Jazz Age Jews

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by Michael Alexander

Princeton University Press

Due/Published September 2003, 264 pages, paper

ISBN 0691116539

New in paper (F03)

 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 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 Jew 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.

Contents

INTRODUCTION
INTERLUDE: JAZZ AGE ECONOMICS

PART I. "Biznez Iz Biznez" The Arnol Rothstein Story
1. Arnold Rothstein
2. Gambling in the Time of Rothstein's Youth
3. The Rise of Rothstein
4. Financial Crime
5. The Black Sox and the Jews
6. The Jews React
INTERLUDE: JAZZ AGE POLITICS

PART II. Frankfurter among the Anarchists "The Case of Sacco an Vanzetti"
7. Felix Frankfurter
8. The Young Progressive
9. Zion and Cambridge
10. Sacco and Vanzetti
11. Aftermath
INTERLUDE: JAZZ AGE CULTURE

PART III. "Mammy, Don't You Know Me?" Al Jolson an the Jews
12. Al Jolson
13. Asa Yoelson Discovers the Theater
14. Jewish Minstrelsy Emerges
15. Blackface Arrives on Broadway
16. The Jews on Tin Pan Alley
17. The Jazz Singer

CONCLUSION JAZZ AGE JEWS

NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX