Freedman Klezmer America

Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-231-51234-3
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 408 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Klezmer is a continually evolving musical tradition that grows out of Eastern European Jewish culture, and its changes reflect Jews' interaction with other groups as well as their shifting relations to their own history. But what happens when, in the klezmer spirit, the performances that go into the making of Jewishness come into contact with those that build different forms of cultural identity?

Jonathan Freedman argues that terms central to the Jewish experience in America, notions like "the immigrant," the "ethnic," and even the "model minority," have worked and continue to intertwine the Jewish-American with the experiences, histories, and imaginative productions of Latinos, Asians, African Americans, and gays and lesbians, among others. He traces these relationships in a number of arenas: the crossover between jazz and klezmer and its consequences in Philip Roth's The Human Stain; the relationship between Jewishness and queer identity in Tony Kushner's Angels in America; fictions concerning crypto-Jews in Cuba and the Mexican-American borderland; the connection between Jews and Christian apocalyptic narratives; stories of "new immigrants" by Bharathi Mukherjee, Gish Jen, Lan Samantha Chang, and Gary Shteyngart; and the revisionary relation of these authors to the classic Jewish American immigrant narratives of Henry Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow. By interrogating the fraught and multidimensional uses of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness, Freedman deepens our understanding of ethnoracial complexities.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Freedman, Jonathan

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikgattungen Weltmusik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Geschichte des Judentums

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Angels, Monsters, and Jews: From Kushner to Klezmer
2. Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, and the Making of Ethnic Masculinity
3. Antisemitism Without Jews: Left Behind in the American Heartland
4. The Human Stain of Race: Roth, Sirk, and Shaw in Black, White, and Jewish
5. Conversos, Marranos, and Crypto-Latinos: Jewish-Hispanic Crossings and the Uses of Ethnicity
6. Transgressions of a Model Minority
7. Asians and Jews in Theory and Practice
Conclusion: The Klezmering of America
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Jonathan Freedman is professor of English and American studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture and The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America.