The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (review)

{ 150 } BOOK REV IEwS within the community and the respect their work was given both in the theatre and in New York society in general. Chapter 5 looks at commercial theatre, where the plays themselves were not necessarily feminist or even significantly thought-provoking, but the woman director created a spectacle simply through her presence. This chapter highlights four female directors or “directresses”: Lillian Trimble Bradley, Minnie Maddern Fiske, Rachel Crothers, and Edith Ellis . It is in these final chapters that Cobrin’s meticulous research truly shines. Each of the women highlighted in chapters 4 and 5 could be the subject of an entire book, but again, Cobrin carefully places them within the historical context , which breathes life into each woman’s story. While there are only a few illustrations scattered throughout the book, the bibliography is a treasure trove of additional research into the historical world of theatre and life. As a whole, this study is an excellent introduction to the emergence of women on the New York stage of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, Pamela Cobrin has successfully placed the lives of women in the theatre within the structure of the women’s movement, offering valuable insight into the relationship between theatre practice and feminist activism during this era. —lAuRA M. NElSON University of Missouri \ The Un­Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture. By Joseph Litvak. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. x + 294 pp. $39.97 cloth, $19.55 paper. Jews were central figures in the story of the Hollywood blacklist, both as those disproportionately targeted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and in terms of the predominantly Jewish control of the film studios . It is this aspect of the blacklist era that Joseph Litvak’s impressive new book puts center stage for the first time. Beginning in 1947, large numbers of Jews, in the main Communists or ex-Communists, were blacklisted, with many of them avoiding their fate by naming names to HUAC, disavowing, as is argued , a troublesome (for the cold war American state), cosmopolitan tradition of Jewish identity. The book builds on a paradox of the time for radical Jews: that blacklisting and marginalization went hand in hand with the “triumphant entrance of Jews into the American mainstream” (56). Litvak brings an impres- { 151 } BOOK REV IEwS sive cultural studies armory of theory to bear on the issue, highlighting and embracing what he sees as a lost, stateless tradition of Jewish wit, comedy, and resistance. The book traces the process of reconstructing American citizenship to key events of the late 1940s, linking the proclamation of the Hollywood blacklist to that of the state of Israel the year after. Exhibiting a mastery of Jewish cultural reference, and drawing particular inspiration from the writings of “culture industry ” critics Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Litvak explores the era (in particular from 1947 to 1964) through a close examination of a series of film and Broadway texts dealing with Jewish themes and of the testimonies of key friendly and unfriendly witnesses. The author’s background is as a scholar of nineteenth-century literature, and it is the penetrating textual readings that are most striking. We are shown both Hollywood and the nation dissociating themselves from the radicalism of a particular tradition of Jewish culture, wit, and intellectualism . He calls this tradition comicosmopolitanism (3), in a phrase typical of the writer’s relentless wordplay, which is often illuminating but occasionally irritating (in the sense that ideas are sometimes suggested rather than fully explained). He links the dangerous “jokers and smart alecks” (155) of the 1950s cultural wars with later minorities, radical academics (like himself), and suspected groups of the post-9/11 era. One is reminded that at the time of the 1951 HUAC appearance of Abraham Polonsky—a key Communist writer-director whose dialectical wit was central to his outlook and writing and who was blacklisted until the mid-1960s—Congressman Harold Velde called him “a very dangerous citizen” (see Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001]). Yet Litvak goes beyond the blacklist era...