who “masks” his ethnicity on 78
rpm records or—in a radically different mode and with a gentler impulse—
Mickey Katz’s hilarious Yinglish send-up of David (now “Duvid”) Crockett,
“King of Delancey Street,” Buddy Young only rails in hurt resentment at American icons; in his case, however, the tirade is not taboo—not, that is,“political” à
la vintage Sahl or Bruce—but just personal. In the Bruce routine, when the
Lone Ranger’s rich, sonorous “High Ho Silver” is played at 33 rpm, the Jewish
voice, under repression, reveals itself, along with the Jewish Ranger’s bitter
lament about his ungrateful American progeny (“I sent two boice to collich.You
tink dy even sent me a pustul cud? . . . Allotta tsuris I have, mine friend”). In the
example of Katz, as Josh Kun has argued, we hear the Yiddish-soaked, gluggingpunning parodies of the Jewish anti-crooner, baffling middle America with the
antic-Semitic sounds of Jewish difference, providing, in the process, the pleasures
of insider recognition for those Jewish audiences feeling not quite at home in
the New World.20
Crystal, then, does not present Buddy Young as a so-called “sick comic,”
unmasking America in the tradition of Lenny Bruce; nor does Buddy remain a
fixture of the Jewish Catskills, although he does, ironically, end up headlining
its latter-day incarnation, the condominium circuit. In perhaps the most moving scene in Mr. Saturday Night, we overhear Buddy’s confession to his dying
mother, spoken, without irony, in the mamaloshen (mother tongue, i.e.,Yiddish),
a startling moment of unexpected intimacy.While his mother rests, seemingly
unconscious, Buddy whispers his deepest fears and anxieties: Es geyt nist git
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[gut]. Ikh bin oyf groyse tsores. S’vet gornisht helfn (It’s not going well. I’m in a lot
of trouble. It won’t help at all).21 I am not exactly sure how to interpret the
scene’s particular intimacies, except as a rare moment of truth-speaking on
Buddy’s part: no rude mouth; no mocking spritz. Instead we overhear the
poignant voicing of Buddy’s bereft condition as entertainer, and as son.
In the end, Buddy recovers his inescapable, irrepressible stand-up self,
working his lonely trade before his people. In a sense he has returned, more or
less, to the haimisch stage of the Brooklyn living room; fittingly, Stan revisits this
originating scene in a deeply nostalgic, schmaltzy painting—the young Yankelman brothers making their extended family laugh—offered, we gather, as a gift
of love, in shared memory and reconciliation.Where else should Buddy go? He
is, after all, where he belongs. In this respect Mr. Saturday Night keeps faith with,
indeed, is controlled by the very nostalgia that shapes its ultimately sappy vision
of Jewish American comedy.What remains unexplored—fatally, in my view—
in the movie’s potentially rich genealogy of Jewish comedy is the figure of the
stand-up forging a necessary (therapeutic) alliance with his audience.
A generation ago Albert Goldman spoke of the alienated Jewish comic’s
heroic “dare”:“to expose his inner turmoil to self-satire.”22 Such vulnerability, in
my view, continues to characterize the most compelling stand-up comics working today: in the tradition of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, these shaman-like
risk takers offer their receptive audiences what Jeffrey Shandler helpfully terms
“the story of my story.”23 Their comic “routine,” their shtick, amounts to the self
performing a personal history of struggle, of pilgrimage, above all of narrating a
journey toward insight. Such brave acts of self-rupturing, I would argue, lead to
the heart of the best contemporary Jewish American comedy.
Indeed, to judge from the current stand-up scene, the “story of my story”
has become, across lines of gender and ethnicity, the preferred performance
mode in its own right. I am thinking of the recent concert films by the Korean American comedienne Margaret Cho, which retell the harrowing story
of her failed sitcom All American Girl (1994–95) and her personal ordeal to
meet the television executives’ expectations of feminine beauty; I am thinking
as well of John Leguizamo’s Freak (1998), about how a wise-ass kid from Jackson Heights became an actor; I am also thinking of Sandra Bernhard’s genreblurring cabaret acts “I’m Still Here . . . Damn It” (1998; video, 2000) and “Songs
I Sang on the Kibbutz” (2000). Even Billy Crystal performed on Broadway, in
fall 2004, an autobiographic one-man show, 700 Sundays, “about periods in
my life and people in my life that helped make me a man.”24
In the case of Marc Maron, the story of his story involves a consuming
desire for revelation, a need for some understanding of his identity as a Jew. In
his hilarious one-man show Jerusalem Syndrome (2000), we follow this earnest
seeker, a self-styled “cosmic doofus,” yearning for a transcendent sign on a pilgrimage to various holy lands, including Jack Kerouac’s grave (the shrine of the
266
Beats), Philip Morris (the corporate belly of the beast for the chain smoker), and
Jerusalem itself.25 For Maron, the sacred office of the stand-up requires such acts
of personal and (because publicly performed) collective unhinging. He started
making trouble early, after moving as a boy from New Jersey to Albuquerque.“I
generated as much anarchy as possible,” he confesses in the published version of
Jerusalem Syndrome (2001);“I was very proud to have pushed two of my Hebrew
school teachers to tears.”26 The itch to engage and disturb drives Maron’s search
for “Truth”; if Buddy Young’s familiar “Jewish” impudence (in the Berle and
Rickles insult mode) ultimately masks rather than unmasks, Maron’s mocking
impulse aligns him with an alternate (perhaps heroic) tradition of Jewish truth
seekers, anxiously moving forward toward some revelation, or at least searching
for (tentative) answers to the ultimate questions of faith and identity.
Onstage the self-styled “Kol Nidre Kid” (Maron was born on the eve of
the Day of Atonement in 1963; thus he deems himself chosen, from the beginning, to suss out God’s plan) engages in a brilliant speed rap, a continuous
spritz of insights and ironies that would surely make its Brooklyn patriarchy
proud. We join this hyperconscious pilgrim on a journey to Hollywood, a
“mystical Jewish city . . . the anti-Jerusalem,” the dream factory of massproduced illusion. Revoicing (however unconsciously) another Jewish demystifier, the 1930s ( Jewish) writer Nathanael West, Maron locates himself among
those caught in the illusion. “This machine, this factory,” he announces, having emerged from the beast’s belly, “creates an exhaust that hangs over Los
Angeles.That’s not smog. It’s vaporized disappointment” (Figure 4).27
Such reporting from the edge may not sound so original, but Maron’s
vulnerability as witness and victim authorizes such observations, which, however old, do not feel banal or unearned. For it was while he was ill at ease in
this would-be Los Angeles Zion that Maron gained the necessary revelation
about his larger purpose as stand-up artist: the condition, as he explains in an
interview, of observing himself “drifting into my imagination to such an extreme and being so out of control, that it resonates forever, and it popped
open a door in my mind that will never be completely shut, nor do I want it
to be.”28 This is an unmoored psychic territory never dreamed of in the controlled world of Seinfeld-influenced “observational” comedy, a safe realm of
(self )consciousness obsessed with the comedy of daily routine. Of course Maron’s
act includes hilarious send-ups of our debased, routinized “lifestyle” as well,
especially the deeper meaning of cell phones (Would Beethoven have been
impressed by people using his Fifth Symphony as their ring tone? Should folks
“take pause” at such signs of civilized taste?) and the disappointments of
twenty-first century life (“Is this all we get? Where are our jet packs beaming
us to Paris for lunch?”).29
In the end, however, Maron’s “story” of his pilgrimage to the spiritual
heart of Judaism marks a new direction in Jewish stand-up, as it connects him
267
4. Marc Maron performing at The Cellar, New York, in 2003.
to his own confused (famishte) Jewish generation, searching for some relation
to tradition. Seeking God through the tiny lens of a Sony camcorder, the magical instrument through which the manic pilgrim hopes to meet, eyepiece to
eye, his Maker, Maron is left alone by the Western Wall, desperate and exhausted, his journey unraveled (earlier he watches helplessly as his precious
machine bounces, step after step, down a long flight of stairs). He can only slip
a note between the sacred cracks of the Wall, inscribed with a poignant, one
word plea:“Help!”The alienated son of “sofa Zionists” (always worried about
Israel in the news, ever ready to haul out the checkbook), Maron is, ultimately,
268
a devout Jewish seeker recording and decoding everything around him. “The
pain of my ignorance spurs me. I seek to understand and reconnect to something truly meaningful and human.”30 Can God be encountered through the
viewfinder of a camcorder? Can the religion of “brand loyalty” (Sony, Coke)
sustain the questing soul? By the end of his cosmic-comic journey, Maron
confronts the meaning of faith in the form of swaying Hasidim at prayer. Although not that “Jewy,” he recognizes that “they justify the middle. . . . They
are there to keep the arcane channels to God open through prayer and ritual
around the clock. On some level, they are there for all Jews, everywhere,
whether they like it or not.” Such are the modest but enabling revelations
available to the self-named, self-appointed “cosmic doofus.”Accepting the loss
of the holy camcorder as part of God’s plan, “I realized deep within that I
knew nothing.”31 And in the spiritually hungry world of Marc Maron, “nothing” signals an invitation to continue the journey, the learning, the moving
forward.
In the end, the stand-up’s stream of observations—manic, weird, even
obvious—still has to count for something.The manic spritz has to flow from the
sprizter’s soul. Without such a verbal-aesthetic-ideological transaction, how
can the world be moved? Without such a vision, it is merely “observational”
humor. Buddy Young, Jr., no doubt, has his personal demons, but he never taps
into them directly as the driving force of his comedic vision. Recognizing the
exhausted dimension of such a mode, Maron summons his demons—keeping
faith with the great, angst-ridden Jewish stand-ups before him—as sources of
his stand-up art. “Unhappy, storm-tossed one, uncomforted!” he indelibly remembers as the opening words of his bar mitzvah haftarah (the weekly reading
from the Prophets), chanted in 1976 at Congregation B’nai Israel, trapped in
the Jewish diaspora of Albuquerque.32 For Maron, the art of Jewish stand up as
self-therapy can, perhaps, salve the unhappy soul. But there is no cure, he also
surely knows, for the restless, storm-tossed seeker of truth.
Note s
1. Of course in discussing the legacies of (mainly) male Jewish stand-ups, I am not forgetting the rich tradition of female comic artists, beginning with figures like Fannie
Brice and Sophie Tucker in the early twentieth century to “unkosher” comediennes
like the legendary Belle Barth (who performed her raunchy routines in the clubs of
Miami Beach in the 1950s and early 1960s) to Totie Fields and Joan Rivers in our
own time. For important studies of Jewish female stand-ups see Sarah Blacher
Cohen,“The Unkosher Comediennes: From Sophie Tucker to Joan Rivers,” in Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987), 105–24; June Sochen, “From Sophie Tucker to Barbra
Streisand: Jewish Women Entertainers as Reformers,” in Talking Back: Images of Jewish Women in American Popular Culture, ed. Joyce Antler (Hanover, N.H.: University
Press of New England, 1998), 68–84; 261–262; Michael Bronski, “Funny Girls Talk
Dirty,” Boston Phoenix, August 15, 2003.
269
2. Mort Sahl, interview with Terry Gross, Fresh Air, National Public Radio, December
23, 2003.
3. The literature on Jewish comedy is vast. For recent studies see Esther Romeyn and
Jack Kugelmass, Let There Be Laughter: Jewish Humor in America (Chicago: Spertus
Museum, 1997); Lawrence J. Epstein, The Haunted Smile:The Story of Jewish Comedians in America (New York: Public Affairs, 2001); Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny:
The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Pantheon, 2003); and
Stephen J.Whitfield,“Towards an Appreciation of American Jewish Humor,” Journal
of Modern Jewish Studies 4 (2005): 33–48.
4. Adam Gopnik,“Standup Guys,” New Yorker, May 12, 2003: 107–108. For a smart reflection on the fate of Jewish comedy see Jeff Berkwits,“What’s with Jewish Comedy?” San Diego Jewish Union (August 2004). (www.sdjewishjournal.com/stories/
cover_aug04.html). See also, in this respect, Joshua Cohen’s own genealogical spritz
on the Seinfeld mode of comedy, occasioned by the passing of Alan King:“Seinfeld,
that navel-gazing slice of urban spinelessness, should have been the endgame for this
brand of hyperanalytical comedy. Seinfeld, the man, is just Alan King’s adopted
lovechild with the worst traits of Woody Allen—only raised by Long Islanders, not
Upper West Siders, and never allowed to play ball with other kids.” Joshua Cohen,
“News & Columns,” New York Press, May 18 2004. For an “obituary” on the fate of
the joke, see Warren St. John,“Seriously,The Joke is Dead,” New York Times, May 22,
2005 (Sunday Styles section): 1–2.
5. By the mid-1950s, the demographics of television were quickly changing: audiences
in the Bronx and Brooklyn who loved Berle’s ethnic-inflected antics gave way to
the blander entertainment tastes of middle America, to viewers less attuned to the
raging vaudevillian’s brash, over-the-top “Jewish” comic style. As a result, the emergent network executives took over, enacting a virtual corporate makeover of television itself. On Berle’s career see Arthur Frank Wertheim, “The Rise and Fall of
Milton Berle,” in American History, American Television, ed. John E. O’Connor (New
York: Ungar, 1983), 55–78.
6. On the show, while Mason was in the middle of his routine, Sullivan signaled for the
comedian to end his act in two minutes, holding up two fingers, because President
Johnson was about to address the nation and all the networks were preempting their
programming. Mason became confused and started imitating Sullivan’s hand gesture. Sullivan interpreted this as obscene and through his influence was able to ban
Mason from television for years. For more on this episode, see Donald Weber,
“Jackie Mason’s Revenge,” Forward, Decemeber 31, 1999: 1, 12.
7. We can also detect references to Red Buttons (to my nostalgic memory Buddy exits
the stage after his Catskills act with a version of Buttons’s signature “hopping”
dance), and even to Mort Sahl. In recounting his show biz history to Annie, his
would-be agent, Buddy shows her a glossy of himself in the late 1960s as a hipster
comic, sporting a goatee and (à la Sahl) displaying a newspaper’s headline. In addition, Crystal invokes, either by cameo appearance, by name, or by joke, a comedy
pantheon that includes Jerry Lewis, Sid Caesar, Jackie Leonard, Jan Murray,Will Jordan, Gene Baylos, the Ritz Brothers, Phil Silvers, Carl Ballantine, Slappy White,
Jackie Gayle, and perhaps other old-timers I may have missed.
8. David Denby,“Comic Stripped,” rev. of Mr. Saturday Night, New York Magazine, October 5, 1992: 101.
9. Albert Goldman, “Boy-Man Schlemiel:The Jewish Element in American Humor,”
in Freakshow (New York: Antheneum, 1971), 174–178.
10. Denby,“Comic Stripped,” 101.
11. Goldman,“Boy-Man Schlemiel,” 178.
12. Gopnik,“Standup Guys,” 108.
270
13. John Lahr, “Nothing Like a Dame,” rev. “Dame Edna:The Royal Tour,” New Yorker,
November 1, 1999: 118.
14. Gilbert Seldes, “The Good-Bad Berle,” in The Public Arts (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1956), 142–144. For Berle’s impact on the 1950s see Donald Weber,
Haunted in the New World: Jewish American Culture from Cahan to “The Goldbergs”
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Berle’s constantly mugging punim
graced the cover of Time the same week (in May 1949) as it did that of Newsweek.
15. The astute critic in the New Statesman calls Buddy “an adolescent terrorist who
can’t stop demanding attention” (Jonathan Romney, “A Stand-up’s Downfall,” New
Statesmen,April 23, 1993: 28).About Lenny Bruce, Goldman writes,“Lenny’s childlike undisciplined temperament was at the root of everything that was splendid, and
appalling, in his life” (“The Electric Resurrection of Saint Lenny Bruce,” in Goldman, Freakshow, 219). Perhaps Shelly Berman says it best:“[Lenny] was angry before
anger was in. He spit in the face of the establishment. He was magnificent” (quoted
in Nachman, Seriously Funny, 424). Of course, despite his own profound affection,
Crystal does not want us simply, or reflexively, to love Buddy; in fact, together with
Buddy’s complicated daughter Susan, I suppose that some of us may need to “get
away from [his] mouth.” In a moving essay about watching Milton Berle perform in
the Catskills in the mid-1950s, Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky writes of the gendered response to Berle’s anarchic stage antics. In his memory Jewish men found Berle’s
shtick liberating, his brash style a way of thumbing one’s nose at, or sticking one’s
finger up, the conventions of 1950s civility. Women, however, including RubinDorsky’s own mortified mother, thought him “coarse and vulgar” ( Jeffrey RubinDorsky, “The Catskills Reinvented (and Redeemed): Woody Allen’s Broadway
Danny Rose,” Kenyon Review 25 (2003): 264–81.
16. Quoted in Michael Sragow, “Shtick Shifts,” rev. of Mr. Saturday Night, New Yorker,
October 5, 1992: 163.
17. Adam Phillips, “On Composure,” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 42.
18. Quoted in Adam Phillips, “Philip Roth’s Patrimony,” in Adam Phillips, On Flirtation
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 169.
19. Phillips,“On Composure,” 45.
20. For the Lenny Bruce’s “Lone Ranger” routine, see John Cohen, ed., The Essential
Lenny Bruce (New York: Douglas Books, 1967), 54. For Mickey Katz, see Weber,
Haunted in the New World, 192–195; and Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
21. Thanks to Jeffrey Shandler for the transcription and translation.
22. Goldman,“Boy-Man Schlemiel,” 186.
23. Quoted in Donald Weber, “The Last Laugh?” Forward, September 22, 2000: 11–12.
24. Billy Crystal, quoted in the New York Times, June 24, 2004, B2. In her Nextbook.org
reflection on 700 Sundays and Crystal’s film personae in general, Sara Ivry speaks of
his “blandness,” the characters that “lacked bite from the get go.” As for the hugely
popular Broadway show, she observes that its “predictable bits offer comfort, never
confrontation.” Sara Ivry,“Billy Sunday,” Nextbook.org (January 3, 2005).These observations suggest how outside the tradition of biting Jewish comedy Crystal, despite
his nostalgia, remains. On Bernhard as Jewish performance artist see Ann Pellegrini,
“Whiteface Performances:‘Race,’ Gender, and Jewish Bodies,” in Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, ed. Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), esp. 130–143. On Margaret
Cho, see Sarah Hepola,“Margaret Cho Has Something on Her Mind: Herself,” New
York Times, September 23, 2003, Arts & Leisure, 4, 17.
25. Maron’s one-man show, Jerusalem Syndrome, ran off-off-Broadway at the Westbeth
Theatre Center in New York City during the summer of 2000. An expanded,
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
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published version of the play appeared in 2001. I saw two performances of Jerusalem
Syndrome that summer and wrote a piece on new directions in stand-up comedy for
the Forward. I draw on parts of that article in the following discussion of Maron and
Jewish stand-up. See Donald Weber, “The Last Laugh?” In addition to performing
on the comedy club scene, Maron is currently a DJ on the liberal “Air America”
radio network, co-hosting the “Morning Sedition” call-in show based in Los Angeles. See Nicholas von Hoffman,“Calling Air America,” Nation 280, no. 20 (May 23,
2005): 18, 20–22.
Marc Maron, Jerusalem Syndrome: My Life as a Reluctant Messiah (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), 18, 19.
Ibid., 62.
Marc Maron, Interview with (Mul)Doomstone, http://www.deathvalleydriver.com/
muldoomstone/marcmaron.html.
Marc Maron, performance at “Stand-Up New York,” n.d. Courtesy Ben Thum.
Email from Marc Maron to the author, October 2000.
Maron, Jerusalem Syndrome, 151, 158
Ibid., 21.
⡣
Television
No cultural form lends itself more to postmodern analysis, particularly from a Jewish perspective, than television.As for the postmodern
aspect, the mass media, specifically television, are the privileged sites of the
postmodernist discourse; in its advertising base and leveling effect—conflation
of public/private, past/present, reality/representation, culture/consumerism—
TV is postmodernism incarnate.1 And while, in one sense, it thus becomes
pleonastic to speak of postmodern television, one can apply to TV the historical
dimension of postmodernism (as distinct from the cultural and theoretical
dimensions). One can, in other words, speak of a postmodern era in television,
distinguished by Jim Collins’s notion of “hyperconsciousness”: the extreme selfawareness, among postmodern television texts, of their cultural and commercial
imbrication with the global media enterprise.2 This era, for most television theorists, emerges in the 1980s with the Music Television Network (MTV, 1980– )
and series such as Miami Vice (1984–89), Moonlighting (1985–89), and thirtysomething (1987–91). The trend proliferates into the 1990s and 2000s with other
shows such as Seinfeld (1989–98), The Simpsons (1989– ), Twin Peaks (1990–91),
and Northern Exposure (1990–95); cable’s “Not TV” programming, such as The
Larry Sanders Show (1992–98), Sex and the City (1998–2004), The Sopranos
(1999– ), Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000– ), and Six Feet Under (2001–05); the allnews, all-sports, and all-shopping networks; and, most recently, reality TV.3
As for the Jewish aspect, in no other major U.S. industry, and certainly in
no other mass entertainment medium, has the combination of Jewish business
influence, creative involvement, and, most significant, textual representation
been greater or more unprecedented than that which has taken place in television since the late 1980s.The high percentage of Jews among network ownership and executive and creative positions, from television’s inception to the
present, is well documented.4 What has only recently occurred, and begun to
be noted, is the sudden appearance in the last fifteen years of a significant
number of overtly Jewish main characters in episodic TV series. As tenuous as
the Jewishness expressed in these shows may be, a select listing of the programs
in question indicates the significance of the “Jewish” TV trend to American
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Te l e v i s i o n
television, and thus to American culture as a whole: Seinfeld, The Nanny
(1993–99), Mad About You (1992–99), Friends (1994–2004), Dharma and Greg
(1997–2002), Will and Grace (1998– ), Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000– ), Everwood
(2002– ), Arrested Development (2003– ), The O.C (2003– ), and the show that
is the focus of my essay for this volume, The Larry Sanders Show (1992–98).5
Surpassing Seinfeld “as the most influential comedy of the ’90s,” according
to Los Angeles Times entertainment writer Robert Lloyd,6 The Larry Sanders
Show further distinguishes itself, for our purposes, in its hyperconscious, showwithin-a-show format (the series revolves around the production of a talk show
featuring actual celebrities and real-life talk-show host Garry Shandling) and in
its elaboration on the theme of Jewish self-hatred. Other sitcoms have touched
on the latter subject—notably, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm—but none have
made it their protagonist’s raison d’être. My essay examines the permutations of
Jewish self-hatred in this darkly comic show as a springboard for confronting a
larger question: In the face of Jews’ unprecedented success and acceptance in
postmodern America, why, and in what form, does Jewish self-hatred persist?
Michele Byers and Rosalin Krieger’s essay,“Something Old is New Again?
Postmodern Jewishness in Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development, and The
O.C.,” takes on three of the most high-profile “Jewish” shows of the past few
years. Central to their analysis of Jewish representation in these popular and/or
critically acclaimed series is the idea of “newness.” Derived from the work of
Slavoj Žižek and Giles Deleuze, newness here is posited in dialogical rather
than binary relation to oldness, such that a repeated event, in its elaboration of
difference/excess, is re-created, particularly in the postmodern age, “in a radical
sense: it (re)emerges every time as New.”The “radical possibilities” of re-imagining
Jewishness on American television in ways that are “familiar yet strange” are what
Byers and Krieger address in the images and tropes of Jewishness, gender, family
life, and community as they play out in Curb, Arrested, and The O.C.
Note s
1. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1991).
2. Jim Collins, “Postmodernism and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled,
2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1992), 353.
3. For more on the postmodern characteristics of television, see Lawrence Grossberg,
Dancing in Spite of Myself (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); John
Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authenticity in American Television
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994); James Friedman, ed., Reality Squared:Televisual Discourse on the Real (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 2002).
4. See Neal Gabler,“Conference Presentation,” in Television’s Changing Image of American Jews (Los Angeles: The American Jewish Committee and The Norman Lear
Center, 1998), 3–12; Muriel Cantor, The Hollywood Producer: His Work and His Audience
Introduction
275
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1998); Juliet Lushbough, “The Hollywood TV Writer:A Descriptive Study of Sixty Primetime Television Writers,” Ph.D.
diss.,Temple University, 1981.
5. For a more detailed analysis of the “virtuality” of Jewish television, and for a more
complete listing of shows, see Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here:The Rise
of the “Jewish” Sitcom (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003).
6. Robert Lloyd,“ ‘Pilot’ Flies in the Face of Convention,” Los Angeles Times, September 5, 2004: E12.
Something Old Is New Again?
Po stmode rn Jewishne ss in C U R B Y O U R
ENTHUSIASM, ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT,
and T H E O.C.
Michele Byers and Rosalin Krieger
In his introduction to the 1996 exhibition catalog Too
Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities, Norman Kleeblatt notes that since the
mid-1980s, largely under the influence of feminism, postmodernism has been
politicized.1 This politicization engendered greater visibility for the cultural
products of marginalized groups, even those that had already had some success
in infiltrating the sociocultural mainstream. According to Kleeblatt, the paradox for many Jews was that “admission into the mainstream had required the
shedding of that very ethnic and cultural specificity upon which the new
identity-centered art is based.”2 Thus it is not surprising that while the recent,
identity-inflected period has seen a substantial rise in Jewish characters on
mainstream American television (both network and cable), this Jewishness has
tended to be more ostensible than clearly defined.3
The main question this essay asks is how such a postmodern inflection or
sensibility is playing out in the most recent examples of Jewishness on the small
screen. Recent scholarship has begun to explore Jewish televisual representation in the postmodern era.4 This essay carries the exploration into the most recent period, focusing on three of the most high-profile “Jewish” shows of the
2000s: Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000– ), Arrested Development (2003– ), and The
O.C. (2003– ).5 The three postmodern shows all put the lives of privileged
Jewish males at their centers.The different strategies employed in the representation of these protagonists are quite complex, however, as are the various ways
the shows can be formed into pairs. Curb and Arrested are sitcoms, for example,
while The O.C. is a prime-time soap. Arrested and The O.C. air on the Fox
broadcast network; Curb on cable’s Home Box Office (HBO). Arrested and The
O.C. are set in the Orange County city of Newport Beach and imagine their
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M i c h e l e B y e r s a n d Ro s a l i n K r i e g e r
wealthy suburban Southern California settings as a gentile paradise; Curb is set
in Los Angeles, more specifically among a Hollywood entertainment community (in)famously rife with Jews. Curb and The O.C. explicitly mark their male
protagonists’ Jewishness, whereas Arrested tends to erase Otherness by making
ethno-religious specificity as unremarkable as possible. The Jewish men on
Curb and The O.C. provide a physical (and moral) counterpoint of unassimilable difference, and yet paradoxically, especially with The O.C., also a Jewishness that permeates and renders quasi-Jewish the people around them; Arrested’s
Jewish men (and women) are virtually indistinguishable from their neighbors.6
Televisual Jewishness derives not only from characters within the narratives, but also from those people who produce, write, and perform these texts.
In the programs under discussion here, for example, all the shows’ creators are
Jewish men: Mitchell Hurwitz (Arrested); Josh Schwartz (The O.C.); and, doubling as star, Larry David (Curb). Many of the other writers and producers on
all three series are also Jewish, as are several of the prominent actors: Jeffrey
Tambor, Jessica Walter, and David Cross (as George Sr., Lucille, and Tobias) on
Arrested;Adam Brody (as Seth) on The O.C.; Larry David, Jeff Carlin, Susie Essman, and Richard Lewis (as himself, Jeff Greene, Susie Greene, and himself,
respectively) on Curb. As David Zurawik and others have chronicled, the stories Hollywood Jews have told to television audiences have demonstrated the
ambivalence about Jewishness and American identity that they experienced in
their own lives.7 In telling these stories they call upon their own experience of
mediating the world through Jewish bodies (ontologies) and ways of knowing
(epistemologies) located in particular contexts, acting out the conflicts of what
it means to be Jewish and upper-middle class in America. Despite fame and
material success, however, they sensed that they were still not quite as White as
the Joneses. Added to such assimilationist ambivalences were collective memories, the persistent reality of antisemitism, and a corollary sensitivity over
perceived Jewish “control” of the TV industry, which together contributed to
preventing these artists and entertainers from expressing their conflicts, and
thus their Jewishness, openly. In any event, in the pre-postmodern television
period between the first “Jewish” sitcom, The Goldbergs (1949–56), and the
second one, Bridget Loves Bernie (1972–73), Jewishness predominantly emerged
as subtext, as a sensibility of those telling the stories. As identity politics and a
shift in TV-industry marketing strategies encouraged a greater acceptability of
ethnicity, Jewish characters who explicitly, if cursorily, acknowledged their Jewishness suddenly became more visible (Bridget Loves Bernie; Rhoda [1974–79];
Welcome Back, Kotter [1975–79]; Barney Miller [1975–83]; Taxi (1979–83]).After
a hiatus through much of the 1980s (except in TV movies), Jewish representation on American television exploded. In the more recent period, beginning
in the late 1980s, televisual Jewishness in some form has become virtually
ubiquitous.8
279
Now that it has been taken out of the proverbial closet, the next question
is: What does Jewishness on U.S. television look like? We do not propose to
answer this question by pronouncing value judgments on the three “Jewish”
shows under discussion, nor will we engage in the highly problematic practice
of assessing “good” or “bad” Jewish images. Rather, we are looking for ways
that a postmodern Jewish sensibility may be read in these critically acclaimed
and/or enormously popular, yet quite different, television series. Central to
our project is the idea of “newness.” More specifically, we argue that Jewishness, as it is produced on American television today, emerges as new through
the (self-conscious) repetition of well-established tropes about Jewishness in
the American context.The corollary to this idea is that the notion of newness
as repetition is rooted in an understanding—dominant in the three “Jewish”
shows discussed here—of North American Jews, even (or especially) today, as
“both inside and outside” the sociocultural mainstream.
Our inquiry of newness will be aided by the theoretical possibilities of repetition and innovation (sameness and newness) in the production of televised
representations of Jewish identity. Of central importance here is a dialogue,
rather than a binary opposition, between these two points. Slavoj Žižek, in Organs Without Bodies (2004), describes a postmodern tendency to highlight the
historicity of the new. “The New,” he writes, “can ONLY emerge through repetition.”9 Drawing on Giles Deleuze, Žižek suggests that “in a proper instance of
repetition, the repeated event is re-created in a radical sense: it (re)emerges every
time as New.”10 Thus, repetition always contains that kernel of difference/excess,
that possibility of multiple points of identification inherent in the way we engage with television.This is what we are looking for: the radical possibilities of
reinvention that may lie at the heart of reiterating particular ways of imagining
Jewishness. By applying Žižek/Deleuze’s ideas to images and tropes of Jewishness and gender, family life, and community as they play out on Curb, Arrested,
and The O.C., we will explore how a new sense of Jewishness can emerge
through the repetition of old images and norms in ways that are familiar and yet
strange.
A C U R B ’s-Eye Vi ew (of Jews in Family
and Community)
Curb Your Enthusiasm is based on a 1999 special for HBO in which Seinfeldco-creator Larry David makes a show about the making of a show. In this way,
Curb resembles the behind-the-scenes feel of The Larry Sanders Show (1992–98)
with a mixture of realistic characters and real-life celebrities.11 David lives in an
elite world of combative friends and acquaintances consisting of his gentile wife,
Cheryl, and her parents, his inner core of (mainly Jewish) friends (manager Jeff
Greene and comedian Richard Lewis), Hollywood executives, and everyday
people. Curb is filmed with a hand-held camera, documentary or verité style, to
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heighten viewers’ sense that they are privy to an elite and nutty Hollywood
world.The dialogue is improvised, lending a “chatty tone that provides a sense
they are not acting.”12 Curb uses familiar Jewish themes, such as comic alienation, assimilation anxiety, and conflict between Jews and gentiles, via the perpetual misfortunes of Larry David’s character—a hapless nebbish. Although
David is a privileged Jew in his financial and social standing, his persona is much
like Woody Allen’s: a misfit at odds with the world, even with the Jews he encounters.13 The predicaments David gets entangled in remind one of those confronted in Seinfeld’s tacit “Jew’s eye-view of life,” only, as Catherine Seipp
observers, Curb “ramps that up several notches.”14 This is partly, no doubt, because David is “on his own” in Curb; perhaps even more so because of the
greater creative license afforded by cable compared to broadcast TV.
Reflecting back on the Hollywood he encountered in the 1930s, Irish
American comedian Fred Allen observed,“These people here seem to live in a
little world that shuts off the rest of the universe and everyone appears to be
faking life.”15 This satirical indictment of the Hollywood lifestyle seems closely
aligned with the vision that Larry David creates on Curb, except that David includes himself in the indictment. For what David Everitt said about the 1950s
sitcom Car 54,Where Are You? seems equally applicable to Curb:“Everyone is at
least a little weird. . . . [It is] a sort of Chelm of [Hollywood] related in spirit to
the town of fools of Yiddish folklore.”16 David, who plays “himself,” is both a
schlemiel and a schlimazl.17 That is, he both attracts and causes trouble, in every
episode.Tall, thin, bald, bespectacled, and with a perpetually baffled expression,
he is not a “cool guy,” as he tells his wife after she accuses him (falsely) of being
unfaithful; he is clearly not equipped for extramarital affairs. She concurs.
Despite his critical and financial success, David is a miserable and alienated
Jewish man who is doomed to a life of constant humiliation, misunderstanding,
conflict, and angst.18 As television critic Howard Rosenberg insightfully assesses, “[David] lopes instead of walks, finds everyday life challenging, if not
frightening, and always looks like he’s trespassing even in his own home.”19 This
observation speaks to Larry’s insider/outsider status in the murky waters of
Hollywood, a place where he is (allegedly) both one of the winners and one of
the “tribe.” “Despite my success,” David seems to be saying, “I’m an unhappy
social misfit. I, and the other people (especially the Jews) I encounter, are petty,
vacuous, borderline insane, and morally bankrupt.” He is admittedly selfloathing, although “it has nothing to do with being Jewish,” as he tells another
Jew who suggests this upon hearing David whistle a Wagner aria to his wife
(“Trick or Treat”). David is also insensitive, argumentative, and selfish: while a
friend grieves over the recent loss of her husband, he only cares about obtaining the shirt he sees the deceased wearing in a photo. And he is notoriously
anti-social, explaining at one point that he does not like talking to people he
does not know, especially the on-the-street, small-talk “stop and chat.” David is
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1. A classic schlemiel moment: Larry David angers wife Cheryl (Cheryl Hines) as he
chokes on a pubic hair, on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Video grab.
especially happy after people begin dissociating with him after he trips basketball star Shaquille O’Neal (“Shaq”). In another episode (“The Special Section”) he uses the death of his mother to get out of attending a bar mitzvah.20
David implies that he does not fit into the upper-class WASP world that
his non-Jewish wife Cheryl easily inhabits, a world of beaches and leisurely
drinks, which seems incomprehensible and alien to his sense of Jewish pragmatism.21 Unlike David, Cheryl is athletic—grunting as she overpowers him
at tennis—and loves the outdoors. In this respect she is more “masculine” than
David. She also is able to partake in the wealthy lifestyle that David’s income
provides without the guilt that plagues him. Since so much in the show is
made of the fact that Cheryl is not Jewish, it is interesting to note that David’s
real-life wife, Laurie, is Jewish. David’s decision for fictionalizing the intermarriage is a common one among Jewish “showrunners”: Jew versus gentile,
the conventional wisdom goes, provides more dramatic conflict (see Figure 1).
Indeed, Cheryl stands in stark contrast not only to David, but also to Susie
Greene, Jeff ’s Jewish wife, who is the antithesis of imagined WASP femininity.
Susie is pale,22 dark-haired, no-nonsense, argumentative, ball-busting, “venomous,”23 wears bright, tacky clothing and accessories, has no tolerance for lies
and people who do not share her worldview, and takes great pleasure in verbally
abusing her husband Jeff (“fat fuck”) and David (“sick fuck”). Despite, or because of, these seemingly unsympathetic (and stereotypical) traits, Susie Greene
has become an audience favorite. As one fan comments,“Her mouth is so foul,
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and she is so over the top that I fall out laughing.”24 Another writes, “Susie, a
brassy, ballsy, tough-talking, take no-shit kind of woman. I’d like to have her
in charge of Homeland Security.”25 Robert B. Weide, an executive producer/
director of Curb, describes his take on Susie’s appeal as follows: “What I like
about . . . Susie Greene is that no matter how much Larry thinks he is in control of a given situation, Susie just walks in and cuts him off at the knees.”26 She
does have detractors. One viewer writes,“God that thick NY accent is just plain
scary,”27 and another viewer adds, “This character is a marketing tool for why
men should not risk marriage.”28 Since the Curb website does not disclose the
ethnicity of the anti-Susie viewers, it is hard to gauge the source of their intense
aversion. But whether it stems from anti-Jewishness and/or sexism, the criticism
of Susie’s character appears to be not of her individually but rather of the emasculating, East Coast Jewish woman type, and perhaps explains the virtual absence of this species in prime-time comedy.29 Such thinking, however, fails to
acknowledge how Susie’s brashness and take-no-prisoners way of communicating cuts through the phoniness of the Hollywood scene, and through David’s
and Jeff ’s lies.Another Susie fan argues precisely this point:“Why do some think
her character is mean? She’s just a straightforward person who has no patience
for hidden agendas, games, and all of the other BS Larry and co. make her put
up with. I know a few women like her who are nonetheless very sweet when
they can be and very tough when they need to be. Most of the time people
[who are] like Susie’s character are the ones I trust the most.”30
Unfortunately, as the only clearly identified Jewish woman in Curb, Susie
Greene appears to reside in a Hollywood/Los Angeles otherwise free of Jewish women, at least in terms of the domestic life of the Jewish community and
the decision makers in the field of entertainment presented on the show. It is
a Jewish community inhabited and controlled exclusively by elite Jewish men.
Perhaps Susie’s over-the-top and overbearing behavior speaks to this (unrealistic) absence of Jewish women in these postmodern televisual worlds. Certainly, based on the positive fan feedback regarding her character, from both
women and men, there appears to be space (and desire) for ballsy Jewish
women in prime-time televisual texts.
As for David, he straddles the Jewish and gentile worlds, but neither one offers comfort or a sense of home or belonging. The resulting critique parallels
one of the main themes of Seinfeld; that is, that a show about “nothing” can be
read as an indictment of the selfishness and moral vacuousness of its star characters. Like the Jews of Seinfeld’s Manhattan—meaning diegetically marked Jews
like Jerry as well as those who “perform” Jewishness like George and Elaine
(and, for some, even Kramer)—the Jews of Curb’s Hollywood are not to be admired but rather admonished and pitied for their self-obsession and amorality.31
While David is perhaps not as neurotically self-absorbed as George Costanza
(whose character was actually patterned after David), he is highly insecure,
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volatile, and eccentric.As Rosenberg states,“David again elevates his own gloom
and pessimism to high art.Add his terror and other personality tics . . . including
some he previously wrote into Seinfeld—and you have a strong candidate for the
rubber room.”32
Barry Garron also sees a strong Seinfeld connection in Curb, but adds, unfortunately without elaborating: “Curb Your Enthusiasm has a unique sensibility.”33 We agree that Curb differs from Seinfeld in one key aspect: the Jews in the
show are not inferred or crypto.This distinction also creates strong intertextual
resonance with the classic crypto-Jewish sitcoms The Burns and Allen Show
(1950–58) and The Jack Benny Program (1950–65), both of which were also set
in Hollywood and based on the lives of their celebrity-stars.34 Curb’s commitment to Jewish identification greatly enhances its storytelling capacity, as it
lends greater realism and dimension to the characters and opens the show up
to episodes with meaningful Jewish themes. Jewish rituals (a bris, or ritual circumcision) and Ashkenazi markers of Jewishness (rye bread and kasha) were
presented in Seinfeld,35 but Curb pushes the envelope by discussing serious
“in-group” Jewish issues such as Jews and Christmas trees (“Larry, Mary and
Joseph”), Christian proselytizing (“The Baptism”), and the place of Wagner in a
post-Shoah world (“Trick or Treat”). As for the Christmas issue, David gets
upset when Cheryl buys a huge Christmas tree for her parents’ visit, with the
loud Christmas carols they all sing, and, as Jeff points out, “It’s not gonna end
there.” However, Jeff and David also criticize Jews who celebrate Christmas
(very different from The O.C. in this regard, as we will see). David says there is
“nothing worse than Jews with trees. . . . They can’t let them have their holiday?”As for proselytizing, in the baptism episode David attacks this practice in a
discussion with Cheryl:“Why do Christians take everything so personally with
Christ? Not only do you have to worship him, you want everybody to. . . . It’s
not only where you live, you go to Africa!”
The bold treatment of “in-group” subjects (and characters like Susie
Greene) mark Curb as radically “new,” from a televisual standpoint.These elements cut into the false and glossy veneer of Jewish-gentile harmony (and the
absence of brassy Jewish women) that otherwise has been de rigueur in contemporary prime-time sitcoms of the 1990s and 2000s. Spotlighting intraJewish debates about the post-Holocaust appropriateness of a Jew enjoying
Wagner is especially provocative, not only in its referencing of the loaded
image of the “self-hating Jew” but also in its exposure of the way members of
historically marginalized groups police one another regarding “proper” group
behavior.36
In many ways, however, Curb has taken something old and shaped it anew.
The Jewish subject matter, indeed the whole sensibility of the show, is rooted
in the tradition of Jewish humor, as is the fact that Jewishness is evoked in ways
that invite even the neophyte viewer to recognize its Jewish content. And yet,
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the specific forms this Jewish content, sensibility, and recognizability take are
significantly different from what went before, at least on American primetime
TV. Ultimately, we would argue, the show’s refusal to “curb” its representations, to make them fall in line with narratives and images that would be comfortable for non-Jewish audiences (and Jewish critics), and the elaboration of
familiar Jewish issues and characters in fresh (in both senses of the word) ways,
evidences a substantial disruption and enhancement of the traditional American Jewish television text.
A R R E S T E D (Jewish) D E V E L O P M E N T
Arrested is a sitcom about a hyper-dysfunctional, upper-middle-class family whose father is imprisoned for business improprieties, leaving his middle
son, Michael (Jason Bateman),“the ‘normal’ one in a family of crazies,” to deal
with a failing business, a “manipulative” mother, and three over-privileged, demanding siblings.37 Like Curb, Arrested is shot like a documentary and employs
a variety of reality-TV styles that give it a less polished look than the ultraslick offerings of The O.C. Although Arrested is a rare series that focuses on an
all-Jewish family, they are (with one quasi-exception) highly assimilated.
Only the father (George Bluth Sr., played by Jeffrey Tambor) openly expresses his Jewishness, and the few explicitly Jewish themes dealt with on Arrested involve him. Ironically, given the Jewish emphasis on family, these scenes
usually take place while George Sr. is in prison and has little direct contact with
the rest of the Bluths; even more ironic is that prison is the place he rediscovers
his Jewish roots. In one bizarre episode, we see George Sr. on television selling
inspirational spiritual videos from his cell, wearing a yarmulke and tallit (skullcap and prayer shawl) and donning tefillin (small prayer receptacles that are
strapped to the arms and head). Besides establishing his (reclaimed) Jewishness,
his ability to negotiate with these religious symbols shows that the Bluth patriarch is far less disconnected from his “ancestry” than might at first seem the
case—and that his family remains disconnected (see Figure 2). Indeed, when the
rest of the Bluth family refers to George Sr.’s newfound Jewishness, they call it a
“religious” transformation but never utter the word Jewish in describing it.
Thus, while Jewishness can be visually exposed on the show it cannot be named;
verbally specifying the family’s ethnicity is apparently “too Jewish” for Arrested.38
This self-effacing of Jewish identity is not the only characteristic of the
representational strategies employed in the construction of the Bluth family.
Having grown up with privilege, the adult Bluth children—Michael, Lindsay
(Portia de Rossi), GOB (Will Arnett), and Buster (Tony Hale)—do not know
how to fend for themselves. The siblings and their mother, Lucille ( Jessica
Walter), are constantly at odds because they all want money, don’t want to
work, and are willing to lie, cheat, and steal (even from each other) to get what
they feel is their fair share.Tobias Fünke, Lindsay’s husband, is, like most of the
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2. Imprisoned embezzler George Bluth Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor) in the “Blooper Bonus”
footage from his Caged Wisdom tape, on Arrested Development. Video grab.
Bluths, presented as an incompetent, but in more stereotypically Jewish fashion. Besides his possibly Jewish name,Tobias is a former physician who broke
a sleeping man’s ribs attempting to restart his heart. He is also balding and
slightly unkempt, particularly when placed beside his attractive, well-dressed
brothers-in-law and his gorgeous, young, blonde wife. And when Tobias
decides he wants to be an actor, he makes literal the desire of all the show’s
characters to reinvent themselves. Tobias’s seeming (if unseemly) Jewishness,
however, may also serve as a foil, acting, as Rhonda Lieberman describes it, to
“displace the Jew.”39 That is, because David Cross, the actor who portrays Tobias, is Jewish, and as an actor and a character embodies many stereotypical
Jewish attributes, his Jewishness may draw the (knowing) audience’s focus, displacing it from the more narratively significant but less overtly Jewish Bluths.
Unlike Curb (and The O.C.), Arrested’s primary female characters are also
Jewish.While these women may be assimilated Jews, they are not represented in
counterpoint to gentile women, at least within the family. As Jennifer Weisberg
notes, any notion we might have that this is a blended family can be dispelled by
noting that Lucille’s “deceased mother’s house clearly displays a mezuzah on its
doorframe.”40 But Lucille is neither the self-sacrificing mamaleh nor the shrewish
overbearing zealot of Jewish media history. Lucille is always out for herself,
continually playing her children against one another; and yet, she never fully
rejects them nor do they entirely reject her. Despite their extreme dysfunction,
this is a family that does not fall apart, even in dire circumstances. Lindsay, a
spoiled ( Jewish) princess obsessed with appearances and male attention, has a
phony involvement with charities she knows little about and has no interest in
except in the way they glorify her. Marta (Patricia Velasquez), the Latina actress
all the Bluth brothers desire, does provide a contrast.41 Marta is presented as the
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opposite of Lucille and Lindsay: she is kind, caring, and conscientious; she is less
campy than the Bluth women as well. She could perhaps be read as a throwback
to the more sympathetic outsider Jew of old, highlighting how the “new”
affluent-assimilated Jew has lost these positive qualities. But, significantly, none
of the Bluth men end up with Marta.The only regularly seen married couples
on the series (Lucille/George Sr., Lindsay/Tobias) are Jews, meaning that the
show, while foregrounding the self-denying, wanna-be crypto-Jew, paradoxically refuses to embrace the traditional interfaith narrative of redemption, either
of Jew by gentile, or gentile by Jew. Ultimately, with its strong focus on a family
that generally has lost or disavows its Jewish heritage yet preserves it against all
odds, Arrested, at least from the standpoint of numbers (especially of Jewish
women), may be one of the most Jewish shows on television.
Because of this strong Jewish presence and its roots in domestic life and familial space, assimilation is deconstructed on the show rather than sanctioned
as “normal” or inevitable.And the deconstruction extends to the two members
of the third Bluth generation, who are even more assimilated than their parents;
that is, they seem to have shed even the residual stereotypes of Jewishness associated with their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Maeby (Alia Shawkat)
is the daughter of Lindsay and Tobias. Her name is suggestive in two ways. First,
it alludes to Mae West, the Hollywood star of ambiguous background who
sometimes claimed a Jewish heritage and at other times appeared to be antisemitic.42 It also may be a play on “maybe”; Maeby, like the rest of her family, is
ambivalent about her identity and yet, unlike them, she is also not so sure about
her place in the world. Maeby’s cousin George Michael (son of Michael Bluth,
played by Michael Cera) is even more confused than she is.43 While Maeby is
largely ignored by her parents (when they are not using her as a pawn), George
Michael is smothered by his father, who turns into the overbearing Jewish
mother his own mother is not.The message here, as Weisberg suggests, may be
that assimilation creates anxiety across multiple generations that are increasingly unanchored from any sense of cohesive identity.
Weisberg further points out that traditional television Jews have been denied “every Californian’s birthright: the right of total self-reinvention and
escape,”44 and we have shown this to be the case in the insider/outsider dilemmas that plague Jewish characters on Curb (and also, as we show below, the
Cohens of The O.C.). The Bluth family, Weisberg writes, “are in hiding from
themselves, unaware of their essential Jewishness as they take great pains to appear just like everyone else.”45 But do they succeed? In the first season of Arrested, after breaking into prison to free his father, son GOB is stabbed by a
White supremacist. GOB splutters, “But I’m White!” The Bluths are indeed
very White, with few vestiges of Jewish identity—or so they think/hope.46 As
Weisberg explains, one of the lessons we learn from reading Arrested as a
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Jewish sitcom is that “you can never escape your roots,” such as GOB finds out
after he is stabbed.47 Wanna-be White Jews are, in the final analysis,“apparently
not white enough.”48
The disruption of the American myth of the melting pot is an important
aspect of a postmodern culture that privileges social difference at the same
time that it privileges the status quo.The misery of the Arrested characters, captured so perfectly in the tension between the series’ farcical tone and verité
style, demystifies this myth. In the end, the Bluths, despite their success and
privilege, are still always at risk of being exposed for what they most fear they
are: different from those around them.They are always in danger of being dethroned, and George Sr. initiates the process when he is arrested and the whole
family suddenly finds itself under intense public scrutiny. The myth of the
American Dream of material success is similarly disrupted. While the Bluths
seem to have (had) it all, they do not seem terribly happy. In fact, one reading
suggests that being born into the cult of White privilege is precisely what
makes it so hard for the Bluths to construct any meaningful self-identity or
connection to the world around them. The gaping hole this privilege creates
drives the narrative tension, as the Bluths strive to find fulfillment, but ultimately it is their psychic and spiritual development, individually and as a family, that has been arrested.
Even after the arrest of George Sr., the family members still try to hold on
to their privileged positions in Newport Beach society.The Bluth children have
been born into elite Orange Country, and they move through that space with
the expectations of that privilege.Their primary fear is the loss of their status, as
they have no idea how to live any other life. The third generation Bluths are
bored with the community they have been born into, but only the rebellious
Maeby explicitly rejects the crassly materialistic values and desires of her parents,
especially of her mother. None of the other Bluth children actively rebels
against these values: GOB, Buster, and Lindsay positively embrace them; and
even Michael, while he may want to be a “better man,”“better boss,” and “better father” than George Sr., cannot entirely distance himself from his parents’
world.
The Bluths are unable to move forward, Arrested seems to be saying, partly
because they are mired in the continual production of the myth of newness
that is so much a part of postmodern America, partly because they are increasingly distanced from their cultural roots and history. And yet despite, or because of, not knowing “who they are,” the Bluths remain true “to their own,”
succumbing neither to the assimilative lure nor the narrative demands of intermarriage. Self-conscious repetition of the old, in lived rather than televisual
terms, is what makes Arrested, from a Jewish standpoint, most new—as is the
confidence level American Jews must have attained to enable them to produce
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and perform in the most self-critical televisual portrayal of a Jewish family on
record.
California Cohe nim
The O.C. is a prime-time (teen) soap chronicling the story of a Jewish
lawyer, Sandy Cohen (Peter Gallagher), his rich gentile wife, Kristen (Kelly
Rowan), and their son, Seth (Adam Brody), who take in and adopt a non-Jewish,
working-class, street-smart delinquent, Ryan Atwood (Benjamin McKenzie).
Throughout the series, father Sandy and son Seth constantly remind the audience of the primacy of their Jewish identities, and the periodic anxiety they feel
about being not-quite-as-White (if just as rich) as their Newport Beach neighbors.49 Unlike Curb, which takes place in the racially and ethnically mixed
urbanity of Los Angeles, The O.C.’s suburban Southern California setting is represented, like Arrested’s, as an essentially White, gentile paradise of blue waters,
white-sand beaches, bikini-clad beauties, and the enormous, gated, and spotlighted McMansion that is the Cohen home.
While the Cohen’s house is exactly like those around it, the people in the
house and their relationships are quite different from those outside. Kristen and
Sandy are a happy hybrid of traditions (a menorah on the mantel and a Christmas tree in the foyer), merging their (rather stereotypical) Jewish, left-leaning
roots and genteel WASP excess into the type of family most people want to be
a part of: the one that works. If the Cohen home is not perfect, it provides
the model.The romantic (and very earnest) valorization of the Jewish family in
The O.C. stands in stark contrast to the satiric representation of the Bluths, and
even the vaguely hysterical tone of the Davids. Because Kristen comes from the
upper-crust world of dysfunction associated with Newport Beach, it is the values associated with Sandy’s difference (his Jewishness) that make this home a
good place.This split is mirrored within the family. Caleb Nichol (Alan Dale),
Kristen’s dad, is not only the patriarch of the Nichol/Cohen clan; as Newport
Beach’s largest land developer he is, in a sense, the patriarch of the community
and stands in for its values. How does Caleb feel about his son-in-law (the
Cohen patriarch), whose values and style (clean living, monogamous, familyoriented, politically liberal) are so obviously different from his own? We learn
how Sandy perceives himself through Caleb’s eyes in an early episode when he
asks Kristen why she thinks Caleb has suddenly warmed toward him—after all,
“I’m still Jewish.” Right from the start, we are attuned to Sandy’s Jewishness as
something that presents a challenge to Caleb’s status as WASP patriarch.
The myth of intermarriage as salvation has a long history in the media,
particularly in its gentile wife/Jewish husband configuration, that parallels the
experience of many producers, writers, and actors in Hollywood. In this narrative frame, it is through marriage to a non-Jewish woman that the Jewish man
gains insider status, and even if his is never fully realized, his children’s places as
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insiders are guaranteed. Rather than countering this narrative, as Curb and Arrested did, The O.C. reworks it in at least two ways. First, here it is Kristen who
is offered the greatest possibilities of moral salvation through her marriage to
Sandy. Second, Seth, despite being Kristen’s son (and Caleb’s grandson), and
growing up in what appears to be a primarily gentile world, is very visibly,
proudly Jewish. This connotes that intermarriage does not necessarily confer
legitimacy on the offspring of intermarried Jewish men, but also that intermarriage need not represent the death of Jewish identity, as has so often been
suggested in Jewish survivalist circles. The O.C. thus provides familiar representations of Jewishness, particularly Jewish masculinity, and intermarriage. And
yet, it offers a somewhat new take on these familiar characterizations and story
arcs, mainly in the way that Jewishness is heralded as something to be proud
of and acknowledged. By suggesting that a Jewish sensibility is dominant in an
intermarried household where Jewishness is absent from the most visible extended family and the community-at-large, The O.C. puts a new spin on representations of Jewish family life in the postmodern period, and stands in stark
contrast to the assimilationist (albeit “all Jewish”) narrative of Arrested.
The differences evoked in the Kristen/Caleb and Caleb/Sandy dyads (mirrored in Seth and Ryan) rely on our familiarity with stereotypical tropes of
Jewish/gentile ways of living in Jewish bodies and understanding the world
through them. Kristen and Ryan invite Sandy and Seth into privileged spaces
that their liminal identities keep them from entering completely, or with complete ease. However, Sandy and Seth offer “better” lives; that is, better than the
superficiality of Newport Beach life. Unlike in Arrested, The O.C. does not
imagine Jewishness as bleached out by the California sun. The stereotyping of
Orange County (in both The O.C. and Arrested) as a WASP paradise also provides an interesting historical narrative, in that Los Angeles used to be televisually
constructed (at least pre-1999/2000’s It’s Like,You Know . . . ), in comparison to
New York City, as decidedly (and unrealistically) non-Jewish. In Curb, as we have
seen, Los Angeles has become as thoroughly Judaized as its eastern seaboard
cousin. One question such a progression raises: Have the Jews who helped deWASP New York and then Los Angeles devised a similar ethno-racial makeover
for Orange County? Conversely, there is another, less favorable reminiscence in
the culture represented in this exclusive enclave: that of the beaches and country clubs from which Jews were long banned in many parts of the United States,
including Los Angeles.50 The caricatured coding of Newport Beach as a nonJewish space thus cannot be completely delinked from the memory (and continuing reality) of Jewish exclusion despite Jewish success and perceived full
assimilation.
Yet how can the Cohens (or the Bluths), living in a suburb bordering on Los
Angeles—a multicultural metropolis with almost half a million Jewish-identified
residents—never meet any other Jews?51 Interestingly, in the second-season
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episode “The Chrismukkah That Almost Wasn’t,” Seth, planning a Chrismukkah
party, calls attention to this elision when he suggests: “We’re gonna have to really put our heads together and do some serious Jew-cruitment. Ryan, do you
think you can rope in some Hebrews?”Then he adds pessimistically (if unrealistically):“Where’re we gonna find some Jews in Orange County?”52 It is an important if obvious (for the show) observation, and a task that no one is able to
fulfill—except through various attempts at Judaization. Case in point: the
episode ends with an expansion of the Cohen/Nichol family, but its two newest
members are not Jewish, at least no more so than Kristen, or than Summer
(Rachel Bilson) or Marissa (Mischa Barton), Seth’s and Ryan’s on-again, offagain girlfriends.53 The party is preempted by grandpa Caleb’s shocking admission that Lindsay (Shannon Lucio), Ryan’s new love interest, is his illegitimate
daughter. Lindsay runs from the Cohen house screaming, but Seth finds her, trying to console her with humor:“Congratulations, you’re a Cohen.Welcome to
a life of insecurity and paralyzing self-doubt. . . . It’s what we do . . . laugh
through our tears, make jokes inappropriately soon after a traumatic event.” Of
course, strictly speaking, she is a Nichol, not a Cohen, but the idea that underlies the scene is that Lindsay is being welcomed into Seth’s tribe, which is undeniably Jewish. Not only does Seth not try to bury his Jewishness under
Christmas trees and renditions of “Deck the Halls” (as Summer points out,
“When it comes to haggadahs, dreidels and guilt, you da man.When it comes to
Christmas trees, hmmm, a bit out of your wheel house”); he sees his Jewishness
as a valuable asset, one that he should share.The episode ends with Seth singing
a Chrismukkah song while everyone wears “yamaclaus”—red yarmulkes with
white fur pom-poms and trim. But that was not the end of the “yamaclaus.” In
a quintessentially postmodern move, the series marketed these items on its website, despite Seth’s continual voiced concern on the show that he must avoid the
commercialization of Chrismukkah. Disingenuous consumerist disavowal
notwithstanding, The O.C. suggests that Chrismukkah holds the promise of
something new that is also something Jewish (see Figure 3).
Jon Stratton’s notion of “Jewish moments,” which Stratton developed from
Alexander Doty’s concept of “queer moments,” offers another intriguing way of
looking at The O.C.54 Jewishness, in Stratton’s view, as it is produced and performed on television, is not reducible to physical (or even genetic) markers, and
recognition of this is central to the method that needs to be employed in any
televisual analysis of Jewishness. Stratton writes, “Jewishness can be understood
as a variable textual attribute not necessarily tied to characters identified as
Jews, and any reader with varying degrees of knowledge of Jewish/Yiddish religion and culture may experience a Jewish moment.”55 He demonstrates that
the Jewish meaning of any text is not only found in the text, but in the ways that
viewers occupying a wide range of subject positions understand it. Both authors
of this essay, for example, have at various times met people (Jews and non-Jews)
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3. Seth Cohen (Adam Brody) and Summer Roberts (Rachel Bilson) deck their heads with
“yamaclauses,” on The O.C. Video grab.
who insist that they never thought of Seinfeld as a Jewish-oriented sitcom, nor
could they pinpoint anything particularly Jewish about it, even if they knew that
Jerry was supposed to be (peripherally) Jewish. But for us, the authors, Seinfeld is
an excessively Jewish text; almost every moment seems to have something Jewish in it—if you know how and where to look. Even on Friends (1994–2004)
some viewers with certain cultural competencies may be looking for the
mezuzah on the (Sr.) Gellers’ front door to confirm son Ross and daughter
Monica’s Jewishness.56 Others may experience “Jewish moments” from the most
ambiguous references.57 In The O.C., for example, the character Anna Stern
(Samaire Armstrong), one of Seth’s love interests in the first season, has a name
that might be Jewish. She is blonde, smart, funky, and down to earth, but her explicitly non-Jewish rival, Summer, is presented as a (generic) princess. In the
episode “The Best Chrismukkah Ever” (2003) Seth buys identical gifts for both
girls, wrapping Summer’s in red and green, and Anna’s in blue and silver. In
many Jewish houses, blue and silver paper is used for Hanukkah. Could this be
the show’s creators’ way of presenting a “Jewish moment” gift to its “in group”
audience?
The strong Jewish sensibility that Seth and Sandy bring to the The O.C.
is highlighted by the absence of a larger and/or more diversified cast of Jewish characters. Seinfeld, as Vincent Brook argues, may have engaged in a form of
Judaizing through the Jewish-seemingness of its diegetically gentile-marked
characters (George, Elaine, even Kramer). The O.C. differs from this and earlier
representations because of the explicit framing of two of its core characters as
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Jewish, and in the way that other members of the community not only take on
“positive” Jewish characteristics but also willingly learn Jewish customs.58
“Hopefully this is a version of Jewishness that is loving and inclusive,”
O.C. creator Josh Schwartz stated.59 And, in word and in deed, on the show
Jewishness is an identity worth emulating. Summer—who at first does not
recognize Cohen as a Jewish name and has no idea what a Passover seder is—
so wants to impress Nana Cohen (Linda Lavin), Seth’s grandmother, that she
researches the seder and then prepares to ask the Four Questions (Seth tutors
her on the Hebrew words). Later:
Summer:
Kristen:
Summer:
Kristen:
Summer:
Kristen:
Have you seen her [Nana’s] haggadah?
(opening it) Oy.
You’re reading it backwards.
Don’t tell anyone.
Hey, it’s okay, being Jewish is hard.
You have no idea.
In this scene (from “The Nana”) the Jewish characters are not asked to accommodate the rituals of the majority culture. Kristen’s successful entrance into the
Cohen’s community is heralded by Nana Cohen, who has turned up in Orange
County to tell her son that she is dying of cancer and will not seek treatment.
Kristen challenges Nana, suggesting that it is time that her mother-in-law rectify the decision she had made to break her close ties with Sandy when they
married; she applauds Kristen’s honesty by saying, “Oh, guilt now, huh; that’s
very impressive.You sure you’re not Jewish?”While the Jews of The O.C. are few
in number, through their refusal to abandon (and the show’s valorization of )
their identities, they create a community that seems increasingly Jewish. By the
second season (the latest as of this writing) Summer, who hatched the plan to
bring the Cohen-Nichol clan together for the event, even saves Chrismukkah!
The O.C.’s progressive potential thus extends beyond a valuation of Jewishness to an articulation of hybridity. Mainstream American culture, despite
long-standing myths of equality and more recent ones of multiculturalism, is
still depicted as very much a gentile culture.Yet difference, in this case difference explicitly articulated as Jewish difference, is infused into that culture.
Jewishness (whether commodifed or couched in stereotypes) is presented as
valuable in this prime-time soap, for Jews and non-Jews alike.
Conc lusi ons: Som eth i ng O l d, S ometh i ng
N ew, Somethi ng Borrowe d,
Somethi ng . . . Jew?
The three series discussed here all take place in the Los Angeles area, but
only one (Curb) imagines itself in a space in which Jews live in a community
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with (although not exclusively) other Jews.The other two series present their
Jewish families in more ethnically neutral Los Angeles suburbs.The difference
may be partly because Curb is a quasi-reality series following the life of a Real!
Live! Jewish! man, Larry David. It could also stem from an extension of the rationale behind David’s fictional intermarriage in Curb. On an enclave as well
as a family level, in other words, ethno-racial heterogeneity may be perceived
as offering greater dramatic (and comic) possibilities.
In these and other ways described in the three shows’ detailed analyses, the
most recent representations of Jewishness on American television draw on old
tropes and traditional representational strategies, but with a postmodern selfawareness. The shows continue a long tradition within Jewish humor of selfdeprecation, the production of comic anti-heroes, and the deployment of an
outsider perspective from what often looks like the inside.At the same time, two
of these series (Curb and The O.C.) display an increasing desire to assert Jewishness explicitly and self-reflexively, and a willingness to, comically and dramatically, attack people with power and authority. Arrested, in its savage debunking of
“the good life” and its complex representation of Jewish women (despite their
assimilation), also strikes a satirical chord.Thus we are in the presence of something new, not entirely new, but new in the sense described by Žižek, new as the
emergence of something different through the self-reflexive repetition of that
which is already familiar. It is through this repetition and self-awareness, the
nods to the audience that bespeak Jewishness (implicitly or explicitly), that we
are shown just how much excess is always present in the stereotype, as Homi
Bhabha has suggested.60 Of course, all is not well in River City—or Newport
Beach or Beverly Hills—from a Jewish, gender, or class standpoint. The three
shows tend to keep Jews in isolation and to maintain a focus on upper-middleclass males. Jews are still represented as outsiders, even if they do not always recognize themselves as such, but they are less likely to hide their Jewishness or
regard it as something to be exchanged for something more “presentable.”
The notable rise in Jewishness on display in all three shows can be partly
understood through the paradox Lawrence Epstein describes in relation to
megastar Adam Sandler: “He, like his generation, doesn’t have to or want to
hide being Jewish or feel any shame either. In this sense, there is a great irony.
The earlier generations had a much more intimate relationship with their
Jewishness. . . . Yet, with all that, they were (often justifiably) reluctant to express their identity in a public forum.This new generation, with far more tenuous Jewish connections, has been freed to express just such an identity.”61 In
a world where the struggle for roots and meaningful identities/communities
continues to be at the forefront of the public imagination, these TV series,
while not departing entirely from what has come before, offer interestingly
new ways of thinking through the irony of American Jewish identity. That
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these series represent different genres and commercial affiliations also suggests
that the televisual landscape in which Jewishness is produced is expanding—
in a way, we can only hope, that will continue to expand and transform representational (and viewing) opportunities for everyone.
Note s
1. Norman Kleeblatt, “ ‘Passing’ into Multiculturalism,” in Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities, ed. Norman Kleeblatt (New York:The Jewish Museum, and New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 4.
2. Ibid., 5.
3. See, for example,Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here:The Rise of the “Jewish”
Sitcom (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003).
4. Jonathan and Judith Pearl, The Chosen Image (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999); Jon
Stratton, Coming Out Jewish (New York: Routledge, 2000); Brook, Something Ain’t
Kosher; David Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of
New England, 2003).
5. The O.C. won four Teen Choice Awards in 2004. Arrested won five Emmys in 2004,
as well as one Golden Globe, one TV Land Award, three Golden Satellite Awards,
and two Television Critics Association Awards. Jeffrey Tambor won a Jewish Image
Award for his portrayal of George Bluth Sr. Curb was also honored by the Jewish
Image Awards (2003). It also won a Golden Globe (2002) and an American film Institute Award (2001) and has been nominated for a large number of Emmy Awards.
6. The Bluths live in isolation in a model home. Symbolically they have no real
“home” (like the alien Solomon family in Third Rock from the Sun [1996–2001]),
which suggests there are no real homes for Jews despite material success.
7. Zurawik, Jews of Prime Time.Ari Kelman, in a review of Zurawik’s book, suggests that
a central problem with it is that Zurawik “removes his evidence from its historical
context” (“Book Review: Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting,”American Jewish History 91/2 [2003]: 339).Thus, when discussing the production of television series, it is important to understand how the texts that emerge function
within particular cultural and sociohistorical contexts.
8. For a more detailed analysis, see Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher, and Zurawik, Jews of
Prime Time.
9. Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies (New York: Routledge, 2004), 12 (emphasis in
the original).
10. Ibid., 15.
11. See Vincent Brook’s essay in this section for more on The Larry Sanders Show.
12. David Bianculli, “Best Since Seinfeld,” New York Daily News, October 13, 2000
(http://www.duckprods.com/projects/cye/cye-nydn001013.html).
13. See Carla Johnson, “Luckless in New York:The Schlemiel and the Schlimazl in Seinfeld,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 22, no. 3 (1994): 116–123.
14. Catherine Seipp,“Larry David’s first show since ’Seinfeld’ enters its second season in
fine, fretful fettle,” Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, October 5, 2001 (http://www
.jewishjournal.com/home/print.php?id=7526).
15. Quoted in David Everitt, King of the Half Hour: Nat Hiken and the Golden Age of TV
Comedy (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 24.
16. Ibid., 24.
17. Our use of these terms is based on Carla Johnson’s above-cited article, in which she
calls George a schlemiel because bad things happen to him, and Jerry a schlimazl
because, although bad things happen to him also, he mainly causes trouble for others. David’s character possesses both traits.
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18. In one episode, David, comedian Richard Lewis, and actor/director Rob Reiner
run into one another in their psychiatrist’s waiting room and make small-talk about
how silly they feel about the whole idea of being in therapy.
19. Howard Rosenberg, “Larry David’s Improv Curb Is Funny and Wickedly Weird,”
Los Angeles Times, October 14, 2000 (http://www.duckprods.com/projects/cye/
cye-lat001014.html).
20. Susie Essman, who plays Susie Greene, has stated, “Part of why both Larry and Jeff
are so endearing is that they never learn from their mistakes [a common sitcom trait
that perpetuates its continuation], and they end up suffering for it. They live that
rarified L.A. existence where they think the reasons my character is so essential
to the mix. It’s my job to give them a harsh dose of reality” (http://www.hbo.com/
larrydavid/interviews/essman.html [accessed December 14, 2004]).
21. Larry designates going to the beach as a gentile activity, yet one that he envies, when
he tells Cheryl in one episode: “I feel aggravated that I’m missing what other people are getting.” He also implies that Jews are too physically fragile and/or excessively concerned about the elements:“Jews buy 85% of all sunblock.”
22. In an HBO interview, Essman describes Susie Green’s fashion as “perfect for the
character of an over-privileged Beverly Hills housewife who thinks she’s on the
cutting edge of fashion. . . . I put those wacky outfits on and immediately channel
Susie Greene” (http://www.hbo.com [accessed December 14, 2004]).
23. Susie’s character is described this way and her character’s “trademark” is “uninhibited insults” (http://www.hbo.com [accessed December 14, 2004]).
24. November 5, 2002: http://www.hbo.com (accessed December 14, 2004).
25. October 28, 2002: http://www.hbo.com (accessed December 14, 2004).
26. October 29, 2002: http://www.hbo.com/larrydavid/interviews/ (accessed December 14, 2004).
27. November 5, 2002: http://www.hbo.com (accessed December 14, 2004).
28. Ibid.
29. For more on televisual and filmic emasculation of Jewish men, see Maurice Berger,
“The Mouse That Never Roars,” in Kleebatt, Too Jewish?, 93–107. We do not regard
representations of “feminized” Jewish men as “negative”; indeed, we see these images as
critiques of and counters to traditional hyper-masculinized images of the all-American,
White-Christian male. For more on Jewish versus gentile models of masculinity, see
Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: Jewish Masculinity (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998); Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, eds., Queer Theory
and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).A key text on the
overrepresentation of Jewish men and the under-representation of Jewish women in
prime-time network television is Susan Kray,“The Orientalization of an Almost White
Woman: The Interlocking Effects of Race, Class, Gender, and Ethnicity in American
Mass Media,” in Critical Studies in Mass Communication (December 1993): 349–366.
30. Viewer comments on Curb can be found on the show’s HBO website bulletin
board, http://boards.hbo.com/thread.jspa?forumID=108&threadID=100000045.
31. For the Jewish-seemingness of Seinfeld’s characters, see Johnson,“Luckless.” Regarding the noir aspect of both shows, David, in a Seinfeld-era interview, said: “A lot of
people don’t understand that Seinfeld is a dark show. . . . Terrible things happen to
people. . . . That’s my sensibility” (in Francis David,“Recognition Humor,” The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/92dec/seinfeld.htm).
32. Rosenberg,“Larry David.”
33. Barry Garron, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Hollywood Reporter (December 24, 2003)
(http://www.duckprods.com/projects/cye/cye-hr.html).
34. In the special features section of Curb’s first-season DVD, David explains that at the
outset of the series there was an attempt to make Cheryl appear more Jewish by
darkening her hair.
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35. Stratton, Coming Out; Rosalin Krieger, “ ‘Does He Actually Say the Word Jewish?’
Jewish Representations in Seinfeld,” in Journal of Cultural Research 7, no. 4 (2003):
387–404.
36. See Brook’s essay in this section for more on Jewish self-hatred.
37. http://www.fox.com.
38. If such concerns existed, they were not eased, at least early on, by the show’s critical
success yet poor ratings (see Curt Schleier, “An Arresting Personality,” Jewish Week
(November 2004) (http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?
artid=9516 [accessed January 3, 2005]).
39. Rhonda Lieberman, “Jewish Barbie,” in Kleebatt, Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional
Identities, 112.
40. Weisberg,“Golden Land,” 2.
41. The fact that all the Bluth men desire a Latina who is discernibly less “White” than
they are is meaningful, especially because Lindsay is so fair-skinned and blonde.This
may be yet another instance in which more explicit forms of Otherness are used to
distance core sitcom characters from being read as explicitly Jewish.
42. http://www.jewhoo.com.
43. Although George Michael is named after his grandfather and father, no one remarks
on the potential humiliation for a teenage boy of being named after a flamboyantly
queer pop star of the 1980s.
44. Jennifer Weisberg,“In the Golden Land,” Nextbook (October 29, 2004): 2.
45. Ibid.
46. In an early episode of The O.C. (“The Rescue”), Seth complains, “Mom, you’re so
White.” Unlike GOB on Arrested, Seth thereby marks his mother’s WASP Whiteness
as both different from and inferior to his own.
47. Weisberg,“Golden Land,” 3.
48. Ibid.
49. The series foregrounds Seth’s identification as culturally Jewish despite the fact
that his mother is not. It seems to play on the fact that he identifies more strongly
with his New York, liberal, legal-aid lawyer (in the first season) father, and shares with
him certain stereotypically Jewish male characteristics (e.g., being bad at sports), as
opposed to those of his mother, whose family represents the apex of the AngloProtestant West Coast establishment.
50. Actually, “were” is a misnomer. According to Daniel Jeffrey, some country clubs
across the United States continue to turn Jews away (Daniel Jeffrey, “No Jews on
Their Golf Courses—Country Clubs in the US That Still Exclude Jewish People
from Their Membership,” New Statesman, 1999) (http://www.findarticles.com/p/
articles/mi_m0FQP/is_4450_128/ai_56064285).
51. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/jewpop.html. Newport Beach
is located about fifty-five miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
52. Seth’s “quest” to find Jews in Orange County suggests that they are invisible, marginal,
difficult to find. In fact, Sandy is the only Jew Seth can easily identify. Ryan, meanwhile, comments sarcastically about his own ability to locate Jews: “Blond hair, blue
eyes. . . . Yeah, no problem, I’m a natural.” Seth agrees that his adopted brother’s
“Aryan-ness” makes him an unlikely candidate, but when Sandy enters the room, Seth
lights up: “Father! Have I just discovered the ideal job for you this Chrismukkah!”
53. Television’s focus on male Jews has a long tradition. However, The O.C. makes Seth
and Sandy’s Jewishness so central and explicit that it seems very curious that Anna
Stern’s potential Jewishness is so ambiguous.
54. Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
55. Stratton, Coming Out, 300.
56. Nora Lee Mandel,“Who’s Jewish on ‘Friends,’ ” Lilith 21, no. 2 (1996): 6.
297
57. Stratton, Coming Out, 300.
58. Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher, 118–128.
59. Allison Benedikt, “Finally,TV Jews who act Jewish,” Chicago Tribune, May 2, 2004
(http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/tv/mmx-0405020374may02,0,7877509.
story?coll=mmx-television_heds).
60. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
61. Lawrence J. Epstein, The Haunted Smile (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), 252.
“Y’all Killed Him, We Didn’t!”
Jewish Se lf-Hatre d and T H E L A R RY
S A N D E R S S H OW
Vincent Brook
Did the Jews invent self-hatred? A case can be made—from
both the production and the reception end. Centuries before they were
branded collective Christ killers in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, a calumny
that laid the groundwork for both antisemitism and Jewish self-hatred, Jews
themselves had planted the seeds of self-hatred for all humanity in the Garden
of Eden. The biblical God’s banishment of the ur-couple from Paradise inflicted a primal self-loathing (with a decidedly gendered component) that
would prove, at least for the faithful, all but inexpungible.Then there is the Jewish Freud, whose nondenominational take on Original Sin postulated a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic source: the collective killing of the Primal Father
and the individual Oedipal complex. Freud’s daughter, Anna, meanwhile, gave
self-hatred back to the Jews through her concept of “identification with the aggressor.”Although the concept can be applied universally, it derived specifically
from the observations of Jewish children who had survived Nazism and yet
identified positively with their Nazi persecutors and negatively with themselves as Jewish victims.1 Last but not least, the poet laureate of existential angst,
Franz Kafka, historicized self-hatred, laying the theoretical and experiential
groundwork for what Jewish filmmaker Henry Bean calls “the ambivalent, selfdoubting, self-hating modern condition.”2
To ascribe a privileged role for Jews in the encoding and decoding of selfhatred is certainly not to deny other groups’ significant enmeshment in the
process. Power relations in general are a fertile field for the sowing and reaping of self-hatred, be it from the conquest, colonization, or enslavement of
entire peoples to the subjugation and oppression of women. Those whose
“otherness” dare not speak its name have perhaps borne the greatest burden of
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299
self-inflicted shame, given the depth of self-denial imposed upon and induced
within them. Just as Jews have introjected antisemitism, so people of color,
women, gays, and lesbians have internalized the damaging social messages of
racism, misogyny, and homophobia, directing against themselves the projected
hatred of the normative society.3
Jews, as a religious or ethno-racial grouping, do appear to have the most
historically overdetermined claim to self-hatred. In the modern era alone—
dating for our purposes from the European emancipation of Jews in the lateeighteenth century—the manifestations of Jewish self-hatred, including its
mutation into virulent internecine strands, have been striking. In twentiethand twenty-first-century America, especially, the permutations have been
unique. This uniqueness derives largely from the expression of Jewish selfhatred despite, and because of, the well-documented and openly acknowledged preponderance of Jews in the U.S. entertainment industries and their
remarkable material success in American society.4 Why self-hatred should persist among Jews even as they were gaining unprecedented access to cultural
and political power is partly explained by the long historical memory and recent experience of European antisemitism, partly by its less extensive, generally more subdued, but occasionally quite ominous American variant.5 In the
post–World War II/post-Holocaust era, however, as overt antisemitism in the
United States receded dramatically and government policies and Jews’ own
upward mobility encouraged widespread Jewish entry into the White middle
class, Jewish self-hatred has perhaps declined but by no means disappeared.6
Examining the nature of Jewish self-hatred in the postmodern era and determining why it continues to survive, if not to thrive, under such seemingly favorable conditions, and exploring how televisual humor has been used both to
ameliorate and to challenge Jewish self-hatred, are the prime objectives of this
essay. The focus of my analysis is the highly acclaimed “Jewish” sitcom The
Larry Sanders Show (1992–98), regarded by some critics as the most influential
television series of the 1990s.7 Before embarking on a case study of Larry
Sanders, however, it is necessary to contextualize the show in relation to what
has become, in the past fifteen years and ongoing, an unprecedented “Jewish”
sitcom trend.
The Rise of the “Jewish” S itcom
I address in Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom
(2003) the complex historical and institutional factors contributing to the
marked increase in sitcoms featuring explicitly identified Jewish protagonists
since the late 1980s.8 Suffice it to say here that even considering the barely decipherable, largely “virtual” nature of the Jewishness displayed in most of these
shows, the large number of mega-hit, Emmy-winning, “must-see” programs
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with explicitly Jewish main characters in this period—close to forty compared
to only seven in the previous forty years—is extraordinary.9 A brief list of
these “Jewishcoms” reads like a Who’s Who of American television comedy
over this period: besides Larry Sanders, they include Seinfeld (1989–98), The
Nanny (1993–99), Mad About You (1992–99), Friends (1994–2004), Dharma and
Greg (1997–2002), Will and Grace (1998– ), Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000– ), and
Arrested Development (2003– ).10 This recent surge in “Jewish” television further begs the question of why Jewish self-hatred should remain a factor in
the postmodern era, in Jewish media representation and, by extension, in
Jewish life.
Yet remain a factor it clearly does, and The Larry Sanders Show, though
perhaps the most prominent example, is not the only case in point. One of the
first of the “Jewish”-trend sitcoms, the short-lived Chicken Soup (September–
November 1989), starring the Borscht Belt comedian Jackie Mason, was arguably forced off the air by Jewish self-hatred, of the internecine variety. Internecine self-hatred refers to self-denigration imputed by an individual or
subgroup within a larger maligned group to another individual or subgroup
within that larger group, though it need not be experienced as such by those to
which it is imputed.This form of self-hatred also tends, at least for Jews, to be
triple-pronged—with all three prongs intertwined in complex, often contradictory ways.
One form of internecine self-hatred is directed at those demeaning attributes externally produced and reproduced through stereotype, such as the
Coon, Buck, Sambo, and Mammy, among African Americans, and the Judas,
Wanderer, Shylock, and Conspirator, among Jews.While justifiably held by the
targeted group to be illusory, constructed, or grossly exaggerated, these attributes nonetheless have had and may persist in having analogues in everyday life.
As such, they have tended—until recent attempts at appropriation—to be
steadfastly denied or avoided, thus leading, when such traits are represented in
the media or encountered in social interaction, to the label “too Black” or
“too Jewish.” A second form of internecine self-hatred is reserved for those
who attempt to avoid external stigmatization through adaptive strategies resulting in the exchange of self-identity and self-worth for acceptance within
the dominant order. Exhibit A for Blacks here is the Uncle Tom, and for Jews,
the Assimilated Jew. A third form of internecine self-hatred appears to be the
exclusive province of Jews. Unleashed by their post-emancipation entry into
mainstream European and eventually American society, yet drawing on the
historical memory and continued experience of bigotry and persecution, this
form also is based in negative stereotypes.These stereotypes, however, though
crucially impacted by hostile contact with and displaced reaction to the nonJewish world, have been generated primarily from within the Jewish community itself. Examples here range from the schlemiel, schlimazl, and nebbish of
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the Old World to the neurotic Jew, Jewish mother, and Jewish American
Princess (JAP) of the New.11
This brief taxonomy of internecine self-hatred is essential for an understanding of the fate that met Jackie Mason and Chicken Soup. Despite comparatively high ratings and generally favorable reviews, at least from the
non-Jewish press, Chicken Soup was done in by pressure from within the Jewish community, which objected both to Mason’s “too Jewish” self-portrayal
and to the show’s interfaith-relationship theme (Mason’s character is romantically linked with an Irish Catholic played by Lynn Redgrave). The latter, assimilationist aspect was an especially sensitive topic at a historical moment
when, for the first time in America, Jews were facing soaring, beyondreplacement-level intermarriage rates.12 The Jewish Journal of Greater Los
Angeles combined the two issues in its trashing of the show: “As if this [intermarriage] problem isn’t bad enough . . . [Mason’s negative stereotypes] are a
pathetic reminder of an era long ago . . . as inappropriate and offensive to
Jews as Amos and Andy [sic] would be to blacks today.”13Added Dan Bloom, an
anti-Chicken Soup campaign organizer:“Many Jews . . . have heard this type of
humor in their homes, but in the public living rooms of America for everybody to hear it seemed embarrassing.”14
It is worth pursuing what it was, more precisely, that made Chicken Soup
so hard for Jews to swallow in 1989, especially given that another Jewish sitcom that premiered the same year, Anything But Love (1989–92)—although it
featured an equally guilt-obsessed, Jewish mother–saddled, shiksa-enamored
Jew (played by Richard Lewis)—managed to survive for three years comparatively unscathed by Jewish critics. Much of the double standard, as Sander
Gilman proposes, consisted in Mason’s, as opposed to Lewis’s, combination of
Eastern European Jewish (read: stunted) body, “vulgar” attire, and Yiddishinflected language. In short (no pun intended), Mason’s gnomish figure, loud
dress, and immigrant speech not only articulated him as less than fully American, and less of a man, but also associated him with the less prized—that is to
say, more despised—aspects of Jewishness.15
Offering an interesting comparison with Chicken Soup, from a gender
standpoint, is the 1990s Jewishcom The Nanny.While the show was taken to task
in the Jewish press for its alleged caricaturing of a Jewish Princess type—a
“Shleppin Fetchit” performed with chalkboard-scratching nasality by Fran
Drescher—it was also lauded in Jewish circles. Representatives of a newly
formed Jewish women’s media watchdog group, the Morning Star Commission,
deemed Drescher’s portrayal of the working-class Jewish nanny “funny and fine
and terrific”; Forward columnist Robin Cembalist called Drescher “a conceptual
artist” who “is not merely rehashing stereotypes but questioning them”; while
critic Susan Glenn defended Drescher as the “only reigning Jewish actress on
television with the chutzpah to celebrate her ethnic ‘otherness.’ ”16 Drescher,
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meanwhile, took the offensive. Responding to one of her Jewish critics, Judith
Peiss, in a Los Angeles Times “Counterpunch” article, she wrote:
The truth of the matter is I created Fran Fine based very closely upon my
mother, myself, and all the wonderful and rich characters I grew up
around in Flushing, Queens. I am sorry and sad if the way we really are
(yes, plastic covers and all) offends [critics like Peiss] mainly because all her
article accomplished was to reveal her insecurities as a Jewish woman living in a Wasp culture. Perhaps Peiss finds Fran Fine too blatantly Jewish for
her taste. But Fran is openly proud of her heritage. . . . I find it infuriating to deal with negativity regarding a character who is clearly carving inroads for other Jewish characters—particularly women—who will not
have to apologize for who or what they are. Maybe Peiss has been
brainwashed—by the very media she puts down—into believing that the
only good portrayal of a Jew is an assimilated one.17
The Nanny ultimately was able to survive the sort of assault that sank
Chicken Soup for several reasons. First, as we have seen, Jewish reaction to
Drescher’s show was less monolithic, more ambivalent than it had been to
Mason’s. The Nanny had strong supporters not only among Jews generally, but,
most significantly, among Jewish women. Second, The Nanny benefited from
timing. Had it been one of the first Jewishcoms to hit American airwaves after
a decade-long hiatus, as had been the case with Chicken Soup, The Nanny’s fate
would have been far more uncertain.18 By the time of its premiere in 1993,
however, the “Jewish” sitcom trend was well established.There were five other
Jewishcoms on the air, including the mega-hits Seinfeld and Mad About You. A
range of Jewish portrayals existed, in other words, making The Nanny less subject to the Amos ’n’Andy effect—that is, a show’s vulnerability to outside pressure, and thus to cancellation, when its alleged unsympathetic representations
are not balanced by shows with more favorable ones.19 Third, Drescher’s
nanny, unlike Mason’s schlemiel, had a host of redeeming character traits.
As the otherwise critical Joyce Antler observed, “What many find likeable in
the show are the nanny’s cleverness, honesty, sense of pride, and warmth. . . .
[She] outsmarts her antagonists, whomever they may be, because of her innate
shrewdness, a genuine concern for others, and the folk wisdom apparently imparted from her heritage.”20 Finally, and most crucially, the nanny is a knockout. Unlike Mason’s conventionally unprepossessing figure, Drescher’s
character is darkly attractive and very sexy. More than any other factor, I believe, it was this nonstereotypical physical representation of a Jewish woman,
at least for American television, that inclined a sizeable portion of Jewish
viewers, male and female, to tolerate her other, less flattering qualities.21
Another sitcom with a repository of purportedly negative Jewish traits, and
therefore another test case for internecine Jewish self-hatred, is Seinfeld. Indeed,
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the “show about nothing” was infamously rejected, initially, by NBC president
Brandon Tartikoff (himself a Jew) for its alleged “too Jewishness”: the Jewishnamed and -looking main character (Jerry Seinfeld), Jerry’s Jewish occupation
(stand-up comedian), and his place of residence (“Jew York City”).22 The show
was only green-lighted, reluctantly, once Jerry’s hall mate’s name was changed
from the more seemingly Jewish “Kessler” to the more denominationally neutral “Kramer.”23 The character of Elaine, meanwhile, played by the Jewish (in
fact and, arguably, in appearance) Julia Louis-Dreyfus, was explicitly marked, in
several episodes, as non-Jewish.24 The show’s Semitic fault lines remained gapingly exposed, however, through the ethnically ambiguous character of George
Costanza, played by the otherwise “quite Jewish” Jason Alexander.
Physically and behaviorally as much a “Jewish body” as Jackie Mason (minus
the Yiddish accent), George is Seinfeld’s Jewish bone of contention. Is he or isn’t
he Jewish? Nobody, on or off the show, seems to know for sure. Jerry Stiller, who
played George’s father, offered an explanation in an interview that trenchantly
transposed Jewish self-hatred into humor: “I think we’re a Jewish family living
under the Witness Protection Program under the name Costanza.”25 George is
also the prototype for an emergent televisual response to Jewish self-hatred, the
“perceptual Jew”: a character who is perceived as stereotypically Jewish by many
viewers (Jewish and non-Jewish) yet who is diegetically represented as nonJewish.The “perceptual Jew” serves a two-fold commercial function: general audience appeal is broadened and Jewish audience aversion assuaged due to the
character’s ethnic hybridity.26 The “perceptual Jew” also serves a therapeutic
function: by foisting putatively unsympathetic Jewish traits onto a non-Jew, both
the production and reception of Jewish self-hatred is shown to be contingent.
One can make the argument, and the Jerry Stiller “Witness Protection”
joke lends it support, that the “perceptual Jew,” among other examples cited so
far, is not so much a sign of self-hatred as of self-preservation. In other words,
the various adverse responses to “too Jewishness,” from stereotype aversion to
assimilationism, can be taken as deriving more from the desire to reach a broad
audience and from feared repercussions, commercial and otherwise, to such
displays in a persistently antisemitic climate than from aversion to the representations per se.The point is, however, that the line between self-hatred and
self-preservation is precariously thin, the one easily bleeding into the other. I
can vouch for the discomfiting kinship from my own experience. Although
I am the son of immigrant German Jews who barely escaped the Holocaust, I
personally have never been physically or verbally abused for being a Jew (no
doubt protected by my non-conspicuously Jewish appearance and name).27 An
incident on the junior high school playground, however, “blew my cover”—
at least internally. One of my best friends (a non-Jew), upon spotting a penny
on the pavement, cackled to me and a group of non-Jewish friends:“Whoever
picks that up is a Jew!” He punctuated the rhetorical threat by mimicking,
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1. Talk-show host Larry Sanders (Garry Shandling) doing his introductory monologue
on The Larry Sanders Show’s show-within-the-show. Video grab.
with caricatured ugliness, the insertion of a penny into his scrunched-up nose.
I didn’t quite grasp this gesture’s significance, but, needless to say, I didn’t pick
up the penny—and have regretted my cowardice ever since. (I have compensated by pointedly “outing” my Jewishness in recent years and by continuing
to err, like my father, on the side of generosity and by over-tipping.)
T H E L A R RY S A N D E R S S H OW
Garry Shandling’s name and appearance are, arguably, conspicuously Jewish. He also grew up as, in his words, the only Jew in Tucson, Arizona—for
which distinction he was occasionally beaten up as a child.28 Shandling survived, of course, to become, among other notable achievements, the star of
The Larry Sanders Show, the quintessentially postmodern HBO sitcom about
the behind-the-scenes and onscreen shenanigans of a late-night talk show
called The Larry Sanders Show.29 I say quintessentially postmodern not only
because of the show’s “hyperconscious” style and content, but also because its
mimicry of the late-night talk-show format both reveals and revels in that
genre’s ontological incestuousness—a staged show about the “reality” of
celebrity in which media personalities perform but also sell “themselves.”30
Loosely based on Shandling’s real-life persona, The Larry Sanders Show
features Garry/Larry as a talk-show host in a perpetual panic about his ratings,
his sex life, and his “too-large” lips and buttocks, not necessarily in that order
and all obviously intimately entwined (Figure 1).31 The focus on “over-sized”
lips and buttocks, especially, is telling. Both labial and posterior profusions are
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generally associated with African Americans—more specifically, with Blacks’
alleged hypersexuality. Moreover, as Gilman points out, the association of Jews
and Blackness is not a recent phenomenon. “Medieval iconography,” Gilman
writes, “always juxtaposed the black image of the synagogue, of the Old Law,
with the white of the church.” This imagery, moreover, “is incorporated, not
merely as an intellectual abstraction, but as the model through which Jews are
perceived, treated, and thus respond as if confronted with the reflection of
their own reality.”32 In the nineteenth century, as “scientific racism” became
not only respectable but an essential prop of Western colonialism, the JewishBlack connection was made into biological “fact.” For Jews, who were already
seen as a preternaturally “mongrel race,” their most recent “hybridization,” explained British “scientific” racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, “was the admixture of Negro blood with Jewish in the Diaspora of Alexandria.”33 As for
empirical “proof,” this was provided by Jews and Blacks’ purported physical
resemblance. Adam Grotowski, a Polish noble, observed about a trip to the
United States in 1857: “Jews [in Poland] have the greatest resemblance to the
American mulattoes: Sallow carnation complexion, thick lips, crisped black
hair. On my arrival in this country I took every light-colored mulatto for a
Jew.”34
Whether today’s TV viewer takes Larry Sanders for a “Black Jew” or a
“White Negro” is not the issue here; rather, my concern is with the implications, for Larry’s self-image, of an aversion to traits associated with both Jews
and another “other.” And the aversion is not limited to only one “other”; ambivalent relations between Jews and gays are also abundantly cross-referenced
on the show.Theoretically, as with Jews and African Americans, the Jewish/gay
bond is a “natural” fit. The Jewish male’s resemblance to the homosexual
through physical imputations of effeminacy was one of the main pathological
symptoms attributed to Jews by “scientific” racism. Equally pertinent, and
more grounded in reality, is the historical affinity with the closet that the Jewish and gay subcultures have shared.35 Both the discursive and the historical aspects of Jewish-gay interaction are evident in The Larry Sanders Show.
Virtually every main character, including Larry, is subjected to at least one
embarrassing moment regarding his perception as being gay.The culmination
of this metatextual motif occurs when the talk show’s chief writer, Phil (Wallace Langham), the most brazenly homophobic of the lot, ends up acknowledging his own repressed homosexuality when he falls for the openly gay
secretary, Brian (Scott Thompson), whom he had been harassing. Before their
climactic embrace in the studio offices, the gay-Jewish connection was made
explicit when the troubleshooting producer, Artie (Rip Torn), warned Phil
about the potential damage to his career from his gay-bashing. Artie: “You
know who runs this town?” Phil: “The Jews.” Artie: “No, the gay Jews!”
(Episode #88:“Putting the ‘Gay’ Back in Litigation”).36
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Beyond what they reveal about the intersection of Jewishness, race, and
sexuality, the show’s Jewish-Black and Jewish-gay approach-avoidance complexes go a long way to explaining Larry Sanders’s highly overdetermined
Jewish self-hatred. For unlike the other “Jewish” sitcoms discussed so far, in
which Jewish self-loathing has been more discursively inferred than explicitly
represented, Larry Sanders’s self-hatred is worn on his sleeve—though, notably, not with a Star of David attached. Actor Janeane Garofalo, for example,
who had a regular part as the show-within-the-show’s talent booker, describes
Larry’s condition generically: “He’s so full of self-loathing, it’s just hilarious.
He’s so full of sheer self-hatred it’s a pleasure to watch.”37 No mention here of
the specifically Jewish nature of Larry’s self-hatred. Indeed, for the occasional
viewer, his condition’s Jewishness might easily remain a mystery, as might
Larry’s Jewish identity altogether.
The closeting of Jewishness has a long history in American entertainment,
from the nose-straightening, hair-dying, and name-changing of Jewish movie
stars to the nondenominationality of TV performers such as George Burns
and Jack Benny. Most Jews, and many non-Jews, may have been aware of
Burns’s (nee Nathan Birnbaum) and Benny’s (nee Benjamin Kubelsky) Jewishness, but its overt disclosure was fastidiously avoided, as it had been with
their earlier movie and radio personae, on their TV shows (The Burns and
Allen Show, 1950–58; The Jack Benny Program, 1950–65). This de-Judaizing
may have been underscored, such as in Burns’s celebrating Christmas at his
sitcom home, or overcompensated for, such as in Benny’s stereotypically Jewish miserliness, effeminacy, and violin-playing. But both celebrities remained
closeted Jews throughout their entertainment careers. What distinguishes
Larry Sanders’s Jewish self-denial is, first, that it occurs at a time when most
other Jewish TV performers, including Garry Shandling himself in his earlier
It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (1986–89), were “coming out” Jewish, and second,
that the self-denial is diegetically informed.38 This overtly “dis-simulative” aspect, which resonates with Lawrence Grossberg’s postmodernist notion of
“authentic inauthenticity,” reinforces the quintessentially postmodern quality
not only of The Larry Sanders Show but, at least in its self-denial aspect, of Jewish self-hatred itself.39
Of course, as previously indicated, despite Jews’ privileged relationship to
self-hatred, the condition need not “always-already” be aligned with them.
The Jewishcom Curb Your Enthusiasm makes this point emphatically. In a
second-season episode (“Trick or Treat”), a Jewish neighbor of Larry David’s
character (named Larry David and based on the real-life Seinfeld co-creator)
pounces on David for whistling a Wagner melody outside a theater. “You
wanna know what you are?” the neighbor inveighs. “You’re a self-loathing
Jew!” David angrily responds that he does hate himself “but it has nothing
to do with being Jewish,” then gains revenge by hiring an orchestra to play
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Wagner on the neighbor’s front lawn in the middle of the night. Freud, one
can imagine, would accuse David of protesting too much, and he would have
ample support for such a diagnosis. David’s dissociation of his self-hatred from
his Jewishness recalls a classic Seinfeld episode (“The Yada-Yada,” co-written
by David) in which Jerry, upset about his dentist’s conversion to Judaism so
that he can learn better jokes, complains to a priest in a confessional that the
conversion doesn’t offend him as a Jew but as a comedian. The deeply selfloathing George Costanza, meanwhile, may technically have been only a “perceptual Jew,” but his performance by actor Jason Alexander was modeled on a
combination of Larry David and Woody Allen.40 Allen himself famously
quipped that “while it’s true that I am Jewish and I don’t like myself very
much, it’s not because of my persuasion.”41And Allen’s disclaimer echoes
Kafka’s claim that his lack of identification with himself as a Jew was superseded by his lack of identification with himself as a human being.42 Existentialist claims to self-hatred have a long history, in other words, among Jews (and
among Jewish comedians, as Donald Weber, drawing on Albert Goldman, elucidates further in his essay for this volume).
Where Larry Sanders parts company from all of the above is that while
these other fictional and nonfictional figures may dissociate their self-hatred
from their Jewishness, they still (with the exception of George Costanza)
admit that they are Jewish. Larry Sanders fastidiously, and at all cost, avoids the
subject.The only way to determine Larry’s ethnicity, besides inferring it from
his appearance or from extratextual or intertextual associations with Garry
Shandling or It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, is to have caught one of the two
episodes (out of a total of eighty-nine) that directly confront the issue—or to
have been a proactive participant in a panel discussion on the topic, as I was.
At a “Creating Comedy” panel sponsored by the Museum of Television and
Radio in Beverly Hills, I asked the panel of TV writers, which included Garry
Shandling and Larry Sanders Show writer Judd Apatow, what part their Jewishness had played in their creative work (only one of the five panelists,
Bernie Mac Show creator Larry Whilmore, was not Jewish). After the nervous
uproar—among the writers, not the audience—caused by my question had
subsided, Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal broke the ice:
“What part has it played? Not one shtickle!” When the laughter greeting this
Yiddishism had died down, Apatow confided that the Larry Sanders writers
had debated behind the scenes about whether Larry was Jewish and had concluded that he was a self-hating Jew.43
As for the two episodes that affirm Apatow’s claim, the first (Episode #59:
“I Was a Teenage Lesbian”) features comedian Brett Butler playing “herself ”
as a talk-show guest. In response to Larry’s reference to the success of her recent best-selling book, Butler opines that after buying a house for her mother
with proceeds from the book, “everything you do with your money is okay.”
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“You don’t have any guilt,” Larry continues her thought. Butler: “No, uh-uh,
I’m a WASP.” Larry: “WASPs don’t have guilt, do they?” To which Butler retorts with a wry smile and her southern drawl: “Y’all killed Him, we didn’t!”
Larry bows his head embarrassedly amid the in-house audience’s nervous
laughter, as the show-within-the show cuts to commercial.
The second episode (#72:“Make a Wish”) similarly conflates Larry’s closeted Jewishness with its self-hating component.The spark here is Larry’s desperate need to make People magazine’s “Ten Sexiest Men” list, even if it means
bumping talk-show guest and friend Ben Stiller off the list. Stiller finds out
about the dirty trick and, while he remains friendly during the talk-show
interview, angrily confronts Larry behind the scenes. Feigning innocence,
Larry tells the irate Stiller: “If you could see how Jewish you look!” Stiller
snaps back, “Oh, that’s great! Coming from a self-hating Jew like yourself!”
Before Larry can respond, Artie, the troubleshooting producer, breaks up the
argument.44
One can hardly conceive a more succinct delineation of the origins and
manifestations of Jewish self-hatred than these two sitcom moments provide.
The one highlights the condition’s antisemitic underpinnings in the Christkilling myth; the other illustrates its internecine expression in reaction to assimilation and self-denial. Larry Sanders emerges “guilty” on both counts.The
issue of self-denial, specifically, is elaborated on in another episode (#67:“My
Name is Asher Kingsley”).45 Here the issue is approached from two different
angles, one related to Larry, the other to Larry’s talk-show sidekick and the series’ comic foil, Hank Kingsley (played by Jeffrey Tambor).46 Both aspects intersect with the notion of self-preservation.
The episode opens with Hank’s abrupt decision to reclaim his Jewishness,
starting by affixing a mezuzah (parchment scroll) beside his office door and
changing his stage name back to his birth name, Hank Lepstein. Referencing
the self-preservation motif, Hank explains, “I’ve hidden it [my Jewishness] all
my life. First in school so I wouldn’t get beat up. Then in show business so I
wouldn’t alienate my public. . . . I want to regain my faith, I want to rejoin my
people!” It turns out that Hank’s motives, as usual, are hardly pure: his real reason for coming out Jewish is to seduce Rabbi Klein, an attractive female rabbi
he met at Marvin Hamlisch’s synagogue. In a vain attempt to dissuade Hank
from his conversion, Artie reinforces the self-preservation theme with a
gentile twist: “You know, I’ve worked for your people a long time. They run
this town. They’ve run it a hell of a lot better than the agents. . . . But we’re
just trying to entertain people and morality’s just gonna get in the way.”47 The
Jewish jokes come fast and furious. When Larry’s Black secretary, Beverly
(Penny Johnson), complains because Hank is allowed to give his rabbi a tour
of the studio when her pastor was not afforded the same privilege, Hank defends the double standard: “I think you’ll agree that a rabbi fits more nicely
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into a show business environment.” Phil, also a non-Jew, questions whether
Hank is really Jewish because he had previously seemed to deny it. “People
change,” Hank insists; “it’s called spiritual growth.” Phil: “Well, this is called
spiritual disbelief, because most Jewish people I know are smart!” As for the
connection to Larry,Artie cautions Hank about bringing the rabbi around the
set because “religion makes Larry very uncomfortable.” The topper comes
when Hank surprises everyone by putting a yarmulke on during the talk
show. During a commercial break, after being scolded by Larry for his unscripted embarrassment, Hank asks Larry about his religion, which Hank
hasn’t the slightest idea about even though he has known Larry for fifteen
years. “That’s a private matter,” Larry mutters evasively, though he tells Hank
that his cap is on inside out. Artie adds in an aside, “His religion is talk-show
host.”48
A subsequent backdoor meeting between Hank and two network executives expands on Artie’s aside, while putting the kibosh on Hank’s religious
fling. “They [the network] want our appeal to be non-denominational,” one
of the execs explains.49 “But you’re Jewish, aren’t you, Stu?” Hank protests.
Updating the assimilationist adage “A Jew at home, a gentleman on the street,”
Stu responds,“Yes, but I’m behind the camera where the viewing public can’t
see me.”The meeting ends with Hank calling Stu an Uncle Tom and Stu calling Hank a schmuck. Hank, as usual, ultimately sacrifices personal principle
for self-preservation, the urgency of which is underscored by the hate mail he
receives. A swastika is scrawled on one envelope and another letter reads,
“Dear Jew: Keep wearing your Jew hat so I can use it as a target when I blow
your Jew head off!”When a third correspondent threatens to stop buying the
brand of orange “jews” Hank peddles, it’s off with Hank’s kippah—an opportunistic gesture that turns out to be redundant. For Hank had already been decapped during the talk show by Artie’s order to shoot him in choker close-ups
that cropped his objectionable head gear! (Figure 2).
When all the Jewish jokes are added up, this last one appears to crystallize
the episode’s, if not the series’, overarching Jewish theme: If you want to survive
in the entertainment business, much less in public life, don’t let your kippah—
i.e., your Jewishness—show. In the “Creating Comedy” panel mentioned
above, Garry Shandling extrapolated just such a theme from the “My Name is
Asher Kingsley” episode. Drawing on Artie’s aside about Larry,“His religion is
talk-show host,” Shandling suggested that talk-show hosts do not want to divulge their religion because they want to appeal to as broad a spectrum of the
audience as possible:“They’re everyman.”
In a personal interview, Larry Sanders Show co-creator Dennis Klein was
more ethnically specific: “Larry Sanders was conceived as the very antithesis of
Jewishness. The Johnny Carson Show, for example—on which Larry patterns his
show and himself as a talk-show host—was, in its background and approach,
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2. Talk-show sidekick Hank Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor) “de-kippah-tated” by a choker
close-up. Video grab.
intended by Carson as a rebuke to mainstream Jewish comedy.” Eager to dismiss his show’s associations with Jewishness, however, Klein quickly added
that “Larry Sanders was not intended as a satirical comment on the hypergentile, anti-Jewish aspect of Carson’s show.” Perhaps not, but the “antiJewishness” seeps through.
Conc lusi on
One of the main questions posed at the outset was why Jewish selfhatred should persist in a postmodern era marked by unprecedented Jewish
acceptance and success in mainstream American society. In response: First,
one of the foundational causes of antisemitism, Christian belief in Jews’ collective responsibility for the killing of Christ, still appears to apply. Although
the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s initiated doctrinal change and Pope
John Paul II expanded it in 2000, one can see from Brett Butler’s talk-show
joke, and the recent controversy over Mel Gibson’s blockbuster film The Passion of the Christ (2004), that the Christ-killing myth maintains a stubborn
hold on Western consciousness. Another persistent source of antisemitism—
Jews’ alleged undue wealth and influence over finance, the media, and world
affairs—if less openly expressed, at least among non-Muslims, certainly persists as well. As for Muslim antisemitism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has
produced a particularly virulent strain, openly promulgated by the Islamic
madrassas (religious schools) and the statements of some Muslim leaders—not
merely terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden, but even government heads such
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as Prime Ministers Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, whose public utterances have betrayed a distinct antiJewish animus.50
As for internecine Jewish self-hatred, this dynamic, while changing significantly, has, if anything, been exacerbated by the continuing Jewish intermarriage crisis and conflicting attitudes toward Israel.With the intermarriage rate
approaching 50 percent in the 1990s, and with religious observance and childrearing statistically also in decline, the combined survival-threatening trend
has been called a “Silent Holocaust” by many Orthodox survivalists who compare the phenomenon to self-imposed genocide.51 The actual Holocaust,
meanwhile, remains one of the most palpable postmodern sources for Jewish
self-hatred, no longer so much through “identification with the oppressor,”
which applied more to the generation that had directly experienced Nazi persecution, as through shame at the alleged passive submission of Jews to the
Final Solution. The Tough Jew of modern-day Israel and the Jewish Defense
League (with antecedents in the Zionist pioneers and American gangsters)
epitomizes psychosocial resistance to the “Jewish weakling” syndrome. The
most potent new source of internecine Jewish self-hatred is Israel itself—
post-1967 Israel, that is, of the Palestinian occupation, the Lebanon invasion,
the “Who is a Jew?” controversy, and the two intifadas.The “good” Jew/“bad”
Jew dichotomy that previously pitted Eastern European versus assimilated
Jews, in ways that saw the judgmental labels gyrate from one to the other,52
now characterizes an equally voluble conflict in which orthodox versus secular beliefs and pro- versus anti-Israeli government sentiments are regarded alternately as badges of honor or disgrace. Jewish self-criticism, a long-honored
Jewish tradition, which only in the face of heightened antisemitism in latenineteenth-century Europe transmogrified into the Jewish “pathology” of
self-hatred, has become an endangered species once again.This time, however,
the transmogrification has been effected by Jews themselves.53 Stuck between
images of a wimp (the Holocaust) and a storm trooper (Israel), Jews seem
more mired in internecine self-hatred than ever before, with—as was demonstrated in the killing of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin by an ultra-nationalist
Jew—potentially lethal consequences.54
The situation has not been helped, in my estimation, by the recent claims
by many Jews of a “new antisemitism” linked to the post–9/11 surge in antiJewish hate crimes, especially in Europe. Although the rise in violence against
Jews is certainly cause for concern, the antisemitic/anti-Zionist link made by
the heralds of a “new antisemitism” is both ideologically spurious and ultimately counterproductive, especially when directed at Jews who may be not
only critical of Israeli policies but of the Zionist project altogether. Alarmist
charges of a “new antisemitism,” when recklessly directed at non-Jews, may
serve to aggravate more than to alleviate antisemitism.When ruthlessly directed
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at Jews, these charges serve only to construct, equally fallaciously, a “new Jewish self-hatred.”55
Manifestations of Jewish self-hatred in the American entertainment media,
particularly in television, remain subject to a more consistent dynamic, one
still predicated largely on self-preservation. Thus, while the “Jewish” sitcom
and overall “Jewish”TV trend may continue, fueled by a conflation of assimilationist and multiculturalist forces, aversions to “too Jewishness” will undoubtedly also persist, fed partly by commercial desire to reach the broadest
audience, partly by sensitivity to Jews’ perceived “over-representation” in the
media and U.S. society. As Larry Sanders co-creator Klein stated in our interview: “It’s an accepted wisdom. For example, during casting sessions, after an
actor does a reading and walks out, someone will say,‘Too J,’ and everyone will
know what is meant. There’s always been, and remains, a tendency to veer
away from overt Jewishness.” Such a tendency will certainly prevail so long as
the Jewish fat-cat and media-control ca(na)rds continue to be played, most recently in New Republic columnist Greg Easterbrook’s essay blaming boorish
Jewish movie moguls who “worship money above all else” for a spate of Hollywood gore-fests; the Parents Television Council’s charge of the antireligiosity of the “Jewish” television industry; and William Donahue of the
Catholic League for Civil Rights’ sinister conflation of Jews, secularism, and
sodomy: “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in
general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? . . . Hollywood
likes anal sex.They like to see the public square without nativity scenes.”56
Postmodern Jewish self-hatred, then, with significant modifications from
its earlier formations, remains subject to what Gilman calls self-hatred’s “inevitable double bind.” From the reception end, Jews, in order to succeed in
society, are forced to assimilate; but in so doing they must also reject as unworthy an aspect of themselves, which is then projected onto “others”—of
their own or of other marginalized groups.57 From the production end, antisemites reject conspicuous Jews out of hand, yet they also suspect those Jews
who manage to “pass” into the mainstream as having done so under false
(read: conspiratorial) pretences.58 Internally and externally, Jews, quite literally,
are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.Then again, whether from genius or necessity, Jews have also managed to snatch redemption from the jaws
of damnation by finding theological justification (the redemptive Chosen
People) and psychological comfort (the moral righteousness of marginality) in
their role as the eternal outsider.When this outsider role is challenged, however, as it is today by Israel’s militarily dominant position in the Middle East
and Jews’ insider status in the U.S. entertainment industry and society, the
predicament becomes precarious once again.
In the end, as it has been throughout post-emancipation Jewish history,
the most effective way to deal with this dilemma may be through transformative
313
humor, humor that helps to loosen, perhaps even to break through, the multiple double-binds of Jewish self-hatred.To test this hypothesis, let the last word
go to The Larry Sanders Show, which in one of its most postmodern “Jewish
moments” uses the self-referential logic of media representation to deconstruct the tortuous illogic of the “Jewish question.”59 In the episode titled
“Adolph Hankler” (#84), comic Jon Stewart, as himself, fills in on Larry’s
show as guest host.As if to compensate for Larry’s, and Hank Kingsley’s, avoidance of Jewishness, Stewart does a sketch lampooning the game show Jeopardy
that functions as a limit case for the “return of the repressed.” Called “The
Adolph Hankler Show,” it features Hank as Adolph Hankler, the game-show
host, dressed in a Nazi uniform and wearing a Hitler mustache. The correct
“question” to all of Hankler’s “answers”—such as “They caused the sinking of
the Titanic” and “The small people that controls the world’s money supply”—
is, uniformly of course, “Who Are the Jews?” When the non-Jewish Artie
complains about the offensiveness of the sketch, Stewart responds,“Yeah well,
it doesn’t bother me, and I’m Jewish.” “So was Jesus,” Artie fires back, “and
look where he ended up?”“On the WB,” Stewart retorts.60
Note s
1. See Sander Gilman, “Jewish Self Hatred (I) and The Believer (II),” in Henry Bean,
The Believer: Confronting Jewish Self-Hatred (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press,
2000), 238.
2. Henry Bean, The Believer, 19. Following the same line of thought, one could easily
include the (quasi-Jewish) Marx among self-hatred’s theorizers, given his class-based
notion of “false consciousness,” from which derive both Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and the (predominantly Jewish) Frankfurt school’s mass culture theory.
3. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967);
Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (1948; reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1960);
Miriam Greenspan, “The New Anti-Semitism,” Tikkun 18, no. 6 (Fall 2003):
33–42.
4. See Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New
York: Anchor Books, 1989); Neal Gabler, “Conference Presentation,” in Television’s
Changing Image of American Jews (Los Angeles:The American Jewish Committee and
The Norman Lear Center, 1998), 3–12; Muriel Cantor, The Hollywood Producer: His
Work and His Audience (New Brunswick, N.J.:Transaction Books, 1998); Juliet Lushbough, “The Hollywood TV Writer: A Descriptive Study of Sixty Primetime Television Writers,” Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1981; David Desser and Lester
Friedman, eds., American-Jewish Filmmakers:Traditions and Trends (Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 1985); J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Reading, Mass.:Addison-Wesley, 1996); Luke Ford, The Producers: Profiles in
Frustration (Lincoln, Neb.: iUniverse Books, 2004).
5. See Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the
Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Leonard Dinnerstein, AntiSemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
6. See Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism; Janet Brodkin, How the Jews Became White Folks . . .
and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1998).
314
7. Robert Lloyd,“ ‘Pilot’ Flies in the Face of Convention,” Los Angeles Times, September 5, 2004: E12.
8. Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003).
9. See ibid. for a complete list. See also David Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time
(Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003).
10. Two current hit dramatic series also feature Jewish protagonists: Everwood (2002– )
and The O.C. (2003– ). For more on The O.C., as well on Curb Your Enthusiasm and
Arrested Development, see the essay by Michele Byers and Rosalin Krieger.
11. See Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred.
12. See Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher; Ellen Jaffe McClain, Embracing the Stranger: Intrermarriage and the Future of the American Jewish Community (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
13. “David Hyman, “ ‘Chicken Soup’ Is a Tasteless Broth,” Jewish Journal of Greater Los
Angeles, September 22–28, 1989: 53.
14. Quoted in “Highly Touted ‘Soup’ Goes Down the Drain,” USA Today, November 8,
1989: 1D–2D.
15. See Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991).
16. Beverly Beyette, “Image Make-Over,” Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1998: E4;
Robin Cembalist,“Big Hair, Short Skirts—and High Culture:Taking Fran Drescher
Seriously,” Forward, February 14, 1997: 9; Quoted in Joyce Antler, “Jewish Women
on Television:Too Jewish or Not Enough,” in Talking Back: Images of Jewish Women in
Popular American Culture, ed. Joyce Antler (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University
Press, 1998), 247.
17. Fran Drescher, “ ‘The Nanny’ Is Jewish and Proud of It,” Los Angeles Times, May 9,
2004: F5.
18. The 1980s hiatus followed a brief upswing in “Jewish” sitcoms in the 1970s that included, most prominently, Bridget Loves Bernie (1972–73) and Rhoda (1974–79). For
more on Jewishcoms from this and earlier periods, again see Brook, Something Ain’t
Kosher, and Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time.
19. Amos ’n’Andy (1951–53) was cancelled despite good ratings, due primarily to pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP).
20. Joyce Antler,“Too Jewish or Not Enough,” 247.
21. See Vincent Brook, “The Fallacy of Falsity: Un-’Dresch’-ing Masquerade, Fashion,
and Postfeminist Jewish Princesses in The Nanny,” Television and New Media 1, no. 3
(August 2000): 279–305; and Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher.
22. David Kronke and Robert Gauthier,“There’s Nothing to It,” Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1995: C13.
23. Jon Stratton, Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities (New York: Routledge, 2000), 290.
24. For specific examples of Elaine’s “coming out” non-Jewish, see Brook, Something
Ain’t Kosher; Stratton, Coming Out Jewish.
25. Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher, 107.
26. For more on “perceptual” Jewishness, see Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher.
27. My family name of “Brook” had been changed from the German “Bruch” by my
parents upon their entering the United States. It seems possible, however (although
it was never confirmed by my parents, whom I never asked!), that “Bruch” stems
from the earlier Hebrew “Baruch.” As for my continuing ability to “pass” for nonJewish, upon meeting with a prospective contributor to this anthology, I was asked
somewhat sheepishly,“Why, exactly, are you . . . doing this project?”
28. Shandling offered this biographical information at the “Creating Comedy” panel
sponsored by the Museum of Television and Radio, held February 26, 2003, at the
Director’s Guild of America Theater in Hollywood, California.
315
29. Appearing on HBO in the mid-1990s, when cable programming was less of an industry force than it is today, the show received correspondingly less audience and
media recognition than popular network Jewishcoms such as Seinfeld, The Nanny,
Mad About You, and Friends. Nonetheless, Larry Sanders proved a success both with
critics and (comparatively speaking) with viewers, garnering numerous Emmy and
Golden Globe nominations (winning several of the former) and remaining on the
air for six years (reruns of the show have since aired on Bravo and ABC).
30. “Hyperconsciousness,” as I explain in my introductory essay, refers to “a hyperawareness on the part of the text itself of its cultural status, function, and history, as well as
of the conditions of its circulation and reception” (see Jim Collins,“Postmodernism
and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Allen
[Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992], 327–353).
31. The altered eponym was chosen to avoid confusion with Shandling’s earlier sitcom,
It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (1986–89).
32. Gilman, Self-Hatred, 7.
33. Quoted in ibid.
34. Quoted in ibid., 8, emphasis added. Larry has also complained, in one episode at
least, about a talk-show guest’s mocking his “big hair” (Catherine Seipp, “Cathy’s
World: Garry Shandling’s ‘Larry,’ ” United Press International, December 25, 2002).
Bodily based self-hatred for Jewish women, while sharing some of the same Black
associative origins, is of course somewhat different than for men. For more on selfhatred specific to Jewish women, see Janice L. Booker, The Jewish American Princess
and Other Myths:The Many Faces of Self-Hatred (New York: Shapolsky, 1991); Ophira
Edut, “Tales of a Jewess with Caboose,” in Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish
Feminism, ed. Danya Ruttenberg (Seattle: Seal Press, 1991), 24–30; Riv-Ellen Prell,
“Cinderellas Who (Almost) Never Become Princesses: Subversive Representations
of Jewish Women in Postwar Popular Novels,” in Talking Back: Images of Jewish
Women in Popular American Culture, ed. Joyce Antler (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 1998), 123–138.
35. For more on affinities between Jews and gays, see Gilman, The Jew’s Body; Naomi
Seidman, “Fag Hags and Bu-Jews:Toward a (Jewish) Politics of Vicarious Identity,”
in Insider/Outside: American Jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael
Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000),
254–268; Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: Jewish Masculinity (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998); Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, eds.,
Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
36. The show’s reference to the entertainment industry’s gay-Jewish connection was no
doubt triggered by a high-profile incident involving Hollywood power player
Michael Ovitz. Upon his unceremonious firing from a top position at the Walt Disney Company by CEO Michael Eisner, Ovitz blamed his fate on Hollywood’s “gay
mafia,” in which category the apparently straight (and Jewish) Ovitz included (not
necessarily accurately) Eisner, David Geffen, and Barry Diller (all Jews), among others (Ben H. Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly [Boston: Beacon Press, 2004], 34).
37. Quoted in Jay Martel,“True Lies,” Rolling Stone, September 8, 1994: 66.
38. In It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, along with other Jewish references, Garry’s having attended Hebrew school is revealed (Alan Zweibel, telephone interview, February 19,
2003).
39. Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
40. Bill Zehme,“Jerry & George & Kramer & Elaine: Exposing the Secrets of Seinfeld’s
Success,” Rolling Stone, July 8–22, 1993: 40.
41. Allen is quoted in Lawrence J. Epstein, The Haunted Smile:The Story of Jewish Comedians in America (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), 196.
316
42. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books,
1948–49).The exact quote, from the January 8, 1914, entry, is:“What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand
very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”
43. “Creating Comedy” panel.The fifth panelist was Beverly Hills 90210 and Sex and the
City creator Darren Star.
44. Apatow recalled a slightly different ending to the scene, perhaps from the original
HBO episode that had been edited for a shorter rerun time slot (I viewed the
rerun). In this version, Larry compounds the self-denying implications of Stiller’s
remark by replying,“You think I’m Jewish?”
45. The episode title is an obvious reference to the Chaim Potok novel My Name Is
Asher Lev.
46. Tambor has a featured role in Arrested Development as the incarcerated patriarch of a
wealthy, hyper-dysfunctional Jewish family (see Byers and Krieger essay, this volume).
47. The absurdist irony of separating agents from the “Jewish-run” entertainment industry cannot have been lost on the show-biz-savvy Artie, nor on the ( Jewish) writers of the episode.
48. At least this is how Apatow recalled the end of the scene at the panel, again perhaps
from the original HBO episode.Artie’s comment is not included in the Bravo rerun
I viewed.
49. Larry Sanders Show co-creator Dennis Klein offered an elaboration of this argument
in a phone interview: “It would be a drag to bring in religion, from a comedic
standpoint. It’s not really funny. If you need it for an episode maybe, such as a bar
mitzvah, but not to carry a series . . . especially on network TV.The last thing you
want is to have a fight with Standards and Practices” (Los Angeles, February 14,
2003.)
50. For the text of Mohamad’s brazenly antisemitic speech to the Islamic Summit Conference in 2003, see http://www.adl.org/Anti_Semitism/Malaysian.asp (accessed
November 2004). Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israel and Holocaust-denying rants are becoming legion.
51. The 1990 Jewish National Population Survey ( JNPS) initially reported a 52 percent
intermarriage rate since 1985. Sociologist Steven Cohen and others subsequently
revised the figure downward to between 42 and 43 percent ( J. J. Goldberg, Jewish
Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment [Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley,
1996], 66–68). The 2000 JNPS, working from the revised 1990 figure, showed a
steady rise in intermarriage to 47 percent from 1990 ( Joe Berkofsy, Los Angeles Jewish Journal, September 12, 2003: 20). For more on the intermarriage issue, see
McClain, Embracing the Stranger.
52. Gilman,“Jewish Self-Hatred,” 227–234.
53. Ibid., 221. For a brilliant conflation of Holocaust- and Israel-based strands of Jewish self-hatred, see Henry Bean’s film The Believer (2002) and Henry Bean, The Believer: Confronting Jewish Self-Hatred, which contains the film’s shooting script and
commentary by the filmmaker and various scholars.
54. This dichotomy is drawn from a scene in the film The Believer.When the American
Jewish protagonist, a self-hating neo-Nazi based on an actual historical figure, rants
against Jews of the Holocaust and those of modern-day Israel, a Jewish friend retorts,“Do you hate them because they’re wimps or because they’re storm troopers?”
55. For more on the “new antisemitism” debate, see Greenspan, “The New AntiSemitism”; Brian Klug,“The Myth of the New Anti-Semitism,” The Nation, February 2, 2004: 23–29; Abraham Foxman, Never Again? The Threat of the New
Anti-Semitism (San Francisco: Harper, 2004); Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2004); Phyllis Chesler, The New Anti-Semitism:The
Current Crisis and What We Must Do about It (New York: Jossey-Bass, 2004); and Paul
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
317
Iganski and Barry Kosmin, eds., A New Anti-Semitism? Debating Judeophobia in 21st
Century Britain (London: Profile Books, 2004).
Greg Easterbrook,“Take Out the Gore and ‘Kill Bill’ Is an Episode of ‘Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,’ ” New Republic, October 23, 2003 (http://www.tnr.com/
Easterbrook.html?pid=844). The most offensive portion of Easterbrook’s article is
the following:“Even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney’s CEO, Michael Eisner,
is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish.Yes, there are plenty of
Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of
violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun
lifestyle choice.” As for the Parents Television Council, the group’s president,
L. Brent Bozell, elaborated on his charge of TV’s disrespect for religion thus: “Is it
because Hollywood is Jewish and taking care of its own? No, I don’t think that. . . .
In the general public and in Hollywood, there is an understanding that respect is
owed to Jews. It’s as simple as that.That same respect ought to be paid to other faiths
as well” (quoted in Lynn Smith, “Advocacy Group Says TV Has Little Respect for
Religion,” Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2004: E1, E6). Donahue’s quote is from
Tim Rutten,“Yule Tidings of a Culture War,” Los Angeles Times, December 18, 2004:
E1, E26–27.
Gilman,“Jewish Self-Hatred,” 228.
Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 19. For more on Jewish passing, see Daniel Itzkovitz,“Passing Like Me: Jewish Chameleonism and the Politics of Race,” in Passing: Identity and
Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion, ed. Maria Sanchez and Linda Schlossberg (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 38–63.
The term “Jewish moments” is used here to refer to overt textual representations of
Jewishness. It is not to be confused with Stratton’s use of the term in Coming Out.
There, “Jewish moments,” drawing on Alexander Doty’s notion of “queer moments,” refer to more subtle Jewish references that were either encoded as Jewish by
the text’s producers and/or can be decoded as such by “competent” viewers.
For those who don’t get the joke, the Jesus-WB connection refers to the Warner
Brothers TV network’s penchant for Christian-oriented programming such as Seventh Heaven (1996– ).Warner Brothers, of course, was founded by, and its entertainment operations remain largely under the management of, Jews.
Contributor s
Vincent Brook has a Ph.D. in film and television from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He teaches film, television, and cultural studies
at UCLA and the University of Southern California. He has written numerous articles for leading media journals and is author of Something Ain’t Kosher
Here:The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (2003).
Janet Handler Burstein has taught Victorian literature, women’s literature,
and American Jewish literature for many years at Drew University, and has
published essays in each of these fields. Her first book, Writing Mothers,Writing
Daughters, discusses American Jewish women’s writing. Her latest book is
Telling the Little Secrets: American Jewish Writing since the Eighties (2006).
Michelle Byers is an assistant professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax,
Nova Scotia. She has written extensively about television series including
Buffy, My So-Called Life, Beverly Hills 90210, Degrassi, and Sex and the City.
Jewishness and television has become an increasingly important area of her research. Most recently she was funded to work on two projects dealing with
Canadian television, film, and youth culture. She also has edited Growing Up
Degrassi: Television, Identity and Youth Cultures (2005), and is in the process of
co-editing volumes on My So-Called Life (with David Lavery) and CSI (with
Val Johnson).
Judah M. Cohen is a Dorot Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Skirball
Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. His recent
publications include “Modes of Tradition? Negotiating ‘Jewishness’ and
Modernity in the Synagogue Music of Isadore Freed and Fredrick Piket” (in
Jewish History and Culture), plus forthcoming essays on music in Jewish summer camps. He has also conducted extensive research on Jewish life and history in the Caribbean, which was the subject of his first book, Through the
Sands of Time:A History of the Jewish Community of St.Thomas, U.S.Virgin Islands
(2004).
319
320
Contributors
Marsha Bryan Edelman is a professor of music and education at Gratz College, where she also coordinates the college’s degree programs in Jewish
music. A graduate of Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary, she holds degrees in general and Jewish music, Jewish history, and educational administration. Dr. Edelman is highly regarded as a lecturer and writer
on a wide range of topics related to the nature and history of Jewish music. In
addition to a variety of articles and program notes attendant to concerts of
Jewish music, Dr. Edelman is the author of Discovering Jewish Music (2003).
James Fisher is a professor of theater at Wabash College, as well as a stage director and an actor. He has authored six books, including The Theater of
Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope (2001), and edited the anthology The Theatre of
Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays (2006); in addition
he has published articles and reviews in numerous periodicals. He also edits
The Puppetry Yearbook. Forthcoming projects include The Fool in Italian Theatre from Pirandello to Fo (2006), and (co-authored with Felicia Hardison Londré) The Historical Dictionary of American Theatre: Modernism, 1880–1930
(2006).
Daniel Itzkovitz is an associate professor of English and the director of
American Studies at Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts. He has
published articles on Jewish studies, queer theory, film, and American literature, and is the editor of a new edition of Fannie Hurst’s novel Imitation of Life
and of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (co-edited with Daniel Boyarin
and Ann Pellegrini).
Ruth D. Johnston is a professor of English and of women’s and gender studies at Pace University, New York City, where she teaches and writes about
film, critical theory, and literature. She has published essays on film in numerous journals, including Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, Quarterly Review of
Film and Video, and Journal of Film and Video.
Rosalin Krieger is a Ph.D. candidate at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her research interests are popular Jewish
representation in contemporary American culture, with a particular focus on
the sitcom and Ashkenazi Jewish identity in post–World War II North America. Her major published work includes the journal essays “ ‘Does He Actually
Say the Word Jewish?’ Jewish Representations in Seinfeld” (2003),“A Knish on
a Plate of Scones: How to Become Canadian” (2003), and the anthology essay
“Jews Do Cry: Invisible, Misunderstood, and Scorned at York,” in York Stories:
Women in Higher Education (2000).
Contributors
321
Jan Lewis is an assistant professor in the Theater Department at Weslayan College. She has written on the plays of Wendy Wasserstein and the performances
of vaudevillians Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice. She also works in professional
theater as a dramaturg, director, and producer; has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; and has served on theater grants panels for
the California Arts Council, the Nevada State Council on the Arts, and the
Los Angeles County Arts Commission.
Deborah Dash Moore is Frederick G. L. Heutwell Professor of History and
the director of the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the
University of Michigan. Her publications include At Home in America: Second
Generation New York Jews (1981); To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (1994); Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images
(2001), co-authored with Howard Rock; and, most recently, GI Jews: How
World War II Changed a Generation (2004).
MacDonald Moore is the author of Yankee Blues: Musical Culture and American Identity (1985), a study of overlapping social and aesthetic valuation in musical life of the United States after World War I. Mr. Moore was president of
New York Digital Recording, Inc., from 1983 to 1997. He has taught at Vassar
College and currently teaches in the American Culture and Judaic Studies
programs at the University of Michigan. He is working on a book, The Jazz
Singer:You Ain’t Heard Nothin’, Nor Seen Much Either.
Andrea Most is an assistant professor of American literature and Jewish studies in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her first book,
Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical, was published in 2004,
and she is currently at work on a new book entitled Acting Jewish: Jews, SelfRepresentation and the American Dream.
Rebecca Rossen is a dancer, choreographer, and dance historian based in
Chicago. She has served on the faculties of George Mason University, Northwestern University, and the Dance Center of Columbia College, and recently
earned her doctorate from Northwestern’s Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in
Theatre and Drama, with a certificate in gender studies. She has produced several dances based on her research that investigate Jewishness, including Sarah
Bernhardt’s Tosca (1999), Make Me a Jewish Dance (2000), and Dancing Jew Ish
(2002).
Donald Weber is Lucia, Ruth, and Elizabeth MacGregor Professor of English
at Mount Holyoke College. His articles and essays on Jewish American literature
322
Contributors
and culture have appeared in the Forward and many other publications. He is
the author of Haunted in the New World: Jewish American Culture from Cahan to
“The Goldbergs” (2005).
Ruth Weisberg is the dean of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. She has had over 70 solo and 165 group exhibitions, and her work is
included in sixty major museum and university collections, including the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New
York, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago,
and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Recent honors have included the
Golda Meir Award, Israel Bonds, 2005; Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris
causa, Hebrew Union College, 2001; College Art Association Distinguished
Teaching of Art Award 1999; National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar in 1994; and a Senior Research Fulbright for Italy in 1992.
Inde x
Aaron, Caroline, 66ill
ABBA, 97
Abraham, Pearl, 17
Ace in the Hole (film), 5
Achron, Joseph, 120
Adams, Ansel, 179, 181
Adams, Joey, 257ill
Adorno,Theodor, 160, 236
Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 311, 316n50
Akiba (rabbi), 164
Albright, Ann Cooper, 146, 151n10
Aleichem, Sholem, 71, 72
Alexander, Jason, 303
All American Girl (TV show), 265
Alland, Alexander, 197
Allen,Woody, 22, 146, 205, 207,
212–216, 219–221, 225–227, 237, 241,
253, 255, 269n4, 280, 307
Along Came Polly (film), 244, 245
Alpern, Merry, 198
Alpert, Michael, 125, 126
Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay,
The (Chabon), 18, 19–21
American Pie (film), 241
Amiran, Emanuel, 127
Amos ’n’ Andy (TV show), 301, 302,
314n19
Amsterdam, Morey, 243, 257ill
Amy’s O (film), 205, 207, 216–220, 222,
226, 227, 229n38
Analyze That (film), 244
Analyze This (film), 244, 245
Anderson, Benedict, 110
Anger Management (film), 242, 244, 245
Annie Hall (film), 22, 207, 212–216,
219, 221
Anniston, Jennifer, 244
Ansky, Solomon (Shloyme Zanul Rappoport), 88–92
Anti-Defamation League, 140
anti-Dreyfusards, 167
Antin, Eleanor, 198
antisemitism, 23–25, 36n10, 44, 45, 65,
66, 79, 114, 117n30, 121, 126, 140,
143, 158, 167, 208, 212, 231, 232, 236,
243, 278, 286, 296n50, 298, 303, 308,
310–312, 316n50, 316–317n55
Antler, Joyce, 302
Anything But Love (film), 301
Anything Else (film), 241, 244
Apartment,The (film), 5
Apatow, Judd, 307, 316n44
Aptekar, Ken, 165
Arbus, Diane, 156, 177–179, 183, 184,
188, 189, 193, 194, 196–198,
202–203n57, 203n58
Arlen, Harold, 96n1, 107
Armstrong, Samaire, 291
Arnett,Will, 284
Arnold, Eve, 197
Aron, Bill, 171
Arrested Development (TV show), 273,
274, 277, 278, 284–289, 293, 294n5,
296nn38, 41, 43, 300
Austen, Alice, 199n2
Avedon, Richard, 183, 184, 197, 198
Aviv, Caryn, 3
Aylon, Helene, 165
323
324
Bachelard, Gaston, 41–42, 46, 52
Baigell, Matthew, 162
Baird, Zoë, 68
Baitz, Jon Robin, 55
Ballantine, Carl, 269n7
Barnam, Paul, 237
Barney Miller (TV show), 278
Barth, Belle, 268n1
Barthes, Roland, 175n18
Barton, Mischa, 290
Bateman, Jason, 284
Baudelaire, Charles, 180
Baudrillard, Jean, 2, 7, 8, 14, 36n20,
175n18
Baylos, Gene, 257ill, 269n7
Bean, Henry, 2–3, 298, 316n53
Beastie Boys (musical group), 237
Beckett, Samuel, 148
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 266
Believer,The (film), 2, 316n53
Bell, Daniel, 1
Bellow, Saul, 213
Ben David, Mordechai, 107, 129
Ben Gurion, David, 2, 4
Ben-Haim, Paul, 111, 127
Benjamin,Walter, 7, 36n20, 77–79,
81, 91, 156, 160, 164, 180, 181,
201n30
Benny, Jack, 243, 306
Benson, Bruce, 107
Berg, Gertrude, 203n63, 249n4
Berger, John, 178
Berle, Milton, 22, 249n5, 253, 255,
256–258, 261, 262ill, 266, 269n5,
270nn14, 15
Berlin, Irving, 95, 96, 120
Berman, Marshall, 163
Berman, Shelly, 256, 270n15
Bernhard, Sandra, 237, 265
Bernstein, Elmer, 96n1
Bernstein, Leonard, 95, 108, 120
Bernstein, Steven, 103
Bernie Mac Show,The (TV show), 307
Best Years of Our Lives,The (film), 5
Bezmozgis, David, 17
Index
Bhabha, Homi, 205, 207, 209–212, 214,
224, 225, 227, 293
Biale, David, 2, 6, 212, 214–216
Big Daddy (film), 242
Biggs, Jason, 206, 241, 242, 244,
251nn29, 33
Billy Madison (film), 242
Bilski, Emily, 159
Bilson, Rachel, 290, 291ill
Binder, Abraham Wolf, 101
Bin Laden, Osama, 310
Black, Lewis, 255
Blazing Saddles (film), 5, 235
Blecher, Miriam, 139
Bloch, Ernest, 108, 119, 120
Blood of Abraham (musical group),
107, 237
Bloom, Dan, 301
Bloom, Harold, 76
Blue Fringe (musical group), 107
Bock, Jerry, 58, 71, 96n1, 103
Boelhower,William, 56, 59, 60
Boles,William C., 74n27
Borscht Belt/Catskills, 125, 255–257,
261, 264, 269n7, 270n15, 300
Boskovitch, Alexander Uriah, 111, 127
Boudreaux, Matt, 85ill
Bourdieu, Pierre, 106
Bowen, Jose, 107
Bozell, L. Brent, 317n56
Brandeis, Louis, 230
Brandt, Bill, 199n2
Brantley, Ben, 71, 72
Brassai, 176, 199n2
Brauntuch,Troy, 164
Brecht, Bertolt, 56, 76–79
Brice, Fanny, 268n1
Bridget Loves Bernie (TV show), 278, 314n18
Brin Ingber, Judith, 139
Brodkin, Karen, 73n7
Brodovitch, Alexey, 185, 186
Brody, Adam, 278, 288, 291ill
Bromberg, Ellen, 11
Brook,Vincent, 1–15, 291, 298–317
Brooklyn Babylon (film), 205
Index
Brooks, Mel, 5, 95, 205, 235, 256
Bruce, Lenny, 179, 197, 253, 255, 264,
265, 270n15
Budin, Noah, 106
Bukiet, Melvin Jules, 17
Burckhardt, Rudy, 197
Burns, George, 306
Burns and Allen Show,The (TV show),
283, 306
Burstein, Janet, 8, 18, 37–54
Buruma, Ian, 158
Bush, George W., 78
Butler, Brett, 307, 308, 310
Butler, Judith, 8, 56, 60, 73n14, 149,
210, 211
Buttons, Red, 257ill, 269n7
Byers, Michele, 8, 274–297
Caesar, Sid, 249n5, 257ill, 261, 269n7
Cahan, Abraham, The Rise of David
Levinsky, 4
Cantor, Eddie, 140, 143, 151n13, 243
Capa, Robert, 180
Caputo, John, 10
Cardozo, Benjamin Nathan, 87
Car 54,Where Are You? (TV show), 280
Carlebach, Shlomo, 111, 112, 115n8,
130, 132n10
Carlin, Jeff, 278
Carson, Johnny, 310
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 176, 199n2
Castle,Terry, 221
Celan, Paul, 37
Cembalist, Robin, 301
Cera, Michael, 285
Chabon, Michael, 17, 18, 19–21
Chagall, Marc, 159, 167
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 305
Charcot, J. M., 167
Chassidism in America: A Life Apart
(film), 205
Chernin, Kim (also Rose Chernin),
39–41, 42, 43, 48, 49, 52
Chicken Soup (TV show), 300, 301
Cho, Margaret, 265
325
City for Conquest (film), 187
City Slickers (film), 235
Clark, Laurie Beth, 11
Clinton, Bill, 68
Coffy (film), 239
Cohen, Joshua, 269n4
Cohen, Judah M., 9, 11, 95–118
Cohen, Rich, 144
Cohen, Richard I., 166, 167
Cohen, Stephen M., 61, 316n51
Cohn, Leah, 17
Cohn, Richard, 116n22
Cohn, Roy, 78, 79, 81, 83, 93n6, 230
Coleman, A. D., 184, 198
Collins, Jim, 7, 8, 273
Comden, Betty, 96n1
Commission on the Future of Jewish
Culture, 1, 14n21
Connelly, Jennifer, 230
Copland, Aaron, 95
Cortazar, Julio, 187
Cowin, Eileen, 198
Crockett, Davy, 256, 264
Croner,Ted, 197
Cross, David, 278, 285
Crumb, R. (Robert), 21–23, 24ill
Cruz, Nilo, 61
Crystal, Billy, 235, 244, 245, 253,
256–266, 269n7, 270n24
Culture Clash (theater ensemble), 61
Curb Your Enthusiasm (TV show), 177,
256, 273, 274, 277–285, 288, 292, 293,
294n5, 295nn20–23, 30, 34, 300, 306
Daily Show,The (TV show), 231
Dale, Alan, 288
Dangerfield, Rodney, 255
Danner, Blythe, 236
Dante Alighieri, 172, 173
David, Larry, 177, 230, 256, 278–284,
293, 295nn18, 34, 306, 307
David, Laurie, 281
Davidson, Bruce, 198
Davis, Julie, 216
Davka (musical group), 116n16
326
Dayan, Moshe, 248
DeLauretis,Teresa, 38
Deleuze, Giles, 274, 279
Denby, David, 259
De Niro, Robert, 236
de Rossi, Portia, 284
Derrida, Jacques, 10, 17, 175n18
Dershowitz, Alan, 232, 233, 249n6
Dharma and Greg (TV show), 274, 300
Diaspora Yeshiva Band (musical
group), 107
Dickstein, Morris, 17, 37
Diller, Barry, 315n36
Divan,The (film), 206n2
Dmytryk, Edward, 5
Doane, Mary Ann, 215, 223
Donahue,William, 312
Doob, Lisa, 116n22
Doré, Gustave, 167
Dorfman, David, 135, 137, 138,
140–150, 253
Doty, Alexander, 290, 317n59
Dreisinger, Baz, 239, 240
Drescher, Fran, 301, 302
Dretzin, Julie, 89ill
Du Bois,W.E.B., 200n21
Dylan, Bob, 12, 96n1, 231
Eagle, Arnold, 197
Easterbrook, Greg, 312, 317n56
Edelman, Marsha Bryan, 9, 11, 96,
119–133
Eder, Alan, 107
Ed Sullivan Show,The (TV show), 258
Eight Crazy Nights (film), 242, 243,
244ill, 248
Einstein, Albert, 3, 7, 230
Eisenberg, Jewlia, 104
Eisler, Hanns, 96n1
Eisner, Michael, 315n36, 317n56
Eisner,Will, 34n2
Elfman, Danny, 96n1
Elizabeth, Shannon, 242ill
Ellison, Ralph, 20
Elman, Ziggy, 120
Index
Engel, Morris, 197
Engelberg, Karen, 72
Englander, Nathan, 17
Epstein, Helen, 41, 43, 44, 54n20
Epstein, Lawrence, 293
Epstein, Mitch, 198
Erdman, Harley, 56, 59, 60, 140
Essman, Susie, 278, 295nn20, 22, 23
Etan G., 108
Evans,Walker, 187, 199n2
Everitt, David, 280
Everwood (TV show), 274
Everybody Loves Raymond (TV show), 307
Ewige Jude, Der (The Eternal Jew)
(film), 24
Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, 37, 48, 53nn7, 8
Family Affair, A (film), 205, 207, 216–220,
222, 226, 227, 229n38
Farm Security Administration (FSA), 176
Fiddler on the Roof (musical play), 4, 58,
70–72, 95, 97, 103, 111
Fields,Totie, 268n1
Fierstein, Harvey, 233
50 First Dates (film), 242
50shekel (musical group), 108
Finger, Bill, 18, 19
Fink, Larry, 198
Finn,William, 56n4
Fischer, Ernst, 77–79
Fisher, Eddie, 190, 257ill
Fisher, James, 8, 56, 76–94
Foer, Jonathan Safran, 17
Fool’s Gold (film), 205
Ford, Harrison, 230
Ford, Henry, 231
Foreman, Richard, 77
Forti, Simone, 139
Foster, Hal, 7, 8, 9, 164
Foucault, Michel, 102, 175n18, 222
Foulkes, Julia, 139
Frank, Robert, 176, 179, 183, 184, 197
Frankfurt School, 7, 160
Franklin, Ruth, 71, 72
Freed, Arthur, 96n1
Index
Freed, Isadore, 101
Freed, Leonard, 197
Freedman, Jonathan, 249n6
Freedman, Samuel, 245
Freud, Anna, 298
Freud, Sigmund, 3, 6, 7, 12, 54n20,
161–163, 205, 207, 208, 210, 211, 215,
298, 307
Friedberg, Anne, 7
Friedlander, Lee, 182
Friedman, Bruce Jay, 259
Friedman, Debbie, 124, 130
Friedman, Kinky, 106
Friends (TV show), 274, 291, 300,
315n29
Froot, Dan, 11, 135, 137, 138,
140–150, 253
Furman, Andrew, 53n1
Galchinsky, Michael, 2
Gallagher, Peter, 288
Gaon,Vilna, 39–40
Gardner, Herb, 55
Garofalo, Janeane, 306
Garron, Barry, 283
Gayle, Jackie, 269n7
Geertz, Clifford, 151n18
Geffen, David, 315n36
Gehry, Frank, 175n18
George,Waldemar, 160
Gershwin, George, 95, 96n1, 107, 120,
121, 237
Gibbs,Terry, 107
Gibson, Mel, 168, 310
Gilden, Bruce, 198
Gilman, Sander, 137, 140, 214, 301,
305, 312
Ginsburgh, Judy Caplan, 107
Glass, Philip, 95
Glenn, Susan, 301
Gödel, Kurt, 7
Goldberg, Adam, 238, 247ill
Goldberg, J. J., 245
Goldberg, Naomi, 84
Goldberg,Vicki, 197
327
Goldbergs,The (radio and TV show), 4,
190, 203n63, 232, 249n4, 278
Goldblum, Jeff, 233–235, 241, 245, 247
Goldfarb, Israel, 112
Goldin, Nan, 156, 177, 178, 191–193,
195, 196, 198, 199, 203n70, 204n73
Goldman, Albert, 258–260, 270n15, 307
Goldman, Emma, 230
Goldsmith, Jerry, 96n1
Goldstein, Eric L., 58
Goldstein, Rebecca, 17, 48–50, 52
Goodheart, Eugene, 38
Goodman, Allegra, 1, 17, 175n33
Goodman, Benny, 107
Gopnik, Adam, 256
Gordon, David, 135, 139, 151n9
Gotanda, Philip Kan, 61
Gottlieb, Adolph, 5, 162
Gould, David, 107
Graduate,The (film), 251n29
Graff, Ellen, 139
Graff, Randy, 71
Gramsci, Antonio, 313n2
Grant, Ulysses S., 68
Graves, Michael, 175n18
Green, Adolph, 96n1
Green, Johnny, 96n1
Green, Seth, 241
Greenberg, Clement, 162
Greenberg, Irving, 173–174
Greenberg, Richard, 55
Greenfield, Lauren, 156, 177, 194,
195, 198
Grossberg, Lawrence, 12, 306
Grossman, Sid, 197
Grotowski, Adam, 305
Gugenheim, Peggy, 162
Guthrie,Tyrone, 55
Habermas, Jürgen, 7, 8
Hackett, Buddy, 255
Haft, Nina, 11
Hale,Tony, 284
Halprin, Anna, 150n9
Hamlisch, Marvin, 96n1, 125, 308
328
Index
Hammerstein, Oscar, 96n1
Hannah and Her Sisters (film), 226
Harburg,Yip, 96n1, 120
Harnick, Sheldon, 58, 71–72, 96n1, 103
Hart, Lorenz, 95, 96n1, 120
Hartley, Mariette, 66ill
Havazelet, Ehud, 17
Havis, Allan, 55
Hay, Deborah (née Goldensohn), 139
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 167
Haza, Ofra, 127
Hebrew Hammer,The (film), 106, 206, 238,
240, 247, 248
Heeb magazine, 237, 240–241
Heisenberg,Werner, 7
Hellman, Lillian, 73n18
Hendrix, Jimi, 106
Henley, Robin, 17
Herman, Michelle, 17
Herman-Wurmfield, Charles, 216,
229n38
Heschel, Susannah, 2
Hidary,Vanessa “Hebrew Mamita,” 108
Hine, Lewis Wickes, 199n2
Hines, Cheryl, 281ill
Hip Hop Hoodíos (musical group),
108, 237
Hirsch, Judd, 233, 235
Hirsch, Marianne, 41
Hirsch, Nurit, 112
Hirszenberg, Samuel, 167
Hitler, Adolf, 78
Hoberman, J., 1
Hoffman, Dustin, 236, 251n29
Hoffman, Eva, 41, 45–46, 47, 54n24
Holert,Tom, 203n70
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 87, 200n20
Holocaust, 11, 23–26, 37–54, 91, 104,
112, 121, 131, 139, 151n9, 166, 168,
191, 200n16, 205, 209, 231, 248, 283,
299, 303, 311, 316n50
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 53n6
Horkheimer, Max, 236
Horn, Dara, 17, 18
Horowitz, Channa, 171
Houston,Valina Hasu, 61
Howe, Irving, 6, 17, 18, 249n5, 251n36
Hurst, Fanny, 38
Hurwitz, Michael, 278
Hutcheon, Linda, 7, 8
Huyssens, Andreas, 7, 8, 9
Hwang, David Henry, 61
Idelsohn, Abraham Zvi (Z.), 105,
109, 110
I’ll Be Your Mirror (art exhibit and
film), 192
Independence Day (film), 206, 233–236,
241, 247, 248
Isaacson, Michael, 116n23
Isle of Klezbos/Metropolitan Klezmer
(musical group), 105
Israel, 11, 12, 18, 96, 108, 109, 111, 112,
118n43, 119, 122, 123, 126, 127, 131,
133n20, 172, 191, 231, 246, 248,
250n8, 266–268, 310–312, 316n50
It’s a Wonderful Life (film), 239
It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (TV show),
306, 307
It’s Like,You Know . . . (TV show), 289
Itzkovitz, Daniel, 9, 10, 206, 230–251
Ivry, Sara, 270n24
Jack Benny Program,The (TV show),
283, 306
Jackpot Bowling (TV show), 258
Jackson, Naomi, 135, 139, 140
James, Henry, 178
Jameson, Fredric, 7, 8, 175n18
Jardine, Alice, 209
Jazz Singer,The (film), 138, 247
Jeffrey, Daniel, 296n50
Jencks, Charles, 7, 14n28
Jenkins, Henry, 151n13
Jenkins, Margaret, 140
Jeopardy (TV show), 313
Jesus Christ, 313, 317n60
Jewish culture/identity: and Abayudaya,
110–111, 117–118n39; and aniconic/
idolatry prohibition, 31–34, 201n34;
Index
and art criticism, 160–162, 164, 165;
and assimilation, 19, 157, 166, 210,
233, 278, 284–286, 302; and Blacks, 5,
59, 69, 70, 79, 107, 108, 111, 117n28,
121, 140, 146, 165, 171, 179, 206,
233–235, 237–240, 247, 248, 263, 300,
303, 305, 306, 308, 309, 315n34; and
the body, 19, 21–34, 36n22, 137–141,
145, 146, 148, 149, 215, 278, 301,
303–305; and chameleonism/passing,
237, 250n15; and Christianity, 77, 79,
80, 82, 100, 102, 106, 128, 158, 163,
166, 217, 233, 235, 239, 243, 249n6,
250n8, 283, 288, 290, 291, 295n29,
298, 300, 308, 310, 312, 317n56; and
class, 179, 184, 189, 190, 216, 245, 258,
263, 278, 287–289, 293, 301; and
comic books, 18–23, 35nn5, 6, 8; and
crypto/inferred Jews, 286; and dance,
9, 84, 135–153; and (D)diaspora/exile,
37–54, 62, 127, 166, 168, 179, 182,
305; and the dybbuk, 88–91, 121; and
Eastern Europe/Ashkenazim, 18, 20,
25, 39–41, 43, 45–50, 52, 67, 68, 71,
83, 84, 86, 87, 96, 104, 111, 113, 119,
121, 123, 124, 126, 129, 138, 139, 161,
167, 283, 301; and emancipation period, 158, 299; and Enlightenment
( Jewish enlightenment/haskalah), 50,
58, 160, 209; and ethical dimension,
205, 211, 212, 227; and fashion, 183,
184, 240; and film, 1, 5, 205–229,
232–251, 253, 256, 265; and gangsters,
136, 141, 143, 144, 187; and gays/
lesbians, 56, 76, 78, 79, 84, 93n6,
218–227, 233, 243, 290, 305, 306,
315nn35, 36; and Germany/Nazis, 42,
44–47, 102, 103, 109, 121, 129, 130,
158, 159, 161, 164, 208, 230, 298, 303,
313; and the golem, 11, 20; and graphic
novels, 10, 17, 19–36; and Hebrew,
124, 127, 128; and immigrants/
immigration, 18, 37–54, 87, 88, 121,
172, 301; and intermarriage, 1, 235,
281, 288, 289, 300, 311; and the
329
Internet, 206, 230–232; and the Jewish
American Princess ( JAP), 65, 68, 215,
216, 219, 240, 241, 285, 301; and the
“Jewish Question,” 4, 180, 182, 208,
209; and jokes, 205, 207–229; and the
Jewish mother (mamaleh,“Yiddishe
Momme”), 71, 190, 218, 258, 259, 285,
301; and Ladinos, 59, 104, 127, 128,
129; and literature, 1, 6, 10, 17–54, 231;
and Los Angeles/Southern California,
171, 194, 195, 216, 220, 226, 278, 280,
282, 288, 289, 293; and Luftmensch, 3,
6; and memoirs, 18, 37–54; and men/
masculinity, 19, 20, 135–153, 206, 214,
215, 241–245, 289, 293, 295n29; and
“metaphorical Jew,” 56, 76, 77, 81, 84,
85, 93; and the Middle East (Mizrachi),
96, 104, 109, 111, 126, 127, 131;
and music, 1, 9, 77, 84, 95–135, 141,
144, 145, 147ill, 148, 232, 237; and
muskeljuden (muscle Jews), 238; and
“new Jew,” 236, 239, 245, 246, 248; and
New York City, 27, 28, 31–33, 66, 67,
77, 81, 87, 97, 108, 111, 127, 130, 143,
145, 146, 149, 165, 171, 176–179,
181–190, 192, 193ill, 195, 197, 199ill,
199n2, 201n38, 202n51, 213, 217, 220,
226, 256, 259, 262, 265, 269n5, 282,
289, 302, 303; and Orange County/
Newport Beach, 277, 287–290, 293,
296n51; and painting, 5, 9, 155–175;
and other (non-Black) ethnicities, 59,
61, 121, 206, 236, 246, 285, 296n41;
and performance art, 97, 135,
140–150, 253; and photography, 156,
176–204; and politics/social justice, 6,
37, 40–43, 49, 56, 61, 73nn16, 18,
76–78, 89, 105, 138, 160, 161, 176,
180, 191, 209, 232, 236, 246, 253; and
population percentage, 161, 245,
316n51; and schlemiel/schlimazel/
nebbish, 212, 214, 216, 219, 226, 238,
241–245, 258, 262, 280, 281, 294n17,
300, 302; and self-hatred, 21–23, 67,
78, 93n6, 259, 280, 298–313;
330
Index
Jewish culture/identity (continued )
and sensibility, 62, 156, 182, 279, 284;
and “shiksa,” 190, 301; and the South,
77, 79, 81; and Spain/Sephardim, 87,
108, 111; and stand-up comedy, 219,
237, 253–271; and stereotypes, 63–65,
67, 71, 72, 140, 141, 143–145,
148–150, 215, 216, 219, 240, 285, 286,
288, 289, 292, 296n49, 300–303, 306;
and suburbia, 190, 191, 193, 278, 288;
and “Super Jew,” 206, 238, 246; and
television, 232, 253, 256, 258, 261, 264,
265, 273–317; and theater, 5, 55–94,
253; and vaudeville, 136, 137, 145–147,
237; and Wandering Jew, 166, 167; and
WASPs, 22, 64, 81, 239, 281, 288, 289,
296n46, 302; and Whiteness, 19, 20,
140, 230, 236, 246, 247, 278, 286, 287,
295n21, 296n41, 308; and
women/feminism, 18, 21–23, 24ill,
37–54, 63–70, 189, 193, 205, 214–227,
229n38, 268n1, 281–283, 285, 302,
315n34. See also antisemitism; Borscht
Belt/Catskills; Holocaust; Israel;
Judaism;Yiddish/Yiddishkait
Jewish Defense League, 311
Jewish Workers Bund, 161
Johnny Carson Show,The (TV show),
309
John Paul II (pope), 310
Johnson, Carla, 294n17
Johnson, Penny, 308
Johnston, Ruth D., 3, 205–229
Jolson, Al, 138, 237
Jordan,Will, 269n7
Josephs, Susan, 152n32
Judaism, 1, 2, 5, 6, 10, 22, 28–34, 36n24,
39, 40, 41, 43, 51, 52, 56, 57, 62–65,
67–70, 76–79, 81, 82, 86, 88–93,
97–103, 105, 106, 112–114, 115nn7, 8,
10, 116nn13, 17, 22, 23, 120, 122–124,
128–131, 132nn2, 9, 10, 133nn19, 20,
144, 145, 160–163, 167, 170–172, 174,
175, 180, 190, 201nn33, 34, 205,
206n2, 213, 217, 218, 221, 231, 235,
239, 243, 245, 248, 266–268, 281,
283–285, 288, 290, 291, 292, 298, 308,
309, 312
Judd, Donald, 163
Juggler,The (film), 5
Jung, Carl, 162, 174n10
Kaeja, Allen, 11
Kafka, Franz, 298, 307, 316n42
Kahn, Barbara, 55
Kahn, Louis, 175n18
Kahn, Sammy, 96n1
Kahn,Tobi, 171, 172ill
Kamler, Richard, 11
Kane, Bob, 18, 19
Kant, Immanuel, 180
Kapelye (musical group), 125
Kaplan, Alice Yaeger, 54n24
Kaplan, Mordecai, 5
Karen, Donna, 183
Katchor, Ben, 4, 10, 18, 21, 27–34
Katz, Mickey, 125, 264
Kaye, Danny, 243
Kelly, Gene, 145
Kelman, Ari, 294n7
Kennedy, John F., 78
Kern, Jerome, 95, 96n1
Kesselman, Jonathan, 238, 247, 248
King, Alan, 253, 255, 258, 269n4
Kinison, Sam, 263
Kirby, Jack, 18, 19
Kissing Jessica Stein (film), 205, 207, 216,
221–227, 229n38
Kitaj, R. B., 1, 155, 167, 168, 169ill
Klee, Paul, 81
Kleeblatt, Norman, 11, 155, 156, 157,
165, 277
Klein, Calvin, 183
Klein, Dennis, 309, 310, 312, 316n49
Klein, Robert, 255
Klein,William, 176, 179, 183, 184, 186,
197, 198
Klepper, Jeffrey, 107, 124
Kletka Red (musical group), 103
Klezmatics,The (musical group), 84
Index
Klezmer Conservatory Band (musical
group), 125
Klezmer Mountain Boys (musical
group), 107
Kligman, Mark, 101
Kline, Franz, 163
Kominsky(-Crumb), Aline, 18, 20,
21–23, 24ill, 34
Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, 96n1
Koskoff, Ellen, 113
Koussevitzky, Moshe, 103
Kozloff, Max, 156, 177, 178, 180, 183,
187, 197, 198, 199n5, 201n33
Krakauer, David, 107
Krakowski,Wolf, 104
Kraus, Rosalind, 164
Krieger, Rosalin, 9, 274–297
Kristeva, Julia, 4, 175n18, 208
Kristallnacht (record album), 103
Kruger, Barbara, 165, 198
Kugelmass, Jack, 4
Kun, Josh, 264
Kushner,Tony, 1, 9, 55, 56, 76–95,
175n33
Kuspit, Donald, 165, 169
Lacan, Jacques, 175n18
LaCapra, Dominick, 54n20
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 4, 208,
212, 227
Lahr, John, 260
Lamos, Mark, 89ill
Lane, Anthony, 179
Lang, Pearl, 139
Lange, Dorothea, 204n89
Langham,Wallace, 305
Lapine, James, 56n4
Lapson, Dvora, 139
Larry Sanders Show,The (TV show), 273,
274, 279, 299, 300, 304–310, 312, 313
Larson, Heikki, 85ill
Lauren, Ralph, 183
Lavin, Linda, 292
Lavry, Marc, 127
Lebedoff, Aaron, 259
331
LeBow, Barbara, 55
Lee, Anthony, 189
Lee, Stan, 18, 19
Lehman, Ernest, 5
Leguizamo, John, 265
Leiber, Jerry, 96n1
Leibowitz, Annie, 198
Leiter, Saul, 197, 202n55
Leonard, Jackie, 269n7
Lepkoff, Rebecca, 197
Lerman, Liz, 1, 135, 140
Lerner, Alan Jay, 96n1, 120
Lerner, Gerda, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48
Lesniak, Helen, 216
Leveaux, David, 70–72
Levenson, Sam, 257ill
Leverett, Margot, 107
Levinas, Emmanuel, 10
Levine, Jack, 162
Levine, Joseph, 132n11
Levine, Sherrie, 164, 165, 198
Levinson, Barry, 116n23
Levinstein, Leon, 183, 198
Levitt, Helen, 197
Levitt, Laura, 43, 197, 199n6, 201n33
Lewandowski, Louis, 99, 130
Lewis, Jan, 5, 55–75
Lewis, Jerry, 269n7
Lewis, Joe E., 257ill
Lewis, Richard, 278, 279, 295n18, 301
Liberty Heights (film), 106, 116n23
Libsohn, Sol, 197
Lichtenstein, Roy, 163
Lieberman, Joseph, 168
Lieberman, Rhonda, 285
Liebermann, Max, 159
Liebman, Charles, 61
Lindbergh, Charles, 238
Lipton, Eunice, 167, 168
Lloyd, Robert, 274
Loeb, Philip, 249n4
Loewe, Frederick, 95, 96n1
London, Frank, 107
Longo, Robert, 164, 165
Louis-Dreyfus, Julia, 303
332
Index
Love and Death (film), 215
Luce, Henry, 176
Lucio, Shannon, 290
Lyotard, Jean-François, 4, 7,
175n18, 208
McCarthy, Senator Joseph R./
McCarthyism, 78
McCluhan, Marshall, 212
McKenzie, Benjamin, 288
McMurtrey, Joan, 66ill
Mad About You (TV show), 274, 300, 302,
315n29
Madonna, 12, 118n50, 231
Maher, Bill, 256
Mailer, Norman, 231, 232
Maisel, Jennifer, 55
Malamud, Bernard, 213
Malpede, Karen, 55
Mamet, David, 55, 62
Manhattan (film), 226
Mann, Emily, 55
Manne, Shelly, 107, 109
Marcuse, Herbert, 160
Margulies, Donald, 55
Marjorie Morningstar (book and film), 4
Mark, Mary Ellen, 183, 198
Marks,Victoria, 135, 152n24
Maron, Marc, 8, 253, 255, 265–268
Marx, Groucho, 216
Marx, Karl/Marxism, 2, 73n16, 77, 162,
182, 230, 313n2
Marx Brothers, 238
Maslow, Sophie, 135, 139
Mason, Jackie, 243, 258, 269n6,
300–303
Matisyahu, 107
Mayer, Michael, 93
Mayfield, Curtis, 239
Medved, Harry, 205
Me and Molly (Berg), 203n63
Meet the Fockers (film), 236, 241
Meet the Parents (film), 241
Meige, Henri, 167
Melnick, Jeffrey, 107
Memories of Me (film), 258
Messingers (musical group), 123
Metropolitan Klezmer/Isle of Klezbos
(musical group), 105
Meyerowitz, Joel, 183
Miami Vice (TV show), 274
Michael, Ras, 107
Miller, Arthur, 5, 55, 61, 62, 74n19, 190
Mirvis,Tova, 18
Mr. Saturday Night (film), 253, 256–265
Mitchell, Joni, 127
Model, Evsa, 184
Model, Lisette, 156, 176, 177, 181, 183,
184–189, 197, 202n47
Modena, Leon de, 99
Mohamad, Mahathir, 311, 316n50
Molina, Alfred, 71
Molly (film), 203n63
Monk, Meredith, 139
Monroe, Marilyn, 189, 190, 193
Moonlighting (TV show), 273
Moore, Charles, 175n18
Moore, Deborah Dash, 8, 12, 156,
176–204
Moore, MacDonald, 8, 156, 176–204
Morning Star Commission, 301
Moses, 230
Most, Andrea, 4, 9, 10, 18, 19–54
Mostel, Zero, 71
M.O.T. (musical group), 107
Motherwell, Robert, 162
Munkacsi, Martin, 184, 199n2
Murray, Jan, 257ill, 269n7
Nachman, Gerald, 256
Nagler, Richard, 198
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 4, 208, 212, 227
Nanny,The (TV show), 274, 300–302,
315n29
Napoleon Bonaparte/Napoleonic
era, 158
National Foundation for Jewish Culture
(NFJC), 1, 171, 175n34
National Jewish Center for Leadership
and Learning, 174
Index
Nattel, Lilian, 48, 49–52
Nemerov, Howard, 198
Netzky, Hankus, 125
Neugroschel, Joachim, 90
Nevelson, Louise, 5
Newman, Alfred, 96n1
Newman, Barnett, 5, 162, 163
Newman, Randy, 96n1
Newton, Huey, 247
New York Photo League (and Workers
Film and Photo League), 176, 182,
183, 184, 201–202n38
New York School (of photography), 176,
177, 179, 182, 197, 199n2
Nicholas II, czar, 231
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 162, 174n10
Nini, Achinoam (also Noa), 127
Northern Exposure (TV show), 273
Northern State (musical group), 237
Nossig, Alfred, 167
333
performance/performativity, 60, 67,
136, 143, 145–150, 205, 210, 211, 227,
237, 282
Pharaoh’s Daughter (musical group), 105
Phillips, Adam, 263
Pi (film), 205
Piamenta,Yosi, 106
Pimsler, Stuart, 135, 140
Pinter, Harold, 190
Pissarro, Camille, 159
Plachy, Sylvia, 198
Plato, 180
Pogrebin, Letty Cottin, 1
Pollock, Jackson, 162, 163
Polykoff, Shirley, 189, 190, 203n59
Popkin, Henry, 205, 232, 249n5
Portnoy’s Complaint (film), 5
postmodern(ism), 2–13, 14n26, 17, 18,
20, 21, 23, 27, 32, 34, 38, 56, 59–63, 70,
72, 76, 80, 82–84, 88, 90–92, 95–99,
108, 113, 114, 120, 123, 124, 126,
O.C.,The (TV show), 274, 277, 278,
129–131, 135, 137–140, 147, 148, 155,
283–286, 288–293, 296nn46, 49, 52, 53
157, 163–166, 168, 170, 174, 205–209,
Odd Couple,The (TV show), 5
227, 236, 237, 240, 241, 243, 246, 273,
Odets, Clifford, 61, 73n19, 81
274, 277, 279, 282, 287, 289, 293, 304,
Oirich, Alan, 35n6
310
Olin, Margaret, 160, 162
Potok, Chaim, 316n45
O’Neal, Shaquille, 281
Prell, Riv-Ellen, 75n64, 215
O’Neill, Eugene, 61, 73n19
Previn, Ira, 96n1
Opel, Nancy, 71
Price Above Rubies, A (film), 205
Orkin, Ruth, 197
Prince, Richard, 165
Ovitz, Michael, 315n36
Princess Superstar, 237
Owens, Craig, 164
Producers,The (film), 256
Pryor, Richard, 265
Palestine, see Israel
Punch Drunk Love (film), 242, 245
Paley, Grace, 231
Pushkin, Alexander, 86
Parents Television Council, 312, 317n56
Parker, Fess, 264
Rabbis’ Sons (musical group), 123
Parker, Sarah Jessica, 230
Rabin,Yitzchak, 311
Parks, Suzan-Lori, 61
Rainer,Yvonne, 139
Partos, Odeon, 127
Rand, Archie, 155
Passion of the Christ,The (film), 168, 310
Raphael,Victor, 171
Peet, Amanda, 242
Rapoport, Nessa, 17
Peis, Judith, 302
Rashi, 164
Pellegrini, Ann, 215
Ray, Man, 184
334
Index
Reagan, Ronald, 78, 87
Recht, Rick, 107
Reich, Steve, 1, 95
Reinelt, Janelle, 59, 60
Reiner, Rob, 295n18
Reinhart, Charles, 151n23
Return of Sarah’s Daughter,The (film), 205
Rhoda (TV show), 278, 314n18
Rice, Elmer, 61
Richards, Eugene, 198
Rickles, Don, 255, 266
Riis, Jacob, 199n2
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 221, 223
Ritts, Herb, 198
Ritz Brothers, 269n7
Rivers, Joan, 268n1
Roach, Joseph, 59, 60
Robbins, Jerome, 72, 139
Rock, Chris, 263
Rodgers, Richard, 95, 96n1, 120
Roediger, David, 200n22
Rogin, Michael, 247
Roman, Freddy, 255
Rondinella, La (musical group), 108
Rosenbaum, Joan, 175n33
Rosenbaum,Thane, 17, 53n1, 71
Rosenberg, Alfred, 207
Rosenberg, Doug, 11
Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 232
Rosenberg, Harold, 162, 165, 166
Rosenberg, Howard, 280, 283
Rosenblum,Walter, 197
Rosenman, Leonard, 96n1
Rosenthal, Phil, 307
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 176, 238
Ross, Jeffrey, 255
Rossen, Rebecca, 9, 135–153, 253
Rossi, Salamone, 99
Rotenberg, Abie, 117n37
Roth, Cecil, 160
Roth, Philip, 38, 191, 231, 238, 263
Rothko, Mark, 5, 162
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 180
Rowan, Kelly, 288
Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey, 270n15
Sachs, Curt, 5, 131
Safam, 111, 124
Sahl, Mort, 255, 256, 269n7
Sander, Eric, 4
Sandler, Adam, 206, 241–245, 248, 293
Santer, Eric, 207
Sapoznik, Henry, 125
Sarna, Jonathan, 1
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 162
Saval, Malina Sarah, 235, 240, 242,
251n28
Saving Silverman (film), 241
Savoy, Eric, 222
Schechner, Mark, 46
Schechner, Richard, 77
Schechter, Basya, 105
Schenkkan, Robert, 74n20
Schiff, Ellen, 61
Schifrin, Lalo, 96n1
Schindler’s List (film), 112
Schjeldahl, Peter, 178
Schoenberg, Arnold, 113, 114
Schuster, Joe, 18, 19
Schwartz, Delmore, 190, 195
Schwartz, Josh, 278, 291
Secunda, Sholem, 120
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 222, 223
Segal, Edith, 139
Seinfeld, Jerry, 8, 253, 255, 266, 274, 280,
282, 294n17, 300, 303
Seinfeld (TV show), 155, 255, 273, 274,
279, 283, 291, 295n31, 302, 303,
315n29
Seipp, Catherine, 280
Seldes, Gilbert, 261
Senesh, Hannah, 118n43
Sephardic Tinge (musical group), 104
Seventh Heaven (TV show), 317n60
Sex and the City (TV show), 273
Shahn, Ben, 161, 197
Shandler, Jeffrey, 265
Shandling, Garry, 274, 304, 307, 309,
314n28
Shapero, Lillian, 139
Shapiro, Paul, 103
Index
Sharabi, Boaz, 127
Sharir,Yacov, 11
Shatz, Adam, 10
Shawkat, Alia, 286
Shelem, Matityahu, 127
Shelemay, Kay, 111
Shemer, Naomi, 112, 118n43
Sherman, Cindy, 165
Shertzinger,Victor, 96n1
Shneer, David, 3
Shohat, Ella, 237
Shteyngart, Gary, 18
Shulman, Helen, 17
Sidran, Ben, 107
Siegel, Jerry, 18, 19
Silver, Ron, 263
Silverman, Max, 209
Silverman, Sarah, 237
Silvers, Phil, 269n7
Simmel, Georg, 201n37
Simon, Jon, 107
Simon, Paul, 96n1
Simpsons,The (TV show), 273
Siskind, Aaron, 197
Six Feet Under (TV show), 273
Smith,Will, 233–235
Snow, Carmel, 185, 186
Snow White (film), 213
So Called (musical group), 108
Sokolow, Anna, 139
Solomon, Alisa, 76, 90
Solomon, Robert, 124–125
Sondheim, Stephen, 95, 96n1
Sontag, Susan, 7, 198
Sopranos,The (TV show), 273
Southall,Thomas W., 202n55
Spelling, Aaron, 230
Spelling,Tori, 230
Spiegelman, Art, 1, 18, 20, 21, 23–27, 34
Spielberg, Steven, 112, 118n43, 237
Statman, Andy, 107
Stam, Robert, 237
Stein, Joseph, 58, 71
Steiner, Max, 96n1
Stern, Steve, 17
335
Stevenson, Adlai, 215
Stewart, Jon, 231, 246, 255, 256, 313
Stieglitz, Alfred, 161, 199n2
Stiller, Ben, 206, 236, 236ill, 241, 242, 244
Stiller, Jerry, 303, 308
Stoller, Mike, 96n1
Stoumen, Lou, 156, 177, 187, 188
Strand, Paul, 199n2
Stratton, Jon, 209, 210, 212, 290, 317n59
Streisand, Barbra, 205, 236
Strike Me Pink (film), 243
Sturm, James, 35n6
Sue, Eugène, 167
Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 41, 43, 44, 47, 48
Sullivan, Daniel, 67, 68
Sullivan, Ed, 269n6
Sultan, Larry, 156, 177, 195–197
Sulzer, Salomon, 99, 108, 130
Sunset Blvd. (film), 5
Superfly (film), 239
Svengali (fictional character), 182
Swados, Elizabeth, 55
Sweet, Jeffrey, 55
Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song (film),
250n20
Tambor, Jeffrey, 278, 284, 285ill, 308,
310ill
Tamiris, Helen, 139
Tarsi, Boaz, 105
Tarticoff, Brandon, 303
Tasman, Mark, 11
Taubman, Craig, 107, 124, 130
Taylor, Elizabeth, 189, 190
Taxi (TV show), 278
Tesori, Jeanine, 95
Texaco Star Theater (TV show),
256, 261
Third Rock from the Sun (TV show),
294n6
thirtysomething (TV show), 273
Thompson, Scott, 305
Thoreau, Henry David, 182
Tiomkin, Dmitri, 96n1
Toch, Ernst, 96n1
336
Tompkins, Jane, 48
Torn, Rip, 305
Townsend, Chris, 192
Trachtenberg, Alan, 177, 182, 201n33
Trembling Before G_d (film), 206n2
Troen, Ilan, 12
Tucker, Sophie, 268n1
Twain, Mark, 8
Twin Peaks (TV show), 273
2 Live Jews (musical group), 107
Ubach, Allanna, 236ill
Uhry, Alfred, 55
Underground Film movement, 7
Uris, Leon, 231
Ury, Lesser, 159
Valdez, Luis, 61
Van Peebles, Mario, 247
Van Peebles, Melvin, 250n20
Vapnyar, Lara, 18
Vasconcelos, José, 246
Velasquez, Patricia, 285
Venturi, Robert, 175n18
Voice of the Turtle (musical group),
108, 111
Wagner, Richard, 97, 280, 283,
306, 307
Waletsky, Josh, 125, 126
Walk on the Moon, A (film), 205
Walter, Jessica, 278, 284
Walzer, Michael, 1, 175n33
Warhol, Andy, 163
Warshawski, Mark, 132n2
Wasserstein,Wendy, 1, 9, 55, 56, 58,
63–70, 73n, 74nn27, 28, 170
Waterboy,The (film), 242
Waugh, Patricia, 38
Waxman, Franz, 96n1
Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 96
Weber, Donald, 8, 18, 253–271, 307
Weegee, 179, 186, 197
Weide, Robert B., 282
Weinstein, Harvey, 317n56
Index
Weisberg, Jennifer, 285, 286
Weisberg, Ruth, 4, 5, 9, 155–175
Welcome Back, Kotter (TV show), 278
West, Mae, 286
West, Nathaniel, 266
Westfeldt, Jennifer, 229n38
Weston, Edward, 179
While the Messiah Tarries (film), 205
Whilmore, Larry, 307
White, Slappy, 269n7
Whitfield, Stephen, 4–6, 62
Whoopee! (film), 243
Wiesel, Elie, 1
Wilder, Billy, 5
Wilder,Thornton, 82
Will and Grace (TV show), 274, 300
Williams, Raymond, 77–79
Williams,Tennessee, 79–81
Wilson, August, 61
Winogrand, Garry, 183, 198
Wirth-Nesher, Hana, 58
Wise, Nina, 11
Wisse, Ruth, 1, 3, 53n8, 241, 245
Without a Paddle (film), 241
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 7, 161
Wolf, Stacy, 58
Wong, Elizabeth, 61
Wood, Kimba, 68
Wouk, Herman, 231
Wu Tang Clan (musical group), 107
Wyler,William, 5
Yankelman brothers, 259
Yerushalmi,Yosef Hayyim, 53n9
Yezierska, Anzia, 38
Yiddish/Yiddishkeit, 12, 30, 49, 59, 62, 63,
64, 66, 67, 87, 88, 104, 125, 127, 128,
131, 132n5, 140, 143–146, 169, 233,
245, 251n36, 255, 259, 261, 264, 265,
280, 290, 303, 307
Yom Chadash (musical group), 107
Youngman, Henny, 257ill
Zahavi, David, 118n43
Zangwill, Israel, 237
Index
Zeira, Mordecai, 127
Zelig (film), 237, 250n15
Zemach, Benjamin, 135, 138, 139
Zimmer, Hans, 96n1
Zionism, see Israel
Žižek, Slavoj, 4, 208, 274, 279, 293
Zorn, John, 103, 104, 116n18, 237
Zurawik, David, 278, 294n7
337

You Should See Yourself

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