Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (review)

As a klezmerologist, I was initially delighted to see a distinguished literary scholar turn to "klezmer" as the title-worthy metaphor for a wide-ranging study of Jewish-American modernity and its impact on contemporary culture. But the more I turned the pages, the slighter the payoff. Briefly put, the book is a loose-jointed collection of essays, mainly based in literary studies, that struggles to deliver on the literally jazzy title. By the eleven-page Conclusion, which uses the word "klezmer" once, despite being titled "the klezmering of America," I began to wonder whether the author thought that an umbrella term might substitute for a tight trajectory.

It's hard to blame him. In my book on klezmer, I began with the figure of the expanding mushroom, taken from a children's story, which grows to accommodate all the forest animals seeking shelter. I compared the tale to the surprising way that the Yiddish word klezmer—professional instrumentalist—had spread by the 1990s to cover a wide variety of music, social, and personal pathways. So it's not surprising that the process plays on, but perhaps it also plays out. Freedman profiles scattered aspects of the musical history and current scene routinely referred to as "klezmer," but cannot really follow through when expanding to topics as diverse as Arthur Miller's marriage to Marilyn Monroe, Asian- and Latino-American novels, or the agonized faux-white hero of Philip Roth's The Human Stain. Freedman seems to know this, as he constantly undercuts his own narrative with qualifications, backpedal-ing, and postponement of the punchline. To quote just a couple of examples, "to note these parallels is not to stress the inevitability of the comparison" (p. 279), or " I should begin by saying that my real discomfort with the Jews-as-white-folks argument lies not so much with the argument per se" (p. 29).

This ambivalence runs deep in Freedman's deployment of klezmer as a metaphor. Brandishing the surprising adjective "klezmerical," the peroration for the lengthy Introduction argues on behalf of the enduring and endearing Jewish talent for engaging in "a syncretic, hybridizing engagement" with American culture (p. 38). This is meant to serve as counterweight to what he sees as an alarming trend towards essentialism. But just a few pages earlier, he touts "klezmer revivalists and post-klezmer Radical Jewish Culture makers" as the ones who have "created new configurations from categories (black/white, Jewish/gentile, Western/Eastern) that have long seemed perdurable, fixed" (p. 22). It's hard to have it both ways—are today's pioneers so much more barrier-busting than their predecessors who, however, were also syncretizers and hybridizers? Freedman himself glories in the boundary-crossing of the Swing Era elsewhere in the book. And why use "hybridity" so much when it is a "somewhat overused term" (p. 22)? Reducing "klezmer" frequently to "queer diasporism" becomes more limiting than empowering for the word's possibilities.

I sympathize with Freedman's conundrums. Looking over the long haul of Jewish-American music starting from the 1881–1924 immigration tsunami, you can argue both sides of the story. From the get-go, Jewish musicians have indulged gleefully in parodies of American popular songs, domestication of U.S. mythologies such as the cowboy, deep complicity with—and breakaway from—the neurotic tangle of the black-white cultural interaction, and quick exits from the "ghetto" of internal community entertainment. But they also soldiered on with wedding music that in some places remained unchanged for decades, as Hankus Netsky shows in his revealing history of Philadelphia's klezmers. Just because that also meant absorbing national song and dance trends, from the charleston through the mambo, does not mean musicians were in any real sense transgressive. For every in-your-face Mickey Katz, there were ten conservative entertainers simply getting on with the peaceable process of domestication in catering halls and the Catskills. Strong strands of conservatism run through the texture of Jewish-American popular culture, even including today's...