Contributors to This Issue

Michael Bronski is an independent scholar and journalist who has published widely on topics including sex, politics, and popular culture. He has written for publications including the Village Voice, the Forward, Los Angeles Times, Z, UTNE Reader, and the Boston Globe. His books include Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility (1984), The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash and the Struggle for Gay Freedom (1999), and Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (2003), and his essays have been included in fifty anthologies including Entertaining America: Jews, Movies and Broadcasting (2003) and Bringing the Plague: Toward a Postmodern Psychoanalysis (2002). He is a Visiting Professor in Jewish Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College.

Jonathan Freedman is a professor of English and American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Author of Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture, and The Temple of Culture: Assimilation, Aggression, and the Making of Literary Anglo-America, 1880–1980, he is currently working on a book on the relation between Jewish and other ethnicities in twentieth-century America from which this essay is excerpted.

Daniel Itzkovitz is Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Stonehill College in North Easton, MA. He has published articles on Jewish studies, queer theory, and American literature and has recently edited two new books:Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life and Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (co-edited with Daniel Boyarin and Ann Pellegrini).

Josh Kun is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (University of California Press, 2005) and is at work on a book about Tijuana, Mexico. An arts columnist for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Boston Phoenix, he has also written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Los Angeles Magazine. He is currently co-editing a collection on Jewish mambo.

Jeffrey Melnick is Associate Professor of American Studies at Babson College. His books include A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews and American Popular Song and Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South. He is currently editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies.

Rachel Rubinstein is the Jeremiah Kaplan Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish American Literature and Culture at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. She received her B.A. from Yale University in 1993 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2003. She is currently at work on a project which deals with Jewish American and Native American intersections in 19th and 20th century American literature and culture.

Seth Wolitz has held the Gale Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin since 1980. He is also Professor of French, Slavic and Comparative Literature and a member of the Middle East Center and associate of American Studies and the Theater Department. He received his A.B. from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from Yale University. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and the CUNY system. He has published and edited volumes on The Poetry of Bernart de Ventadour, The Proustian Community, and The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer, as well as a monograph on Jewish Food Culture. He has written many articles on Yiddish literature with an especial knowledge of Yiddish literary and cultural modernism. A specialist in the emergence of Jewish modern art in Eastern Europe, he has written the lead articles on the Jewish national art Renaissance in Russia for the 1987 catalogue in Jerusalem, Tradition and Revolution, and for the Russian-Jewish avant-garde art exhibition in the Jewish Museum of New York. Wolitz has published on Chagall and the relations of Yiddish poets and artists and has lectured at MOMA and written on Jewish graphics, typography, and page design. He recently returned from lecturing in Jaipur, India and Seoul, Korea on "The Parallel Emergence of...