Reading the Popular in American Jewish Studies

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 694–709 Reading the Popular in American Jewish Studies LAURENCE ROTH MICHAEL IMMERSO. Coney Island: The People’s Playground. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Pp. viii Ⳮ 199. LAWRENCE J. EPSTEIN. The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America. New York: PublicAffairs, 2001. Pp. xxii Ⳮ 356. Heeb: The New Jew Review. Spring 2003. The Plotz Retrospective. The Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art at Congregation Rodeph Shalom, Philadelphia. April 25–August 17, 2003. Michael Immerso’s and Lawrence J. Epstein’s wide-ranging histories help crystallize a number of trends, and problems, in contemporary scholarship on the popular arts in American and American Jewish life. Both books attempt to convey to a broad readership a compelling story about the rise and fall of a popular phenomenon. Both are ‘‘celebrations’’ of those phenomena, and examples of how such popular scholarship— scholarship aimed primarily at lay readers—is informed and legitimated by the recent boom in the theory and criticism of mass culture, popular culture, the vernacular, and the everyday. Such upbeat interpretations appeal to America’s current fascination with its commodities and with the mundane bric-a-brac of its modern life, as well as with its entertainments and entertainment-delivery systems. Call these stories cultural solipsism in the face of global turbulence and instability, or call them a critical rereading and unpacking of American identities and cultural hegemony, in either case they now have a market value as high as any Britney Spears collectible on eBay. Much fun can be had in lampooning this publishing trend—witness the humor column in the October 6, 2003, issue of the New Yorker that The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. READING THE POPULAR—ROTH 695 offered mock book reviews of historical studies of vanilla (The Flavor That Changed the World), pet cats (The House Cat That Changed the World), and wallets (The Pocket Lint That Changed the World). But for those of us interested in how questions of race, class, ethnicity, gender, politics, and religion intersect with our readings of the everyday and our consumption of the popular arts, satires such as this are instructive. They remind us that, in light of the current obsession with everything popular, we must pay careful and close attention to the culturally specific ways in which representations of individual and collective identities are being shaped and reshaped, told and retold, in the popular arts. This is especially true when that process is examined in books like Immerso’s and Epstein’s histories. For the importance of those histories is that they illustrate to readers why popular and mass culture are the dominant social-construction engines in modern America. In both these books we are invited to contemplate how the boundaries and bridges between individuals and collectives—and between past, present, and future—are conjured and reinterpreted in the popular and mass-culture realms. Andreas Huyssen persuasively argues that it is through the media and information technologies embedded in these realms that ‘‘the sense of lived time is being renegotiated in our contemporary cultures of memory.’’1 This transformation of the human perception of time, space, and identity erupts into the popular imaginary in movies like Christopher Nolan’s Memento or Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, and spills over into a cultural need for the sorts of reassurances and solutions provided by the popular arts. For scholars of American Jewish popular culture and literature, books such as Epstein’s and Immerso’s, and ‘‘alternative’’ publications such as Heeb and Plotz: The Zine for the Vaclempt, offer an opportunity to consider how American Jewish studies is an important site of struggle over two questions: How best to unravel the scope and power of American popular and mass culture, and who constitutes the audience for that project. Jeffrey Melnick takes up these questions in a recent review essay, when he outlines what scholarship in American Jewish studies ought to look like if it aspires to be a relevant mode of contemporary inquiry...