Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America

6 The Material Gaze: American Jewish Identity and Heritage Production

225 six The Material Gaze: American Jewish Identity and Heritage Production When Philip Roth published his “Imagining Jews” in The New York Review of Books in 1974,1 he set out to defend his “shooting off his mouth about shooting off his semen”2 that made Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) such a robust, and to many, a crude book by a Jewish author. The fact that a Jew like Portnoy could be so enthralled to the passions, and sexual ones at that, appeared to overturn the accepted literary image of the rational, moral Jew who restrains himself from the more violent urges of the emotional life. The more turbulent, passionate, and sexual life of the gentile played the foil to the upright, honest, and ethical Jewish American . Recall Edelshtein’s critique of Ostrover’s stories in Ozick’s “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” as “insanely sexual, pornographic, paranoid, freakish,” and so only beloved by non-Jews.3 Ostrover passes as a gentile because he abandons his Jewish ethical roots. But Roth wants to recover that pornographic Jew, and so celebrates this libidinous type in contrast to those conjured by Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud. Bellow’s characters are most Jewish, so Roth believes, when “they are actors in dramas of conscience where matters of principle or virtue are at issue,” but are least Jewish when “appetite and quasi- or outright libidinous adventure is at the heart of a novel.” When a Bellow character yells “I want!” it represents “raw, untrammeled, uncompromising, insatiable, and unsocialized desire,” and “only a goy can talk like that and get away with it.” So too for Malamud’s novels, for his Jews are “innocent, passive, virtuous,” while the gentile is “corrupt, violent, and lustful.”4 So here comes Roth’s Portnoy, “a lusting Jew” and a “sexual defiler.” Roth has envisioned him 226 · material culture and jewish thought in america as the classic goy, and thereby has overturned “imagining what Jews are”5 in American Jewish fiction. Jews no longer monopolize the righteous certitude of ethical, rational behavior, but instead are enslaved to sexual and libidinal passions. If Bellow and Malamud distinguish the Jew by his (and it usually is his) rational control, then Roth imagines the Jew struggling mightily with baser passions with little ability to repress them. Roth had surely been unfair to both Bellow and Malamud, and a bit too defensive in justifying his own work.6 But that censure would miss the larger significance of Roth’s defense: the novelistic enterprise, so Roth contends, is “imagining Jews being imagined, by themselves and by others.”7 Novelists like Roth inscribe profiles of Jewish identity that others, Jews and non-Jews alike, imagine as fitting depictions of American Jewry. But writers also re-imagine those entrenched images to reveal new, or perhaps latent features of human character. Whatever one might think of Roth’s sexual defilers, his works return the reader’s gaze and subject it to critique. If Portnoy appears repulsive and vulgar, this reveals a good deal more about a reader’s imaginings than it does about Roth’s fictional character. Literature, as Roth suggests, overflows with Jews being imagined, but so do other artistic mediums such as photography, film, and the plastic arts. This chapter focuses on graphic images to better reveal how Jews visualize themselves as American Jews. This is a vast and borderless field, and once again I will restrict my gaze to those art works that amplify the thesis of this book—to wit, that American Jews visualize materially, and do so in ways that situate identity within material things and practices. This is how Anzia Yezierska viewed her world, for her characters see materially as they engage and work with a visual culture. Yezierska exposes Jewish visual practices, and I want to transpose those modes of seeing to three other sites of visual display: the magazine covers of Lilith magazine, Arnold Eagle’s photographic collection of Orthodox Jews in New York City (1935), and the three film versions of The Jazz Singer (1927, 1953, and 1980). Since the mid-1970s, Lilith magazine has promoted a Jewish feminist visual culture, and its covers reveal how glossy images produce new religious and ethnic sensibilities. These covers overturn received paradigms in order to establish new modes and behaviors, and so visually perform this transvaluation of value. Eagle’s work from the 1930s bears witness to a world that Lilith has left behind. [18.218.254.122] Project MUSE (2024...