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297 Notes 1. Introduction 1. Susan A. Glenn, “In the Blood? Consent, Descent, and the Ironies of Jewish Identity,” Jewish Social Studies 8:2/3 (Winter/Spring 2002), 139–152. The term is derived from the now-defunct Internet website Jewhoo! (itself a takeoff on Yahoo), which functioned as a search engine for famous Jews, enabling visitors to determine whether any given celebrity is, in fact, Jewish. 2. Adam Sandler first performed “The Chanukah Song” on Saturday Night Live on Oct. 15, 1994, and recorded it in 1995 for the CD What the Hell Happened to Me? (Warner Bros. Records, 1996). 3. Rob Eshman, “What’s In a Name?” (editorial), Jewish Journal (Oct. 4, 2002). 4. The term Jewish identity will be discussed later in this chapter. Assimilation is a more problematic term because it has fallen out of fashion in social scientific discourse, largely due to its colloquial usage as a pejorative. As Jonathan Sarna further notes, “Through the years, ‘assimilation’ has become so freighted with different meanings, modifiers, and cultural associations that for analytical purposes it has become virtually meaningless.” American Judaism: A History (Yale Univ. Press, 2004), xix. Nevertheless, I will use it in this narrative to denote the various forms of resistance to Jewish identification that were common in pre1960s America. That the dialectic of Jewish identity and assimilation has been fundamentally altered in the decades since the 1960s is the thesis of this book. 5. Jonathan Sarna, ed., The American Jewish Experience (Holmes & Meier, 1986), xvi. 6. Though Jews reside all over the United States (total Jewish population: approximately 5–6 million), at least one out of three live in either New York City or Los Angeles (with Jewish populations of approximately 1.5 and .5 million, respectively). 7. Norman Mailer, from Cannibals and Christians (Pinnacle, 1981); quoted on frontispiece of David Desser and Lester Friedman, American-Jewish Filmmakers : Traditions and Trends (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993). 8. Sandy Koufax (with Ed Linn), Koufax (Viking Press, 1966), 158. Koufax was referring to a turning point in his baseball career. 9. Woody Allen, Celebrity (Magnolia Productions, 1998). Of course, Allen himself is a prime example of American Jewish celebrity, exemplifying both American renown and Jewish representation. 10. Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Atheneum, 1961), 57. 298 N O T E S T O C H A P T E R O N E 11. Chris Rojek, “Celebrity and Religion,” in Redmond and Holmes, eds., Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader (Sage Pub., 2007), 171–80. 12. For a lengthier consideration of the term, see P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4–7. 13. In “A Letter From Bob Dylan” (a prose poem written for Sis and Gordon Cunningham), Broadside (1965); reprinted in The Bob Dylan Scrapbook: 1956–1966 (Simon & Schuster, 2005), 37. 14. The three principal American investigators of American celebrity are Leo Braudy (historian), Richard Schickel (film critic), and Joshua Gamson (sociologist ). Most scholarly study of the phenomenon is centered in England, where popular culture is better established as an academic subject: for example, Richard Dyer, Stars (British Film Institute [BFI], 1979) and Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (BFI, 1987); Christine Gledhill, ed., Stardom: Industry of Desire (Routledge, 1991); Chris Rojek, Celebrity (Reaktion Books, 2001); Jessica Evans and David Hesmondhalgh, eds., Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity (Open Univ. Press, 2005); Paul Willis, ed., Stardom: Hollywood and Beyond (Manchester Univ. Press, 2005); P. David Marshall, ed., The Celebrity Culture Reader (Routledge, 2006); Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, eds., Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture (Routledge, 2006); and Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader (Sage Pub., 2007). 15. This topic is more fully explored by Joshua Gamson in Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Univ. of California Press, 1994). 16. Quoted in Richard Schickel, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America (Ivan R. Dee, 1985), 109. 17. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 17. 18. June Sochen, “From Sophie Tucker to Barbra Streisand: Jewish Women Entertainers as Reformers,” in Joyce Antler, ed., Talking Back: Images of Jewish Women in American Popular Culture (Brandeis Univ. Press, 1998), 81. 19. J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, eds., Entertaining America: Jews, Movies , and Broadcasting (Princeton Univ. Press and Jewish Museum, 2003), 151. 20. Schickel, Intimate Strangers, x–xi. 21. Schickel, Intimate Strangers, 548. 22. Kenneth Silverman, Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss (HarperCollins , 1996), 202. 23. Ibid., 203...

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