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Jazz Age Jews
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by Michael Alexander
Princeton University Press
Due/Published
September 2001, 239 pages,
cloth
ISBN
0691086796
By the 1920s, Jews were--by all economic, political, and cultural measures of the day--making it in America. But as these children of immigrants took their places in American society, many deliberately identified with groups that remained excluded. Despite their success, Jews embraced resistance more than acculturation, preferring marginal status to assimilation. The stories of Al Jolson, Felix Frankfurter, and Arnold Rothstein are told together to explore this paradox in the psychology of American Jewry. All three Jews were born in the 1880s, grew up around American Jewish ghettos, married gentile women, entered the middle class, and rose to national fame. All three also became heroes to the American Jewish community for their association with events that galvanized the country and defined the Jazz Age. Rothstein allegedly fixed the 1919 World Series--an accusation this book disputes. Frankfurter defended the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Jolson brought jazz music to Hollywood for the first talking film, The Jazz Singer, and regularly impersonated African Americans in blackface. Each of these men represented a version of the American outsider, and American Jews celebrated them for it. Michael Alexander's gracefully written account profoundly complicates the history of immigrants in America. It challenges charges that anti-Semitism exclusively or even mostly explains Jews' feelings of marginality, while it calls for a general rethinking of positions that have assumed an immigrant quest for inclusion into the white American mainstream. Rather, Alexander argues that Jewish outsider status stemmed from the group identity Jews brought with them to this country in the form of the theology of exile. Jazz Age Jews shows that most Jews felt culturally obliged to mark themselves as different--and believed that doing so made them both better Jews and better Americans. |
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Review
By the 1920s many Jews were not only assimilated into the mainstream of American life but had become prominent figures in the world of business, law, and popular entertainment. Despite this success, Michael Alexander argues, there was a tendency among Jazz Age Jews to identify with marginalized groups. Alexander examines three famous instances where Jewish individuals aligned themselves with outsiders and won the admiration of their fellow Jews. Alexander contends that the experience of Eastern European Jews as members of an exiled and oppressed group had made the outsider status central to Jewish identity. Ironically, the relatively greater religious toleration in the United States threatened this notion of Jewish identity and led many to embrace those who championed the causes of other outsider groups or who were themselves outsiders. Jazz Age Jews focuses on three prominent figures: Jewish gambler Arnold Rothstein, whose outlaw status made him a kind of folk hero to many Jews; Felix Frankfurter, who defended the notorious anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti; and Al Jolson, whose blackface performances sought to pay homage to African American culture. Michael Alexander has chosen colorful stories to tell, and he does so in a vivid and intelligent fashion, creating sense not only of the individuals but of how other Jews perceived them. He also reveals the nuances of how Jewish identity was constructed in the United States and the important role of the Eastern European experience in creating a mindset of the "outsider." Finally, Alexander also explains how Jews' decisions to mark themselves as different was also, in their eyes, a decision to make themselves more American. For other titles in related subjects: |
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