Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (review)

Stella Adler, Dustin Hoffman, Mel Brooks, Tony Kushner, Wendy Wasserstein—what do they have in common? They all are figures in the American theatre and they all are Jewish. Their contributions, along with others, prompt Henry Bial to explore how "mainstream American entertainment is a crucial site for understanding the relationship between Jews and American culture" (5). Bial offers fresh insights regarding the changing representations of Jews in contemporary American popular entertainment.

Jerry Seinfeld might say his long-running situation comedy was "about nothing," or just about the foibles of a group of preposterous people living in Manhattan. Henry Bial would say that Seinfeld's "nothing" really signifies "nothing new" with regard to Jewish comedy. Bial points out that the apparent insignificance at the heart of Seinfeld's world is really rooted in the significance of Jewish American culture. Seinfeld situates in a contemporary secular context the scenarios, themes, and gags emblematic of the past century of Yiddish theatre. With his show, he exposes a remarkably Jewish New York and yet avoids the overt identification of Jewishness in order to appeal to a wider mainstream American audience. The identification of this strategy, which intentionally renders Jewishness invisible, is the starting point of Bial's analysis of Jewish American representations. Drawing upon theories of double coding, Bial shows how representations of Jewishness in mass culture spoke to at least two incongruous audiences: one equipped to recognize the performance of Jewishness, and another unschooled in its characteristic behavioral tropes. Analyzing theatre productions, television programs, and films from 1947 into the new millennium, Bial investigates how American Jews observed and actualized their simultaneously visible and invisible ethnic identity in performance.

After the theoretical introduction, Acting Jewish unfolds in five additional chronologically organized chapters. The first addresses reactions by "the American entertainment industry to the crisis of Jewish identity in the immediate postwar era" (4), examining the Elia Kazan film Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and its treatment of the question of anti-Judaic discriminatory practices. The chapter also explores The Goldbergs (1949–53), a television situation comedy centered around a traditional American Jewish family, and Arthur Miller's seminal play Death of a Salesman (1949). The latter is analyzed in terms of the debate revolving around its "Jewishness, or lack thereof" (50) over the last half-century. Bial explicates how these models endeavor to address the "double bind, acknowledging the value of Jewish difference while simultaneously stressing the universal brotherhood of all peoples" (31).

The third chapter, "Fiddling on the Roof, 1964–1971," continues Bial's discussion of double coding. Here he focuses on the 1964 stage version and the 1971 film rendition of Fiddler on the Roof, and contrasts the receptions of gentile and Jewish audiences. The author uses Stuart Hall's "Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse" as a "communications model of mass culture in which ideological messages are produced, circulated, consumed, and subsequently reproduced" (61) to explain how messages are polysemic. Hence Bial posits that we derive multiple meanings while analyzing a text because of the "reading positions" we occupy as "decoder-consumers" (61). Thus, for example, Walter Kerr interpreted Tevye's signature song "If I Were a Rich Man" as a "daydream," whereas the Jewish critic Howard Taubman heard moments of quasi-liturgical chanting "in the manner of a prayer" (68). "Taubman's reading," writes Bial, "reminds us that to a Jewish community of readers the tradition on which life in Anatevka is based is not some generic 'old country' practice, but Judaism" (68).

In the fourth chapter, "How Jews Became Sexy, 1968–1983," Bial shows how performances of Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand "reconfirm a belief in the desirability of passing and the impossibility of doing so" (106). He extends his discussion of double coding, contrasting Allen's and Streisand's careers and how their "work both drove and benefited from a change in how the sexual attractiveness of the Jewish body...