Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (review)

A specter is haunting Jewish literary history—the specter of a bad conscience born in an all-too-often under-theorized appeal to “identity.”

There are many histories that can be written about literary criticism’s two-generation-old romance with identity. Here’s one, however, that probably cannot be written, an alternate account that haunts our current critical moment: after the Vietnam-era explosion of identity politics, the deconstructive critique of representation that really took off in the 1980s made the search for and ostensible discovery of a determining extra-literary “identity” in literature impossible. In this history, “identity politics” has ended—sometime in the early 1990s, maybe. What makes this alternate history of a present that isn’t ours fictional, I like to think, was the hegemonic rise of new historicism, which, in domesticating certain deconstructive “techniques,” domesticated as well academic criticism tout court, making it the handmaiden of an expectant recognition, in turn the kapo to identity’s sovereign comandante. Thus now, especially in identity-based academic apparatuses like Jewish studies or other ethnicity- or race- or culture-based “studies” areas, we mostly take for granted that “identity” is recoverable from the texts we analyze. Indeed, these academic areas are in large part constituted by the expectation of identity: to study a text in a Jewish studies-administered undertaking, for example, is in fact to already categorically inscribe Jewish identity in the apprehension and analysis of that text.

Anyone who has read any recent Jewish literary criticism can testify to this state of affairs, and we are likely stuck with it for the time being; the hegemonic expectation of identity in part inheres in our near inability to envision a critical practice that does not take for granted the “Jewishness” of the texts we take up. And this is why works like Jonathan Freedman’s Klezmer America are so important. By interrogating the ways in which we recognize the Jewishness of Jewish literary (and more generally cultural) texts, Freedman joins a relatively small group of critics engaged in the essential labor of challenging the self-evidence of Jewish American literature and culture’s Jewishness.

Freedman’s central point, essentially, is that, diasporic from the outset, Jewish culture is at root, well, radical. In an argument that, if not indebted to Amos Funkenstein’s work on the “Dialectics of Assimilation” (Funkenstein is not cited in the book, to my recollection), can certainly be considered productively in conjunction with it, Freedman claims that the persistent presence of Jews among Gentile cultures, the fact that Jews have essentially never existed free from the proximity of a dominant other culture (at least they haven’t for a good long time), “challenges the establishment of norms and boundaries, fixities and reifications”—that is, the kind of secure markers that might underwrite the secure self-conception of other, non-diasporic cultures (22). In other words, insists Freedman, at the heart of Jewish culture—a diasporic culture that has been diasporic long enough and pervasively enough for there no longer to be a useful or accurate way to talk about a single, culturally-unifying “homeland” (I should say that this is my gloss)—is “precisely the heterogeneity, the multiplicity, the hybridity” that has defined it from its inception. Freedman names this radical hybridity or heterogeneity “klezmer,” which he accords central importance both as a practice of and a metaphor for a kind of “ceaseless and even foundational revisionism” (18). Klezmer culture, in Freedman’s account, is already hybrid, “assimilative rather than assimilating or assimilated, transformative rather than transformed”; klezmer offers what Freedman calls a “counter-vision” at the heart of radical Jewish culture, “a vision of culture as a nongenetic, non-normative form of genesis, making itself by shaping prior and contemporary cultural forms into new patterns of mixing and matching—a recombinant form of reproduction mysteriously undertaken without any DNA” (91). But importantly for Freedman (who makes great hay of the etymological link), this radical “counter-vision” is at the root of Jewish culture; his “critique of the...