Theatrical Liberalism: Jews and Popular Entertainment in America by Andrea Most (review)

Following her paradigm-shifting Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (2004), Andrea Most expands her purview with Theatrical Liberalism: Jews and Popular Entertainment in America to ask why US popular culture has been so dominated by Jews. She notes the familiar answer to this question (including her own in Making Americans): that participation in mainstream secular US culture was one way that Jewish artists could pass, assimilate, and succeed. She then offers a new argument: that, in fact, secular culture has incorporated many aspects of Judaism and Jewish values. She coins the term theatrical liberalism to characterize plays, musicals, novels, and other forms of culture that exhibit four characteristics: first, this worldview, as she terms it, sees theatre as an important, even sacred space; second, it exhibits the external, outward-focused action that Judaism values; third, it privileges selfdefinition and an anti-essentialist self; and fourth, it balances Jewish obligation to the community with individual rights.

To explain Jewish connections to theatre and theatricality, Most begins Theatrical Liberalism by reading the biblical story of Jacob (who pretended to be his twin brother Esau) and subsequent commentary on the foundational story, which underlines the centrality of role-playing and identity performance to Jewish thought. From there, the book is organized chronologically from the 1920s until the early twenty-first century, and each chapter examines Jewish expression in popular culture during a different period in US history and how each generation of Jewish artists transformed theatrical liberalism.

Most locates the origins of theatrical liberalism in the Depression era and sees the backstage musical or play, which combines romantic comedy with a story of theatrical production, as its exemplary genre. Examples in this chapter include The Jazz Singer, Show Boat, and Gold Diggers of 1933. In the later 1940s and ’50s, during the height of the cold war and McCarthyism, she finds that Jewish artists were ambivalent about theatrical liberalism’s efficacy and wrote plays and musicals, such as Death of a Salesman, Pal Joey, and West Side Story, that questioned its values. “Theatrical liberalism,” she writes, “offered secular Jews, and many other Americans, a way to express their yearning for purpose, meaning, and community without marginalizing themselves within particular religious or ethnic groups” (93). In the next chapter, which focuses on the late 1950s and early ’60s, she discusses philosophers and social scientists, such as Erving Goffman, who were “expressing increasing interest in the theatrical nature of identity” (141), and the overtly Jewish musicals Funny Girl and Fiddler on the Roof, both of which “provided Jews and Americans with a history not only of Jewish immigration to America but also of Jewish investment in popular entertainment” (142). In the 1960s and ’70s, Most argues, theatrical liberalism can be seen in hippie culture, in Jews’ involvement in political activism, and in growing ethnic pride that led to claims of Jewish authenticity, with examples in the writing of Cynthia Ozick, Abbie Hoffman, Norman Mailer, and Lionel Trilling, and in Mel Brooks’s film Young Frankenstein, to name a few. In the 1980s and ’90s, Jewish scholars and artists navigated a multicultural America with renewed attention to theatricality and performance. Here, she analyzes Judith Butler’s essays, Woody Allen’s Zelig, Philip Roth’s novel The Counterlife, and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, among others. The book concludes with examples drawn from a conference and cultural festival about contemporary Diaspora Jewish culture that Most organized at the University of Toronto, which revealed to her the connection between US secular culture and Jewish culture and so inspired the book.

Theatrical Liberalism casts a wide net in scope and scale, moving from biblical times to 2011 (The Book of Mormon and Glee), examining culture across many forms and genres, and offering a whirlwind tour of Jewish texts of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Like all of Most’s writing, the book delivers many brilliant insights about these texts and shows me new ways of thinking...