Jazz Age Jews.
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Jazz Age Jews. Overview
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.
Jazz Age Jews. Specifications
Jazz Age Jews tells the stories of Arnold Rothstein, the gangster accused of fixing the 1919 World Series; Felix Frankfurter, the defending lawyer for the infamous Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial who went on to become a Supreme Court justice; and Al Jolson, who starred, in blackface, in the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer. These three minibiographies, elegantly written by historian Michael Alexander, compose one big story about Jews in the 1920s who thought of themselves as outsiders. Most historians explain this situation as an effect of anti-Semitism; Alexander argues that Jewish outsider status was a theological phenomenon. Jews who migrated from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought with them the belief that "humiliation and alienation were signs of being God's chosen people." Therefore, "In America, when Jews were not being marginalized, they identified with those who were," as demonstrated by the three life stories in Jazz Age Jews. Their stories, as told by Alexander, are "are about making it but thinking you haven't. They are about being there but believing you are held back." They offer succor to all Americans who "despite evidence of their own success, understand themselves best by identifying with those who have least." --Michael Joseph Gross
