Jews, America

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

French photographer Brenner spent two years criss-crossing the U.S. to produce this freewheeling, provocative and intriguing portrait of Jewish-American life, from Alaska fur traders to a Miami Beach auto shop owner and Persian immigrants in New Jersey. Imaginative and sometimes artfully posed, his 801 photos often express mordant irony or cultural juxtapositions: a Passover seder, with its emphasis on freedom from bondage in a maximum-security women's prison; Soviet-Asian cab drivers in Coney Island; a chorus line of glamorously dressed Broadway stars at a sukkah feast on a skyscraper roof overlooking the Empire State Building. Brenner exuberantly narrates or reenacts real-life dramas, as in his group portrait of a sheriff and citizens of Billings, Mont., who showed solidarity with a Jewish family whose house had been vandalized. His celebrity portraits of Steven Spielberg, Betty Friedan, Jerry Lewis, Saul Bellow and others subtly ironize the sitters' sense of themselves. Noted cultural historian Schama thoughtfully discusses Brenner as an artist who celebrates the diversity of Jewish- American life and the ambiguous, shifting border between the Jewish and Gentile worlds. (Oct.)