Jazz Age Jews

By the 1920s, Jews were—by all economic, political, and cultural measures of the day—making it in America. But as these children of immigrants took their places in American society, many deliberately identified with groups that remained excluded. Despite their success, Jews embraced resistance more than acculturation, preferring marginal status to assimilation.

The stories of Al Jolson, Felix Frankfurter, and Arnold Rothstein are told together to explore this paradox in the psychology of American Jewry. All three Jews were born in the 1880s, grew up around American Jewish ghettos, married gentile women, entered the middle class, and rose to national fame. All three also became heroes to the American Jewish community for their association with events that galvanized the country and defined the Jazz Age. Rothstein allegedly fixed the 1919 World Series—an accusation this book disputes. Frankfurter defended the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Jolson brought jazz music to Hollywood for the first talking film, The Jazz Singer, and regularly impersonated African Americans in blackface. Each of these men represented a version of the American outsider, and American Jews celebrated them for it.

Michael Alexander's gracefully written account profoundly complicates the history of immigrants in America. It challenges charges that anti-Semitism exclusively or even mostly explains Jews' feelings of marginality, while it calls for a general rethinking of positions that have assumed an immigrant quest for inclusion into the white American mainstream. Rather, Alexander argues that Jewish outsider status stemmed from the group identity Jews brought with them to this country in the form of the theology of exile. Jazz Age Jews shows that most Jews felt culturally obliged to mark themselves as different—and believed that doing so made them both better Jews and better Americans.

"Michael Alexander's Jazz Age Jews is an imaginative interpretation of American Jewish history. Beautifully and forcefully written, this account focuses on how Jews in the United States have perceived of themselves as outsiders. Alexander's arguments will raise eyebrows, infuriate some, and stimulate widespread discussion. Nonetheless, his approach may be a forerunner of a new way to examine American Jewish history."--Leonard Dinnerstein, author of Anti-Semitism in America, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust, and The Leo Frank Case

"Jazz Age Jews is a significant contribution to our understanding of American Jewish culture and society. It reinterprets the meaning of Jewish identification with the outsider in the 1920s and demonstrates the profound impact such Jewish behavior and beliefs had on American culture. Alexander knows how to tell a good story and has chosen wonderful case studies as the means to spin his narratives. With new ideas on almost every page, this is an excellent book."--Deborah Dash Moore, author of At Home in America

Publishers Weekly

Jews and the jazz age: bathtub Manischewitz? Yiddish speakeasies? the Purim massacre? Not exactly. In his deft and provocative book, Alexander sketches how the social position and public perception of American Jews mutated in America during the 1920s. Drawing on a wealth of sources reports in Yiddish newspapers, the history of minstrel shows on Broadway, and papers of Oliver Wendell Holmes this book traces the unique roles played by and the problems faced by descendants of the great waves of turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants. Alexander argues that, even when they prospered financially, these Jews possessed an "outsider identification" that propelled them to support social justice causes as well as often valorize extralegal activities such as gambling. He paints a vivid portrait of popular anti-Semitism of the time Fitzgerald's malicious portrait of a Jewish gangster in The Great Gatsby; the attempt by Harvard's president A. Lawrence Lowell to institute quotas for Jews at the university, Henry Ford's white-supremacist writings while structuring his book around three pivotal events that shaped thinking about Jews: the Black Sox Scandal, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer. His arguments in the first two sections are dazzling about Arnold Rothstein's role in the national pastime's scandal and Felix Frankfurter's defense of the Italian anarchists but he is less convincing when critiquing Michael Rogin's Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot in his analysis of Jewish performers and blackface in his third example. Despite this, Alexander's commentary is elucidating and insightful, an important contribution to both Jewish and culturalstudies. (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.