Finalist for the 2013 National Jewish Book Award, American Jewish Studies
For centuries, Jews were one of the few European cultures without any official public theatrical tradition. Yet in the modern era, Jews were among the most important creators of popular theater and film–especially in America. Why?
In Theatrical Liberalism, Andrea Most illustrates how American Jews used the theatre and other media to navigate their encounters with modern culture, politics, religion, and identity, negotiating a position for themselves within and alongside Protestant American liberalism by reimagining key aspects of traditional Judaism as theatrical. Discussing works as diverse as the Hebrew Bible, The Jazz Singer, and Death of a Salesman—among many others—Most situates American popular culture in the multiple religious traditions that informed the worldviews of its practitioners.
Offering a comprehensive history of the role of Judaism in the creation of American entertainment, Theatrical Liberalism re-examines the distinction between the secular and the religious in both Jewish and American contexts, providing a new way of understanding Jewish liberalism and its place in a pluralist society. With extensive scholarship and compelling evidence, Theatrical Liberalism shows how the Jewish worldview that permeates American culture has reached far beyond the Jews who created it.
Andrea Most is Associate Professor of American Literature and Jewish Studies in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her first book, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical, won the 2005 Kurt Weill Prize for the Best Book on Musical Theatre.
Table of Contents
ContentsAcknowledgments ixSetting the Stage 11. Jews, Theatricality, and Modernity 152. The Birth of Theatrical Liberalism 393. Theatrical Liberalism under Attack 884. The Theatricality of Everyday Life 1415. Theatricality and Idolatry 1646. I Am a Theater 201Curtain Call 241Notes 247Credits 275Index 281About the Author 293
What People are Saying About This
From the Publisher
“Makes new sense of aspects of popular culture we have all grown up with and thought we knew only too well. Most bridges religious studies and theater, political theory and American studies, high criticism and middlebrow performance. Her book will help us see better how Jews and their Jewishness did not merely 'enter’ American popular culture, but did so much to invent it.” -Jonathan Boyarin,Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Thought, University of North Carol
"Demonstrates why and how Jews have been central to the development of Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, and Hollywood. Taking us on a rollercoaster ride through popular culture, from The Jazz Singer and Death of a Salesman to My Fair Lady and Blazing Saddles, Most analyzes the social anxieties that swirl around American self-fashioning and explains why these anxieties repeatedly play themselves out in competing notions of theatricality. Most radically, she shows us that so many of the most Jewish features of popular culture are also the most American—that American popular culture is Jewish culture."-David Savran,Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre, CUNY
