THEATRICAL LIBERALISM: Jews and Popular Entertainment in America by Andrea Most (review)

“We in the show business have our religion too—on every day—the show must go on,” asserts Al Jolson as Jack Robin (née Jakie Rabinowitz) in Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer (1927), the motion-picture industry’s first “talkie.” As author Andrea Most argues, this “new dogma”—the conviction that “all members of [a theatrical] company are obligated to do what they can to make sure that the show goes on”—animated the backstage musicals and romantic comedies created by acculturated Jewish artists in 1920s and 1930s America (11). This sacred tenet that the “show must go on,” that the needs of the dramatic community must always trump the desires of the individual artist, is at the heart of Most’s titular concept—“a Judaically inflected” ideology she terms theatrical liberalism (77).

Many scholars have reasoned that the overrepresentation of American Jews within the popular entertainment industry reflects their desire to assimilate into the dominant society by eschewing their or their ancestors’ immigrant pasts and religious traditions. In fact, in her first book, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (2004), Most argued that Jews on Broadway attempted “to acculturate by creating a fantasy America, which was distinctly open to and tolerant of people like themselves” (3).

In this, her second book, Most maintains that prior analyses of the American Jewish investment in popular culture as a pathway to assimilation replicate a false dichotomy, rooted in Protestantism, which situates the public/secular in opposition to the private/sacred. This scholarship presumes that the so-called “assimilated” first-and second-generation Jewish Americans active in the development of supposedly “secular” popular entertainment were able to consciously discard all of the beliefs and rituals of their ancestral culture in an effort to become American.

Rather than viewing these mostly “unobservant” American Jews as divorced entirely from Judaic codes and rituals, Most argues that the artists under consideration in Theatrical Liberalism have “a clear connection to Judaism” (11). By reconstructing the theater as a sacred space, celebrating theatricality, resisting essentialized identity categories, promoting individual freedom through self-fashioning, and privileging obligation to the theatrical community above individual rights, Most contends that these artists created the uniquely Jewish doctrine of theatrical liberalism (10–11).

As Most contends, theatrical liberalism attempted to reconcile contradictions between Protestant American liberalism, which constructs a dichotomous relationship between a public secular sphere and a private religious sphere, and Judaism, “which has never neatly conformed to this public-private model” (4).

Exploring a variety of texts—such as the biblical narrative of Jacob and Esau, Show Boat (1927), Death of a Salesman (1949), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Funny Girl (1964), Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983), Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993), and an Amichai Lau-Lavie drag performance—Most claims that American Jews have used popular entertainment as a forum for promoting this distinctly Jewish American belief system.

Although Most’s thesis is perhaps overly ambitious and, therefore, difficult to support fully, Theatrical Liberalism’s greatest contribution to the existing scholarly conversation regarding Jewish Americans and popular culture is her assertion that the secular/sacred binary, imposed by Protestant ideology, is ineffectual for analyzing the nuanced ways in which Judaic rituals and traditions influenced the allegedly nonreligious sphere of American entertainment. For, as Jewish playwright Samson Raphaelson wrote of the Jewish American performer’s obligation to the theatrical community, “The show must go on . . . It’s like a religion” (40).