Jewish American Performance: An Introduction

We’re pleased to have edited this first issue of TDR under the journal’s new editorial consortium arrangement. This collection grows from our mutual interest in the many intersections of Jewishness with our own scholarship in feminist, queer, and musical theatre. Although our central concerns as performance studies scholars have almost always been elsewhere, Jewishness has haunted our research and writing in sometimes articulated and sometimes unspoken ways. For instance, in musical theatre studies, where Stacy’s work is focused, Jewish men have been the primary, motivating artists of musical theatre in the United States. Musical theatre history traces Jewish men’s propensities toward assimilation in the work they’ve created to represent and speak to the nation. For Jill, it’s been impossible to ignore the fact that many of the most important feminist theatre artists of the 20th and 21st century are, or have been, Jewish women, including Sara Felder and Deb Margolin, whose work we’re pleased to feature here.

Because neither of us had fully addressed Jewishness as a vital component of American theatre, we co-taught a seminar at Princeton University in fall 2010 that allowed us to explore these themes at the same time that we solicited essays for this issue of TDR. We asked ourselves and a terrific group of undergraduate students, “How has 20th- and 21st-century theatre offered a forum for political discussions of Jewish assimilation and difference from the American middle-class ‘norm’? How has performance staged competing narratives of ‘sameness’ or ‘difference’ as part of the project of American nationalism for Jews?” We read work by scholars such as Riv-Ellen Prell, Bruce Kirle, Andrea Most, and Linda Ben-Zvi, as well as by many of the authors this issue gathers, to address some of these questions. We also organized an event at Princeton in December 2010 called “‘Good for the Jews?’ A Symposium of Scholars and Artists on Jewish Identity in American Theatre and Performance” that showcased some of the new work in the field (www.princeton.edu/arts/gfj). Our public discussions debated the vestiges of anti-Semitism in American culture; the stereotype that Jews “control” American entertainment and media; the particularities of Jewishness as expressed in theatre and performance; the intersection of Jewish religious rituals with cultural practices; interethnic and interracial relations; the wages of Jewish liberalism; the implications of double-coding on theatre and performance production and reception; and a host of other issues that are also reflected in these pages.

The essays take diverse approaches to a panoply of performance forms and contents. Jonathan Freedman discusses Sergio Leone’s film Once Upon a Time in America (1984) with an eye toward how it represents Jewish American memory and identity vis-à-vis the vexed project of constructing nationalism in American cinema. Lauren Love’s essay on the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair pageant The Romance of a People describes how Zionism was represented in an American context by the monumental, spectacular images the pageant constructed. Authors in this issue also consider the complex political and emotional relationship of American Jews to Israel in musical theatre and in dance. Jessica Hillman’s essay on Jerry Herman’s Milk and Honey (1961) describes how the musical evinces nostalgia for the “homeland” that actually becomes an affirmation of its Jewish characters’ primary Americanness. In Rebecca Rossen’s discussion of Liz Lerman’s Fifty Modest Reflections on Turning Fifty (1998) and Kristen Smiarowski and Tom Young’s Attempts (2002), dance offers a vital forum for exploring how American Jewish choreographers perform their relationship to Israel.

In our seminar, we read Sander Gilman’s work on the Jewish body to consider how Jewishness is inherently performance based and performative, from gesture to inflection, posture to gait. We also considered how such performativity has been exploited in stage productions to produce or resist or revise a cultural stereotype of “the Jew.” In Esther Schor’s interview with Irwin Keller, the San Francisco–based drag performer and erstwhile rabbi demonstrates the imbrication of Jewish ethnicity with his loving constructions of female gender performance. Likewise, Stefanie Halpern...