The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture, and: The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture (review)

As the common story goes, in the post-Holocaust world of increasing Jewish success, acceptance, and assimilation, Jews entered mainstream, white American culture like never before.

But not so fast. This same postwar period was marked by an enhanced ugliness on the Jewish American front, notable, in particular, in the targeting of Jews by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and in Senate hearings chaired by Joseph McCarthy. HUAC and McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) homed in on Jews like no other group. For instance, six members of the Hollywood Ten—those first blacklistees who refused to testify before HUAC in 1947—were Jews.

And most of the others seem to have been mistaken for Jews. In his brilliant volume The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (2009), Joseph Litvak reopens the discussion of the red scare hearings and their contemporary resonances. In the process, he helps to make sense of these disparate readings of Jewishness, expanding how we think and write about the complex interactions between Jewishness, culture, and political history since World War II. In its voracious appetite for attacking the Jews of "Hollyweird" and its encouraging of what Litvak calls "stoolpigeon culture," HUAC enforced a sycophantic, anxiously anti-cosmopolitan, anti-comic (and therefore anti-Jewish) mode of citizenship that, he argues, still holds sway in the twenty-first century. In Litvak's book, the Jew—or at least Jewishness—is set up against "that model citizen of the long 1950s whose end we have yet to see: the American sycophant" (107).

HUAC's search for communists and fellow travelers was a front. They were gunning instead for those whose presence bred discomfort among "real America" patriots, challenging a premise of American citizenship: "Under the pretext of hunting for Communists, HUAC, and later McCarthy and company, conducted a campaign against a related but rather different form of international or subversively un-American activity: the cosmopolitan mimesis whose universality modern civilization refuses to tolerate, or even to recognize, and circumscribes instead in the figure of the comic Jew" (108).

Jews were the subject of such intense scrutiny in part because Jewishness was so dense with unsavory meaning, not simply as a marker of identity, but rather most powerfully as a marker of the possibilities of anti-identity, "as a signifier for the pleasure of the pariah amid the deadly seriousness of nations and races: the comic pleasure of relinquishing or refusing the dubious privilege of national and racial dignity and belonging, by 'losing oneself in identification with the Other'" (31). For HUAC and the McCarthyites, the Jewish pariah's fluidity stands as a convenient signal for all that America must reject for its model of citizenship to succeed—in particular, what Litvak calls comicosmopolitanism: "the whole scandalous, indeed criminal, conspiracy of smartness, acting, pleasure, happiness, imitation, mobility, and play, centered in yet reaching well beyond Hollywood and New York" (3). HUAC's attack on Jewish culture-makers was an attempt to reclaim control of strategic terrain, to ensure through intimidation that the production of America was Judenfrei (free of Jews, in the spirit of Alain Badiou's Polemics [2006], where one chapter title provocatively queries: "Israel: The Country in the World Where There Are the Fewest Jews?"). Working to expunge the comicosmopolitans, HUAC also helped to scrub the Jews clean of their Jewishness.

To prove his point, Litvak looks not only at film, but also at television and at the interplay between Hollywood's two major industries. Television, he writes, "constitutes the paradox of a Jewishly dominated mass medium without Jews—or to put it more cautiously, in which Jewishness . . . must show its face as little, or as guardedly, as possible" (154). Litvak's analysis of Elia Kazan's filmic exposé of the television...