Jews, America, and Popular Culture: Negotiating Identity and Place

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

This panel offers new insights into the complex nature of American Jewish identity represented in journalism, literature, film, comic books, and television. Four scholars investigate modern American Jewish culture and its reception. The panel maps how legal authorities, creators of popular culture, and audiences imagine Jewish identity. Ethnic and gender stereotypes, sexuality, and Americanization are common threads. This session thus aims to unpack multivalent and often contradictory depictions of modern American Jewish culture in the public imagination and entertainment media from 1900 to the present.

Alan Ginsberg reveals Jewish women arriving in America at the turn of the century as avid consumers and creators of emerging popular culture both for pleasure and to fashion new identities and solidarities. Newspapers and magazines, short stories, plays, novels, and screenplays connected individual and communal activities. With these came unprecedented freedom to decide how much Jewish ethnic and cultural difference to retain, and how much to assimilate with American culture.

Aaron Welt explores the image of the Jewish gangster in the popular imagination of Progressive Era New York City. The “Trial of the Seven Cloakmakers” demonstrates contemporary American views of immigrant Jewish masculinity, the Jewish body, and the fitness of Jewish immigrants to participate in the industrial process.

Andrew Fogel examines the role superheroes and comic books played for Depression era American Jewish males as a means to Americanize and resolve their insecurities of diaspora by imagining homeland. This paper also traces how science fiction superheroes and their imagined geographies constitute the Jewish form of fantasy literature and serve as a response to prejudice and dislocation.

Jill Fields analyzes representations of Jewish characters in Orange is the New Black (2013-) and explores distinctions between their depictions in the memoir by Piper Kerman describing her year in a women’s prison and in the Netflix series based on that book. Kerman’s Jewish fiancé and his family are compassionate and loving people in the memoir who became obnoxious and unattractive stereotypes in the series. The paper thus considers why the reworking of this text conjured the dangerous cliché of the abject Jew.

Sub Unit

• Jews, Film, and the Arts

Chair

• Ted Merwin, Dickinson College

Individual Presentations

• The Jewish Narnia: Superheroes, America, and Homeland - Andrew Brett Fogel, Purdue University

• Shtarkers and the Trial of the Seven Cloakmakers; Yiddish Crime and Labor in the Progressive Imagination, 1912 -1916 - Aaron Welt, New York University

• American Jewish Women, Popular Culture, Assimilation, and Solidarity 1880-1920 - Alan Robert Ginsberg, Columbia University

• Translating People of the Book: Jewish Character(s) in Orange Is the New Black - Jill Fields, California State University, Fresno