Beyond The Golden Door

Clifford Odets. Arthur Miller. Paddy Chayefsky. Neil Simon. Jules Feiffer. Wendy Wasserstein. Tony Kushner. These leading American playwrights do not just happen to be Jewish: they are Jewish playwrights. They and other Jewish playwrights have written out of their own experience, for general American audiences, about what it feels like to be twentieth-century American Jews. Beyond the Golden Door is the first book devoted to showing how Jewish playwrights have dramatized the great struggle to balance Old World heritage with New World opportunity—a struggle with implications for all American ethnicities.

Clifford Odets. Arthur Miller. Paddy Chayefsky. Neil Simon. Jules Feiffer. Wendy Wasserstein. Tony Kushner. These leading American playwrights do not just happen to be Jewish: they are Jewish playwrights. They and other Jewish playwrights have written out of their own experience, for general American audiences, about what it feels like to be twentieth-century American Jews. Beyond the Golden Door is the first book devoted to showing how Jewish playwrights have dramatized the great struggle to balance Old World heritage with New World opportunity—a struggle with implications for all American ethnicities.

Julius Novick is Emeritus Professor Emeritus of Drama Studies, Purchase College of the State University of New York. He is the author of Beyond Broadway: The Quest for Permanent Theatres. He was the theatre critic at The Village Voice, The New York Observer, and New York Newsday and has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Forward, and many other publications. He has been honored with a Fulbright Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others, and has served twice on the Pulitzer Prize Drama Jury.