In their own image: New York Jews in Jazz Age American popular culture.
Item
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Title
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In their own image: New York Jews in Jazz Age American popular culture.
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Identifier
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AAI3047246
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identifier
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3047246
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Creator
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Merwin, Edward Paul (Ted).
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Contributor
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Adviser: Alisa Solomon
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Date
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2002
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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 | Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies
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Abstract
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This interdisciplinary dissertation focuses on the ways in which second generation American Jews---the children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants---acculturated into American society in the 1920s both in and through popular culture. They did so, I argue, by producing and consuming representations and images of Jews in vaudeville, Broadway theater and silent film. Second generation American Jews made a home for themselves as Jews had done for millennia---not by discarding immigrant Jewish culture but by adapting it to the culture in which they found themselves. How Jewishness was represented in popular culture played a large role both in defining and sustaining Jewish identity and also in softening attitudes toward Jews in American society.;My subject is the interplay between changing cultural representations of "the Jew" and the changing social and economic position of Jews in New York as they moved en masse from the Lower East Side "ghetto" to the lower middle class Jewish neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Despite continuing ambivalence about their Jewish identity rooted in the internalization of negative societal attitudes toward Jews and other immigrants, Jazz Age Jewish performers gradually transcended their historical representations in Western culture as fundamental outsiders and aliens. Images and representations of Jews became staples of interwar American popular culture. Nevertheless, most of these routines, stage comedies and films have received scant attention from scholars of Jewish history and culture.;These Jewish-themed cultural products capitalized on the spirit of tolerance that followed the First World War, and that co-existed with rising discrimination in some quarters against Jews and other minorities. Despite the rabid Nativism and anti-Semitism of the period that led to the federal immigration restrictions of 1921 and 1924, Jews began to join the mainstream of American society. I argue that the Jewish-themed films of the 1920s were particularly influential in fostering acceptance of Jews through their sympathetic treatment of the immigrant families they depicted. This is the first effort to combine a sociological and performance studies approach to the study of the acculturation process of American Jews.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
