Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (review)

In Acting Jewish, Henry Bial offers an important entry into scholarly work on popular Jewish entertainment, attempting to understand the dynamic created among performer, text, and reader. Though drawing from work on Jewish identity and entertainment, cultural studies, ethnic studies, Jewish studies, and media studies, Bial situates his research within performance studies, which offers him a model of analysis for understanding these relationships as simultaneously "playful" and "meaningful" (141). Bial emphasizes the pleasure audiences feel at self-recognition when experiencing the doubly coded, "wink-wink" nature of shows like Seinfeld or the references to a shared Jewish-American past in films like Funny Girl, but describes these readings as "performative" rather than intrinsic to the work. What is it, he asks, that comprises the "Jewish" performance, and to whom is the Jewish reading of that performance available?

The four central chapters of the book focus on case studies of more or less explicitly "Jewish" performances from the period after the Second World War, including (among others) extended discussion of the television program The Goldbergs; the play and film Fiddler on the Roof; Woody Allen's and Barbra Streisand's many performances on stage and screen; plays by David Mamet, Wendy Wasserstein, and Tony Kushner; and even the online text Jewhoo. In all of these texts Bial focuses on the importance of performance, considering both the actors' and writers' abilities to influence potential readings, and the audiences' willingness to make them. One of Bial's most interesting contributions in this book is the idea that both the actor and the reader are enacting performances of Jewishness—that the conditions for interpreting an entertainment text as Jewish include knowledge and intent on the part of the reader: "the desire to read Jewish" (155). In the chapters which bookend his case studies, Bial develops his theoretical models, analyzing the claims of works on Jewish identity and popular culture which have preceded his. These chapters offer useful discussions for those less interested in entertainment as a primary object of study; here Bial fleshes out the nuances and problematics of defining Jewish cultural studies, managing to both critique the project and validate it.

Bial's ongoing discussion of the relationship between the categories "Jewish" and "New York" is particularly fruitful. Bial argues that these two terms are often taken as synonymous by audiences and critics alike, with "New York" sometimes used as a euphemism—Bial quotes Wendy Wasserstein describing the criticism of her play The Sisters Rosensweig as "too New York" (108)—and sometimes meant to evoke the warmth of a nostalgic immigrant past—as Bial describes Jewishness in the television version of The Goldbergs. The conflation of "New York" with "Jewish," however, raises the question of for whom a performative, doubly-coded reading is available.

Availability or lack thereof is a crucial problem for those who want to write about popular Jewish texts: If defining what is "Jewish" is an "I know it when I see it" proposition based on cultural rather than religious codes, the act of reading these texts as Jewish also participates in defining what is and is not an authentic Jewish history and past. Such readings have the potential for defining many American Jewish histories and thus personal experiences as "not Jewish." The ability to recognize "New York" as Jewish, Bial points out, may be more available to non-Jews familiar with Jewish life in Brooklyn than Jews with personal histories in the Midwest. As Bial warns his reader in the introduction to Acting Jewish: "the authentic is constantly in motion, circulating in an ongoing conversation between performance and audience. Acting Jewish as a formulation of identity should thus be understood as a processual, provisional, and always already contested performance that circulates between the two worlds of essentialism (insistence on the authentic) and postmodernism (all authenticities are equal, which is to say that nothing is authentic)" (15–16).

The shape of Acting Jewish—a set of case studies of...