Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity

Jonathan Freedman

Published by Columbia University Press 2008

Klezmer America

Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity

Jonathan Freedman

https://doi.org/10.7312/free14278

Overview
Contents

About this book

Klezmer is a continually evolving musical tradition that grows out of Eastern European Jewish culture, and its changes reflect Jews' interaction with other groups as well as their shifting relations to their own history. But what happens when, in the klezmer spirit, the performances that go into the making of Jewishness come into contact with those that build different forms of cultural identity?

Jonathan Freedman argues that terms central to the Jewish experience in America, notions like "the immigrant," the "ethnic," and even the "model minority," have worked and continue to intertwine the Jewish-American with the experiences, histories, and imaginative productions of Latinos, Asians, African Americans, and gays and lesbians, among others. He traces these relationships in a number of arenas: the crossover between jazz and klezmer and its consequences in Philip Roth's The Human Stain; the relationship between Jewishness and queer identity in Tony Kushner's Angels in America; fictions concerning crypto-Jews in Cuba and the Mexican-American borderland; the connection between Jews and Christian apocalyptic narratives; stories of "new immigrants" by Bharathi Mukherjee, Gish Jen, Lan Samantha Chang, and Gary Shteyngart; and the revisionary relation of these authors to the classic Jewish American immigrant narratives of Henry Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow. By interrogating the fraught and multidimensional uses of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness, Freedman deepens our understanding of ethnoracial complexities.

Author / Editor information

Jonathan Freedman is professor of English and American studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture and The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America.

Reviews

David Brauner:
always engaging and at time groundbreaking.

Shoel Stadlen:
There are some fascinating vignettes in this book.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
INTRODUCTION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Angels, Monsters and Jews From Kushner to Klezmer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	39
2. Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, and the Making of Ethnic Masculinity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	94
3. Antisemitism Without Jews Left Behind in the American Heartland Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	140
4. The Human Stain of Race Roth, Sirk, and Shaw in Black, White, and Jewish Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	164
5. Conversos, Marranos, and Crypto- Latino Jewish- Hispanic Crossings and the Uses of Ethnicity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	209
6. Transgressions of a Model Minority Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251
7. Asians and Jews in Theory and Practice Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	283
Conclusion: The Klezmering of America Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	322
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	333
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	371

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 408
Illustrations
- Other: 17 illus

eBook

Published: January 18, 2008
ISBN: 9780231512343