You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture (review)

How do contemporary artists engage with the question of what it means to be a Jew? This volume contains fourteen essays by leading scholars of Jewish culture who reflect upon the complexities of Jewish identity in the work of “postmodern” representation. Each essay in this volume analyzes the tension between postmodern “anti-essentialism” and category crisis and the question of whether and how to depict Jewish difference. In the postmodern era, when artists are breaking free of reductive thinking and challenging “absolute truths,” notes the volume’s editor, Vincent Brook, the most urgent issue is not “how” Jewish culture should be defined, but rather “the increasing inability, yet persistent necessity, to define it” (6).

Organized topically according to cultural form, these revelatory and thought-provoking essays range across the terrain of literature, theater, music, dance, painting, photography, film, television, and stand-up comedy. Some essays, such as artist Ruth Weisberg’s “Between Exile and Irony: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Jewish Modes of Thought,” are highly polemical critiques of the postmodern erasure of Jewish ethnic particularity in representational art. For example, she lauds the work of twentieth-century “modern” artists, such as R. B. Kitaj and Marc Chagall, who took the “archetypal exilic figure” of the Wandering Jew and tried to “reclaim it,” while criticizing the representational strategies of “postmodernist appropriation that tends to drain [Jewish] meaning from the work of art rather than amplify it” (168). Weisberg identifies what she calls “a Catch-22 situation” for Jewish artists, arguing that “the art world tends to punish those who are focused on the expression of their Judaism in an unambiguous and relatively un-ironic way” (170). According to Weisberg, the large museums (where Jews are well-represented on boards of directors) rarely mount exhibits with Jewish themes, consigning these to Jewish museums, while Jewish museums tend to favor Jewish artists with a secular and ambiguous Jewish orientation.

Other contributors embrace the possibilities that postmodernism offers for challenging Jewish “master narratives.” For example, in her essay “Troubling Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Theater,” Jan Lewis sees postmodernism as a useful way of challenging “reductive essentialisms,” about the nature of Jewishness. Reading the work of playwright Wendy Wasserstein through a postmodernist lens, Lewis highlights the “flexible possibilities for American Jewish identity” and shows how her plays challenge notions of a monolithic and stable sense of who and what is Jewish. Daniel Itzkovitz’s suggestive essay on the “New Jew” in Hollywood film argues that secular Jewish identity has long been “defiantly elusive” and thus may be seen as “the quintessential postmodern identity” (240). Focusing on the proliferation of male Jewish characters in recent Hollywood films, he insists Jewish liminality has also been “domesticated” and contained by efforts to turn the liminal Jew into a kind of “normative American everyman” (245). In their essay on “Postmodern Jewishness” in television comedy, Michele Byers and Rosalin Krieger focus on a related theme: the notion of “newness” in the televisual depiction of Jewish men, offering the paradoxical claim that the possibilities for imagining a new sense of Jewishness emerge in the repetition of older Jewish images (279). One example is the HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm. Although the show relies on well-established traditions of Jewish humor, “the Jewish content, sensibility, and recognizability” of these familiar tropes provide fresh perspectives since they do not “fall in line with narratives and images that would be comfortable for non-Jewish audiences” (284). The “postmodern self-awareness” of the Jewish characters also allows them to assume an “outsider perspective,” even as they operate from what appears to be the realm of assimilated American life (293).

Brook has assembled a stellar cast of contributors, and thus it is a shame that his all-too-brief introduction to the volume does little to highlight the thematic relationship among the essays. Rather, he focuses in on debates among “passionate adherents of the pro-, anti-, and ambivalent postmodernist schools,” but with...