All too often an incident or accident, such as the eruption in
Crown Heights with its legacy of bitterness and recrimination,
thrusts Black-Jewish relations into the news. A volley of
discussion follows, but little in the way of progress or
enlightenment results--and this is how things will remain until we
radically revise the way we think about the complex interactions
between African Americans and Jews. "A Right to Sing the Blues"
offers just such a revision.
"Black-Jewish relations," Jeffrey Melnick argues, has mostly
been a way for American Jews to talk about their ambivalent racial
status, a narrative collectively constructed at critical moments,
when particular conflicts demand an explanation. Remarkably
flexible, this narrative can organize diffuse materials into a
coherent story that has a powerful hold on our imagination. Melnick
elaborates this idea through an in-depth look at Jewish
songwriters, composers, and perfomers who made "Black" music in the
first few decades of this century. He shows how Jews such as George
Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and others were able to portray
their "natural" affinity for producing "Black" music as a product
of their Jewishness while simultaneously depicting Jewishness as a
stable white identity. Melnick also contends that this cultural
activity competed directly with Harlem Renaissance attempts to
define Blackness.
Moving beyond the narrow focus of advocacy group politics, this
book complicates and enriches our understanding of the cultural
terrain shared by African Americans and Jews.
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