Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (review)

Jews have long occupied a curious place in the collective imagination of American Studies. While scholars consistently invoke Jewish images and influences as defining elements of modern American culture, they all too frequently insist on viewing Jewish identity solely in terms of its relationship to the black-white racial dichotomy, ignoring its own unique fusion of ethnic, religious, and national dimensions. In Klezmer America, Jonathan Freedman's welcome new study, he confronts this problem directly and offers a solution in the form of an ambitious, impassioned call for a revival of the study of Jewish ethnicity in American culture.

Freedman makes his case through a virtuoso set of peregrinations through the works of writers such as Tony Kushner, Philip Roth, and Arthur Miller, along with briefer, highly suggestive excursions into the Jewish-Latino, Jewish-Asian American, and even Jewish-Evangelical Christian nexuses in contemporary fiction. He selects music as his linking motif for these case studies, highlighting the hybrid, destabilizing force of klezmer music in contemporary Jewish and American culture. From its early modern East European folk origins, klezmer dramatically morphed in late twentieth-century America into a creative vehicle for a loose movement of musicians who frequently collapse the lines between high and low, black and white, Jewish and non-Jewish, synagogue and jazz club. Freedman sees this contemporary klezmer—multicultural and avant-garde, yet rooted in Jewish tradition—as a neat expression of Jewish-American creativity as a whole. It is one that substitutes postmodern "affinity" for more rigid notions of cultural ownership or national heritage, let alone the rigidity of race.

Freedman's book is an enjoyable mixture of literary criticism and genuine cultural sleuthing into the Jewish-American past. Building on the work of the newer Jewish Cultural Studies, he convincingly demonstrates how, one way or another, Jewishness forms a crucial counterpoint to various kinds of American ethnic identity. Ironically, though, the reader in search of a deeper account of the music referred to in the book's title will come away frustrated by its casual, selective approach in this regard. Despite its present-day "relentless hybridity," for most of the twentieth century, American klezmer was neither a modernist cultural movement nor a multicultural mélange, but an immigrant ethnic folk music. Indeed, one of the enduring mysteries of Jewish-American cultural history is why this music failed to undergo the great mid-century cultural mainstreaming that took place for literature. Freedman does not ask, for instance, why Sholem Aleichem's Yiddish stories found new life as Broadway's Fiddler on the Roof, the ultimate symbol of post-Holocaust Jewish-American identity, yet most American Jews abandoned klezmer until the 1990s. So too is the story of this musical decline and reemergence a more complex tale than Freedman's politicized reading of it as the sound of "rootless cosmopolitanism," "queer diasporism," and "cultural syncretism." Rather than a progressive Jewish rejection of ethnic essentialism, klezmer's contemporary boom might just as easily be understood as a post-Civil Rights era re-ethnicization (and re-Europeanization) of Jewish identity at the very point when American urban ethnicity had seemingly reached its nadir.

This criticism aside, Freedman's book offers scintillating readings of an impressive array of texts and a valuable, provocative challenge to scholars who reduce modern Jewish artists to cultural appropriators, wannabe blacks, or would-be WASPs. Most importantly, his convincing redeployment of the frame of Jewish ethnicity in studying American culture should inspire others to follow in his footsteps.