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Reviewed by:
  • A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill, and: The Jew in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa
  • Sarah Gracombe (bio)
Meri-Jane Rochelson , A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008), pp. xxvi + 317, $34.95 cloth.
Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman, eds., The Jew in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. xii + 241, $84 cloth.

Angst. Pride. A fraught relationship with Christian culture and a preoccupation with Jewish jokes, Jewish food, and Jewish mothers . . . While this might sound like the work of Philip Roth or Woody Allen, the writer being described is actually Israel Zangwill. Before there was Goodbye Columbus, there was Zangwill's Ghetto Comedies (1907) and before Annie Hall, his "Anglicization" (1902). Of course, Zangwill was not exactly like Roth or Allen, any more than he was exactly like Dickens, with whom he was compared during his own lifetime. But he did inaugurate many of the themes and narrative maneuvers associated with modern Jewish culture. If Zangwill is remembered at all today, it is usually for his controversial engagement with Zionism or his play The Melting Pot (1908), an interesting, syrupy ode to America that gifted us that memorable phrase. But Meri-Jane Rochelson's A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill reminds us that Zangwill was once "probably the most famous Jew in the English-speaking world" (1). Born in 1864 in London to Eastern European immigrants, Zangwill went on to write novels, mysteries (including the first "locked door" mystery), plays, and articles traversing almost every major topic of the day. He was also a suffragist, humorist, [End Page 363] self-promoter and self-deprecator, a religiously unobservant husband of a non-Jew, and a critic of Jewish assimilation. Whatever he was, as Rochelson shows in this dense, detailed, and extremely valuable biography, he was always compelling.

In keeping with her title, Rochelson emphasizes both the Jewishness and the publicity of Zangwill's career. His "public arena" was, above all, the pages of periodicals, high and low, Jewish and mainstream, English and American. Zangwill founded the Punch-like Ariel, had a culture column in the Pall Mall Gazette, debuted much of his creative work in periodicals, and participated in various journalistic debates, including a New Review symposium on sex education also featuring Thomas Hardy and Sarah Grand. Indeed, part of what makes this book relevant for readers of this journal is its information about periodical culture. For instance, Rochelson tracks the increase of articles about Jews/Judaism in the 1880s corresponding to the increase in Jewish immigration; similarly, we see the complicated reaction of established Anglo-Jews to such immigration in the Jewish Standard's 1891 addition of a Yiddish supplement and its need to defend this supplement as a means of Anglicizing Russian Jews. More crucially, Rochelson examines how Zangwill skillfully employed emerging forms like "the interview, the photograph, and the literary gossip column . . . to establish himself" as a new kind of cultural celebrity and then deployed this celebrity to advance his favorite causes (25).

Drawing on archival materials and scholarship about Anglo-Jewish history, Rochelson explores these causes and their links to his literary output. Reading Zangwill's frenetic schedule of speeches and publications makes the revelation that he died at sixty-two of "exhaustion and emotional collapse" unsurprising (2). Rochelson highlights aspects of Zangwill's politics that she deems underemphasized by prior biographies: his unpopular antiwar stance and his genuine commitment to the suffrage movement. Zangwill's letters and speeches reveal his participation in important debates about what forms of political protest were ethical and practical, debates that still resonate today.

As Rochelson argues, these debates also resonate with the cause that earned Zangwill the most devotion and opprobrium: Zionism. An early ally of Herzl in England, Zangwill became increasingly skeptical that Palestine could be a plausible home for a Jewish state; in 1905 he formed the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO), which investigated other territories, chiefly in Africa (discussed below). Rochelson notes the troubling paradox of...

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