Introduction

This special issue deals with the performance of Jewishness in a variety of popular cultural venues from the late nineteenth century through the 1950s. In essays which probe Jewishness as performance in vaudeville and the Ziegfeld Follies, Broadway musical theater, animated cartoons, and song performance, popular culture is examined as a screen on which ethnic identity is writ large. Looking at the complex manifestations of Jewish identity revealed in such onstage portrayals, these essays concur with those who like Werner Sollors believe that ethnicity is less an immutable, self-evident heritage than a process which is continually reinvented and reinterpreted. When ethnicity is seen in such terms-almost as a mask which can be put on or removed at will-its deep connection with the methods of popular entertainment becomes readily apparent. The performance of Jewishness onstage, together with the performance of Americanness offstage, charts dilemmas of Jewish identity in a melting pot culture where the triumph of assimilation was never quite total. By explaining how ethnicity became performative onstage--a process of self-conscious role-playing, interaction, or manipulation--the essays raise significant questions about larger cultural transformations and the nature of ethnic identity itself.

Harley Erdman, who writes about the performance of Jewishness onstage in the last half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, argues that a significant transformation occurred during the early twentieth century, when, by and large, representations of Jewish life became "increasingly masked, indirect, invisible" as opposed to the full-bodied representations of the preceding half century. After 1920, says Erdman, "performing Jewishness in mass culture increasingly required varieties of masking"; indeed, the Jewish presence onstage became an "absence ... a generalized invisibility." In Erdman's view, the stage types of Jewishness both "performed and created new ideals of Jewish-American assimilation," resulting in a "decades-long popular-culture disappearing act." ¹

The essays in this volume offer an opportunity to explore Erdman's thesis about the chronology and force of such a transition to a new, more "encrypted" onstage Jewishness (in Pamela Brown Lavitt's useful term), and to examine the relationship of such a tranfomation to broader changes in American Jewish life. The performances of Jewishness discussed in this issue also illuminate theories of ethnic humor, like the recent work of Esther Romeyn and Jack Kugelmass, which highlights historical and cultural aspects of Jewish "code switching" comedy. ² Finally, the essays help to contexualize-and in some ways challenge-theories about Jews' transition to "whiteness" in twentieth-century America. ³

In her essay on coon shouting, Brown Lavitt argues that even in an earlier period, starting in the 1880s and extending through 1920, the popular fad of coon shouting--the "last descendent" of the nineteenth century minstrel show--capitalized on the suppressed, and sometimes invisible, identity of Jewish performers. "Coon shouting" referred to female performances of coon songs in vaudeville, often employing character impersonations, black dialect and cake-walking. Popularized by Ziegfeld girl Anna Held-a Polish Jew known as America's first sex goddess--by the 1890s coon shouting was widely considered a Jewish woman's performance venue.

Although Held denied her Jewish identity, onstage, she created a "performance dialectic" composed of a mixture of Jewish exoticism and black sexuality. In effect, her Jewishness established a nonperjorative blackness (as opposed to most minstrel shows). Strutting the cakewalk, singing risque, hot lyrics (although she never wore blackface), Held shrouded her ethnic identity through racial masquerade on stage. Brown Lavitt designates her performance style as encrypted since it hid coded information about her own ethnicity at the same time allowing insider status to Jewish audiences who broke the code.

Offstage, Held hid her identity by becoming a professional American beauty who pitched face powders and whitening agents. Teetering between the performance of genteel "white" femininity and the more risky and risque identities of black and Jew, Held's ambiguous persona reflected ambiguities in the values and expectations of immigrant and mainstream audiences alike. Chic, independent, and modern, she made possible the performances of...