"This theatre is a battlefield": Political performance and Jewish-American identity, 1933--1948
Item
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Title
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"This theatre is a battlefield": Political performance and Jewish-American identity, 1933--1948
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:2680ee2380d4:11599
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identifier
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12110
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Creator
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Eisler, Garrett,
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Contributor
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David Savran
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater history | American studies | Judaic studies | Hecht | Ben | Holocaust | Jewish-American Culture | Performance | World War II | Zionism
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Abstract
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This dissertation explores the effect of political performance on Jewish-American cultural identity during the World War II era. With the rise of Hitler, many previously secular and assimilated Jewish theatre and film artists embraced their ethnic heritage and used their work as vehicles for, first, antifascist and, subsequently, Zionist mobilization. This cultural work, I argue, proved instrumental in effecting a postwar shift in Jewish-American identity from assimilation to "hyphenation.".;I begin by tracing Jewish artists' involvement in the prewar antifascist activism of the Popular Front. At a time when isolationist sentiment engendered American complacency towards Hitler and when Jewish concerns were marginalized, even demonized, as "warmongering," producing and exhibiting antifascist narratives was difficult. But by exploiting various genres of the popular stage (agitprop, musical satire, social realism) and film (espionage thriller, historical allegory), these artist-activists gradually influenced the public sphere regarding intervention into the European crisis. For many artists who had hitherto masked their Jewish identity (by changing their names, for instance), these projects marked a process of "coming out" that paved the way for greater acceptance of Jewishness in the postwar era.;I then turn to the 1940s to show how, after Pearl Harbor, many of these same Jewish-American artists continued their activism by enthusiastically joining the U.S. war propaganda effort, and, after victory, campaigning for a Jewish state in Palestine. My main focus is on close readings, based on archival research, of three propaganda pageants by the playwright and screenwriter Ben Hecht in collaboration with emigre composer Kurt Weill: Fun to be Free (1941), We Will Never Die (1943), and A Flag is Born (1946). By intervening into public debates over isolationism, America's response to the Holocaust, and the birth of the State of Israel, these works asserted Jewish agency more overtly than anything previously on the American stage. Such cultural work, I argue, anticipated and influenced a postwar shift to a more openly professed Jewish-American identity---something reflected in other cultural products of the era such as the 1947 film, Gentleman's Agreement. As the United States' swift recognition of Israel in 1948 indicated, something had changed in Americans' attitudes towards Jews. This project argues that the work of this Jewish-American "cultural front" throughout the war era was instrumental in bringing that about.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Theatre
